<i> Orange County </i> 1980<i> s</i> : Decade Witnessed Slight Parting of Great Orange Curtain

As the 1980s began, the pop music industry could have said about Orange County what Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland: There’s no There there.

Actually, the deal-makers, trend-setters and career-brokers of the Los Angeles music scene had their own disdainful term for the vast suburb to the south: anyone trying to make or promote music beyond the Long Beach frontier was said to be Behind the Orange Curtain. County residents who wanted to take a peek at what was happening in the pop world typically had to drive to the arenas, theaters and clubs of the big city to see any musical points of interest.

As the 1980s end, Orange County’s pop scene remains incomplete and overshadowed by the musical nerve center to the north. But now there is definitely a Here when it comes to pop music. If the Iron Curtain could fall in 1989, it isn’t too far-fetched to believe that the Orange Curtain will be drawn back soon to reveal a musical community worthy of national recognition apart from its celebrated northern neighbor.

With growth booming and household incomes soaring in Orange County, it wasn’t surprising that the music industry viewed it as a major consumer market (if not a source of musical creativity) as the ‘80s dawned.

In 1981, Irvine Meadows opened, a 15,000-capacity venue that finally gave the county a regular stage for top-name rock and pop attractions (previously, only the occasional stadium-scale mega-act would pass through to play Anaheim Stadium). Two summers later, the Pacific Amphitheatre was in business in Costa Mesa, attracting crowds of up to 18,765 music fans a scant 11 miles from Irvine Meadows.

That touched off a uniquely close, uniquely intense competition that has paid dividends for the Orange County concert-goer. Together, the two venues book an aggregate of 70 to 100 concerts a year. The fact that the rival amphitheaters’ bidding wars to attract talent have resulted in possibly the highest average ticket prices in the nation didn’t seem to bother an affluent concert-going public, which proved more than willing to pay top dollar for entertainment.

In 1987, the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim opened. With 2,500 in-the-round seats surrounding a rotating stage, the Celebrity stepped into a void by providing a mid-size pop concert hall and a wide range of bookings. It became the county’s only major regular outlet for Latin pop, rap music and R&B;, while also catering to fans of rock, country and middle-of-the-road pop.

Because of these big-money ventures, Orange County finally found itself reasonably well-represented as a destination for high-profile concert tours (although some of the decade’s biggest acts--among them Bruce Springsteen, Prince and Pink Floyd--failed to appear in the county).

It was on the grass-roots level that Orange County’s growth in the ‘80s remained frustratingly slow. Throughout the decade, the county stayed by and large a one-horse town when it came to rock music clubs capable of booking nationally known talent. The venerable Golden Bear in Huntington Beach held sway until 1986, when it closed and handed over the torch to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, which remains the county’s only rock club attracting major names several times a week.

(In country music, the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana began booking major acts in 1980 and had clear sailing through the decade, establishing a prosperous once- or twice-a-week concert operation that won national acclaim in the country music industry.)

Orange County’s club dearth is an absurdity when one considers that many communities far smaller than our 2.2-million population support far more active club scenes. While the late-’80s saw a number of promoters attempting to start clubs to rival the Coach House, they all had problems in establishing the booking clout and expertise needed to attract major names.

While the Coach House emerged as an excellent place to see a show, well-regarded by the performers who play there, concert director Ken Phebus says the club’s bookings have been hampered by the lack of an Orange County rock radio station that could develop the sort of symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship that concert venues commonly have with radio stations in other markets. When it comes to broadcast media, Orange County remains in a squeeze between Los Angeles and San Diego, making it difficult to promote shows by newer acts that rely on radio play and giveaway contests to gather an audience. Consequently, local fans wanting to see cutting-edge rock acts on the first go-round still must drive to Los Angeles more often than not.

An example: the Coach House had hoped to bring in the zesty Dirty Dozen Brass Band for a concert last night. But the acclaimed New Orleans act didn’t have the exposure here to sell more than a handful of advance tickets. The club dropped the Dirty Dozen in favor of yeoman rocker Eddie Money, an act more proven at the cash register, though far less scintillating artistically. For now, Orange County simply doesn’t have the infrastructure of radio exposure, club options, and active college-based concert bookers to make it a hotbed for rising pop talent. (While some college radio stations in the county do champion up-and-coming talent, none of them have a strong enough signal to have much impact.) Bogart’s, just over the county line in Long Beach, is the closest thing the Orange County music scene has to a full-spectrum rock club that can foster local bands while also booking cutting-edge national headliners.

Perhaps the situation would be different as we enter the ‘90s if Orange County officialdom hadn’t spent most of the ‘80s stifling attempts to bring a grass-roots music scene to life. In the early ‘80s, the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa booked cutting-edge punk and new wave bands, touring acts as well as bands from the budding local punk scene. Punk was far too unruly for city officials, who clamped down on the Cuckoo’s Nest and eventually succeeded in shutting it. Other clubs in other cities met a similar fate as the decade went on. The unkindest cut of all was the loss of Safari Sam’s, a small but creative Huntington Beach club, which lost its entertainment license in 1986 after emerging as an alternative arts center and spawning ground for some of the most artistically ambitious Orange County bands.

