Night Moves Will Scale Back on Live Rock Acts, Start Using DJs

Having failed to turn Night Moves into a higher-profile venue attracting nationally known rock acts, owner Ezra Joseph will scale back the club’s live music offerings next month while placing greater emphasis on dance music provided by disc jockeys.

“We really weren’t able to book the bands and expand,” Joseph said Friday. Competition from other area clubs left Night Moves “squeezed out” of the bidding as it tried over the past few months to attract major touring acts, Joseph said. “We’ve been left with the hard-core punk bands that nobody else wants.”

Joseph said he will change directions in mid to late January, remodeling the club at 5902 Warner Ave., giving it a new name, and placing greater emphasis on video games, pool tables, recorded dance music and other attractions that he hopes will broaden the club’s clientele.

Night Moves has been the only Orange County nightclub providing a regular night-in, night-out stage for local rock bands that play original music not geared to heavy-metal audiences. Other outlets for original, non-metal rockers have sprung up recently on a one- or two-night-a-week basis at such clubs as Sargenti’s in Costa Mesa, Manhattan’s in Stanton and Taka-o in San Clemente. The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach also offer occasional local rock bookings.

“We’ll still be doing original rock bands,” Joseph said. But instead of featuring as many as three bands on some nights, with shows seven nights a week, Night Moves will scale back to only one or two bands, five nights a week. Starting Jan. 19, Joseph said, Fridays will be given over entirely to recorded music parties thrown by disc jockey Gary Tesch. In live bookings, he said, “we plan a shift in emphasis” that will make punk rock less of a staple.

Ed Christensen is the booking agent Joseph hired in an attempt to make Night Moves a regular stop on the touring circuit for alternative rock acts. Christensen said Friday that while he put in competitive single-show bids for such acts as Exene Cervenka, Soundgarden, 24-7 Spyz and Peter Case, he usually was outgunned by the greater booking power of Ken Phebus, the Coach House concert director who also books shows at other venues, including Bogart’s, the Ventura Theatre and Calamity Jane’s in Las Vegas.

“You just have much more power making an offer to an (artist’s) agency for four or five shows,” Christensen said. “One person offers (an act) a lot of dates, and they’re all contingent on each other. The agent takes all or none. We’d lose. We’re just outclassed, that’s the bottom line.”

Christensen said another problem was the perception that competing clubs were classier places to play than Night Moves, a perception shared by a number of musicians and band managers on the local rock scene who have criticized Night Moves for its dreary, dim interior and its lack of such amenities as a proper dressing area for performers.

“It’s Bogart’s or us, and they blow us out of the water as far as the sound (system), the niceness of the club,” Christensen said.

Joseph said he will address some of those problems by closing for renovations Jan. 7 and 8. “We’re going to remodel it and try to make it a cleaner, nicer-looking place, brighter, with more lighting,” he said. The booths that line one side of the 300-capacity club will be dismantled, opening up more space for the pool tables and games that Joseph hopes will make Night Moves a more appealing place to spend an evening.

“The club won’t be so dependent on people who just come to see a particular band, then leave. They’ll have more things to do here,” Joseph said.

Joseph said he also is moving away from the pay-to-play policy he adopted earlier this year, in which lesser-known local bands had to purchase and resell tickets in order to get bookings on weeknights. Instead, he said he will try the “unlimited guest list” policy that Bogart’s often uses to bolster the draw for unproven local bands. Fans of a band can get in free by signing up in advance. The band earns a pre-set amount for each fan on the list who shows up, while the club makes its profit at the bar instead of at the door.

Meanwhile, San Clemente has gained a foothold on the Orange County original pop music map with the transformation of the Southampton from a dinner theater to a country music venue. Also figuring on the far Southern front is Taka-o at 425 N. El Camino Real, a Japanese restaurant that regularly features local original pop performers in its 100-seat lounge. Booker Mark Liddell has been bringing in rock bands on weekends (the Edge plays this Friday, and the Weeb on Saturday). The 714 band is a fixture playing reggae on Thursdays, and acoustic New Age guitarist Scott Huckabay plays on Wednesdays.