A Lot of Good Sounds Go Unnoticed in San Diego

Let’s take a moment to spotlight some of the San Diego pop music scene’s best-kept secrets--weekly events that are musically enriching but generally draw sparse crowds because of a lack of exposure:

- The “Sunday Night Blues Jam” at Winston’s Beach Club in Ocean Beach. Close your eyes and pretend you’re in some Kansas City roadhouse. Up to a dozen local blues musicians engage in a spirited free-for-all, tearing up the house with sizzling interpretations of classics like “Little Red Rooster,” “Mannish Boy” and “The Thrill is Gone.”

- Jack Tempchin’s Monday night gigs at the Casbah in Middletown. Accompanying himself on guitar, the local singer-songwriter performs mostly originals, many of which you’re bound to recognize. Among them: “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Already Gone,” big hits for the Eagles in the early 1970s; “Slow Dancing,” a minor hit in 1976 for Tempchin and his own band, the Funky Kings, and a major smash a year later for Johnny Rivers; and several more recent chart-busters Tempchin penned for ex-Eagle Glenn Frey, including “Smuggler’s Blues,” “You Belong to the City,” and “I Found Somebody.”

Alternating sets with Tempchin are two other local singer-songwriters: country traditionalist Robert Savery and Candye Kane, sure to evoke memories of the late Patsy Cline.

- Tom (Cat) Courtney’s Thursday-night appearances at the Texas Teahouse in Ocean Beach. The veteran bluesman has been playing at this tiny beach-area dive for 17 years. Before that, he toured and recorded with such blues legends as Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker and Jimmy Reed.

Courtney consistently refuses offers to play elsewhere on other nights. He’s got a full-time job--as fry cook at the Stardust Hotel and Country Club in Mission Valley, working the graveyard shift.

- Open Mike Night, every Tuesday at the Spirit in Bay Park. Local wanna-be’s take the stage and perform a song or two; alumni include punk-rock bands, folk groups and even a country fiddler. “We’ve also had comedians, jugglers, and poets--anybody off the street who thinks they have something to offer,” said Spirit owner Jerry Herrera. “It doesn’t matter how good they are; it all turns into fun.”

- The Wednesday night “Original Music Showcase” at Rio’s in Loma Portal. Three or four local bands are featured each week, performing hourlong sets of their own material. Talent coordinator Buddy Blue doesn’t care whether they play punk-rock, heavy metal, reggae or whatever else--just as long as they don’t do any (ugh!) covers.

Tonight’s appearance at Winston’s Beach Club by the recently resurrected Iron Butterfly is something of a homecoming. The much-maligned heavy metal progenitors, best remembered for the 1968 mega-hit, “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” began life in San Diego two years earlier as the Palace Pages, the house band at the long-defunct Palace nightclub on Frontier Street (now Sports Arena Boulevard).

Jerry Herrera, who owned the Palace (and who now owns another club, the Spirit), remembers them well.

“When I hired them, they were a soul-psychedelic band,” he said. “They took the old soul sound from, say, Otis Redding and James Brown, and then added the freaky psychedelic music, with lots of feedback, that was just starting to get popular up in San Francisco.”

For more than a year, Herrera added, the Palace Pages continued in that vein, cultivating an interracial following that routinely packed the place, night after night.

“They appealed as much to blacks as they did to whites,” Herrera recalled. “And, let me tell you, they really sounded good--they combined the best of rhythm-and-blues with the best of psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll.”

The Palace Pages’ metamorphosis into what Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia calls “the original heavy metal Cro-Magnons” came after they moved to Los Angeles in 1967 and changed their name to Iron Butterfly, Herrera said.

“I think after they left San Diego, they sort of became part of the scene that was happening up there,” he said. “They got into a completely different groove and just fell into it.”

This stylistic change may have put Iron Butterfly on the fast track to commercial success, but Herrera didn’t like it.

“When I heard their (second) album, I was really disappointed,” he recalled. “It made them really big, but the music wasn’t very good at all. I knew they were capable of doing so much more.”

LINER NOTES: Club of Rome, one of San Diego’s most promising original-music bands, will perform a two-hour concert of acoustic and experimental music Saturday night at the Sonic Arts Gallery downtown. The band will play acoustic versions of the six songs on its recently released debut album, “New World Coming,” as well as new tunes reflecting chief songwriter Steve Saint’s growing interest in ethnomusicology. Band members will be backed by an assortment of guest musicians, including a flutist, a sitarist and a tabla player. . . .

The Dec. 14 heavy metal concert by Badlands and D.A.D. has been moved from the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa to Iguanas in Tijuana. . . .

Exactly 22 years ago this week, San Diego pop quintet Gary Puckett and the Union Gap made their first-ever appearance on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with “Woman, Woman.” . . .

Best concert bets for the coming week: Former X singer Exene Cervenka and the Walking Wounded, tonight at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach; the Blasters, Thursday at the Belly Up; Spirit, Friday at Winston’s Beach Club; the Meat Puppets, also Friday, at San Diego State University’s Backdoor; Third World, Saturday at the California Theater downtown, and Ronnie Montrose, also Saturday, at the Bacchanal.