This official zeal to preserve tidiness at the expense of artistic ferment wasn’t directed only at rock musicians. The county’s arid folk music scene found an oasis in the mid-’80s when musician Carolyn Russell began opening her home in Garden Grove for small traditional folk concerts featuring some nationally known acts. Although Russell’s neighbors had no objections to the gatherings, city officials filed a zoning complaint and shut down her house concerts in 1986 (with their low overhead, house concerts are a folk-scene staple in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the nation).

Against this suburban mentality, with its emphasis on peace and quiet at all costs, rose Orange County’s most significant folk-art movement of the 1980s: punk rock. With its main spawning grounds in Fullerton and Huntington Beach, the local punk scene that bloomed in the early ‘80s gave rise to a full roster of bands that gathered national followings with albums, tours, and music that chronicled their youthful feelings of anger and rebellion, and their deep disaffection for the status quo.

The Orange County punks horrified mainstream Orange County enough to inspire a swift clampdown on the clubs where they proliferated, but bands like Social Distortion, the Adolescents, T.S.O.L., the Vandals and Agent Orange still managed to leave lasting marks as musical influences. The best of the Orange County punks demonstrated the capacity for artistic growth and maturity, and some of them remain active in music 10 years after the punk-rock boom.

The punk explosion of the early ‘80s set the stage for an alternative-rock scene that continued to grow in Orange County during the rest of the decade, despite the dearth of grass-roots clubs in which a band could build a following. One of the most promising developments was the emergence of Dr. Dream Records, a small, Orange-based company that offered a forum for creative local rockers such as El Grupo Sexo, Ann De Jarnett, the Swamp Zombies, Eggplant and National People’s Gang. In 1988 Dr. Dream began establishing a small foothold in the music industry, marketing its releases nationally and sending some of its bands across the country on tour.

Dr. Dream’s modest success has been particularly reassuring as counterpoint to the most ambitious previous stab at launching an Orange County-based record label, one that turned into the county’s biggest rock fiasco of the decade: Rocshire Records. In the early ‘80s, the Anaheim-based company popped up from seemingly nowhere, led by a maverick president, Clyde (Rocky) Davis, and promised local acts that they would have access to a bottomless pit of resources to help further their music. Unfortunately, Davis and his wife, Shirley, were later given prison sentences after the FBI discovered that they had financed Rocshire with funds embezzled from Hughes Aircraft’s medical benefits department, where Shirley was employed.

On the touring front, the ‘80s found many worthy blues and roots-rock performers from Orange County hitting the road, including the James Harman Band, the Wild Cards and guitarist Walter Trout, who played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before setting out on his own in 1989. Two of the Harman band’s albums, “Those Dangerous Gentlemens” and “Extra Napkins,” were nominated for W.C. Handy awards, the top honor in the blues field. The Pontiac Brothers, from Fullerton, were among the best touring ambassadors for the Orange County scene from 1984 until their breakup in 1988, but their spirited, no-frills guitar rock never won them the audience they deserved.

The Orange County acts making the biggest national impression during the ‘80s appealed to more mainstream tastes. Jon St. James, a La Habra-based record producer, developed a pair of successful dance pop acts in Bardeux and Stacey Q, whose “Two of Hearts” reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop singles chart in 1986. Another commercial success was Stryper, the born-again heavy metal rock band that dressed in black and yellow bumblebee striped outfits and tossed Bibles to its audiences. Stryper became the first well-known Christian heavy-rock band, despite (or maybe because of) its formulaic pop-metal sound.

Before the 1980s, Dick Dale and the Righteous Brothers were the only Orange County acts to have caused more than a ripple in the pop music world (Jackson Browne went to high school in Fullerton, but Orange County was never his musical home). The decade wasn’t an easy ride for Dale, the surf-guitar innovator from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Dale made more headlines in the ‘80s for his financial troubles and his successful defense against sex-related felony charges than he did for his music. But at decade’s end, Dale was still hammering out impressively energized riffs in live performance, and he made some happier headlines with a 1988 Grammy nomination for his guitar duel with Stevie Ray Vaughan on the surf-rock classic “Pipeline.”

The Righteous Brothers’ streak of ‘60s soul hits, including No. 1 songs with “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin”’ and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” made them by far the most famous Orange County pop act. Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield continued to team up in the ‘80s for shows at their Fountain Valley nightclub, the Hop. But Medley formed another No. 1 singing partnership when he dueted with Jennifer Warnes on “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” the “Dirty Dancing” movie theme that became a pop phenomenon. The 1988 song won a Grammy and an Oscar, and it enabled Medley to play before big audiences again as the show-closing act on a national “Dirty Dancing” tour.

As the ‘90s begin, Orange County will be represented for the first time by an array of rock performers recording for prominent national labels. Veteran punk band Social Distortion is working on its first major label release for Epic; folk-rocker Vinnie James has a good shot at gaining national attention with his debut album on Cypress; Burning Tree, with its young blues-rock guitar ace, Marc Ford, will debut on Epic; and T.S.O.L., also a punk-rock survivor, takes another shot at the big time with a new record for Enigma. If one or more of these albums proves a success, perhaps the Orange Curtain will lift a little more--and perhaps the county’s powers that be will begin to be persuaded that indigenous rock music is a form of private initiative that should be regarded with pride instead of hostility.