Camaraderie <i> in a Key of ‘C’</i> : The Talented and the Not-So-Talented Gather at Piano Bars to Sing the Blues--or Troubles Away
It’s been a bad day from dawn to dusk.
The city repaved your street before sunrise and forgot to warn you, trapping your car in the driveway. You took an hour bus ride for the six-mile trip to work. The office coffee pot is busted, as is the photocopying machine and switchboard operator. Your boss’s year-end review mentions that you might want “to explore other job options.” Your live-in girlfriend calls to say she won’t be home for the rest of the holidays but no, no, everything is fine! And all the friends with whom you most need to howl at the moon are busy tonight.
Before you drive off the Newport Beach Pier, pull up a stool at one of Orange County’s piano bars and let ‘er rip.
Whether you belt one out like Frank Sinatra or resemble one of the singing Chipmunks--or just hum real good--a kinder and gentler atmosphere awaits you here at one of the dozen or so sing-along lounges, which have outlived disco, heavy metal and Bill Murray parodies.
Maybe piano bars have survived because being neighborly never entirely went out of style. Maybe, to quote Dean Martin, everybody needs somebody sometime, and it’s hard to ignore a sobbing grown-up around a piano. They are also lots of fun.
Big name crooners and novices flirting with brief stardom have been known to grab the mike at sign-along piano bars like Newport Beach’s Villa Nova restaurant. There, veteran pianist Richard Fauno said, actor Buddy Ebsen thrilled the crowd with “Ebb Tide” and a soft shoe. Bobby Hatfield, one of the Righteous Brothers, performed “Unchained Melody.” Actress Elke Sommer favored gospel songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
A still shaken Fauno recalls how one of his favorite customers, the late Yankees manager Billy Martin, whenever he was in town “sat right next to me and sang ‘You Were Always on My Mind.’ It wasn’t always perfect, but everybody loved it.”
“It’s more intimate in a piano bar, and people feel like they can talk to each other without seeming like they are hitting on someone,” says Margo Day, a Mission Viejo interior designer and community theater singer. “People are friendlier. They are not as afraid to say hello. It’s hard to feel alone with all that camaraderie.”
No one seems to know how many sing-along piano bars there used to be but performers, restaurateurs and customers say there are fewer now.
“Live music is dead these days,” says Frank Amos, president of Orange County’s 1,300-member chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. “Recorded music and deejays have replaced performers, and you can imagine what that means for piano bars.”
Those that remain, however, have a loyal following. They include silver-haired old-timers at the Coachman in Garden Grove who puff on Marlboros and play maracas; talented local stage and opera singers at the Villa Nova restaurant in Newport Beach; a 35-and-up crowd of mostly singles at Shadrak’s in Anaheim; and a more raucous but less intimate group at the roomier Gino’s on the Hill in Costa Mesa.
Patrons of these and other piano bars say they find something other saloons don’t offer: a sense of belonging.
The Villa Nova dinner crowd is impatient by the time Fauno begins playing his piano at 9. This has got to be the king of piano bars, and we are not talking about drunken songbirds blubbering through “My Way.”
It’s a particularly talented group of singers who hug the edge of his waterfront piano this night, some of them professionals. They include a striking Judy Garland ringer and a blond Elvis impersonator, singers whose repertoire ranges from opera to Broadway. The man in the wheelchair isn’t singing. He’s throwing roses at women and asking them to dance.
Fauno opens his five-hour set softly with a classical piece, his quarter-size pinky diamond glistening across the piano keys. It’s not long before someone asks for the mike, and the jumbo brandy snifter begins to fill with bills.
He never stops smiling. He takes only one break all night, and it is brief. With his dark smooth hair and gold cross medallion, the 37-year-old family man looks rather debonair sipping coffee and stealing drags off his Marlboro Lights throughout the evening.
Many of the best piano bar singers around say he is the most accomplished piano bar player in the county because he is not only a good musician but a good host, reading his guests’ moods and playing to them. Many of his customers have been showing up for the whole nine years he has worked at the bay-front Villa Nova.
After studying music and then teaching it at Princeton, Fauno did some commercials. But the work was too inconsistent to support his wife and son, now 16. So Fauno moved to Southern California and worked for a few years at Knott’s Berry Farm. To make ends meet, he agreed to fill in for a vacationing piano bar player who never came back. He has been at it for the past decade.
He has worked at some dives before arriving at the pricey Villa Nova. At one of his first jobs, the bar owners vaguely explained that the piano had for some reason been submerged in water.
“The keys were green. I was playing on piano keys with fungus, “ Fauno recalls, laughing. “And it sounded like it had been underwater too.”
But some of his favorite people are his fans, and he says there is an immediate audience reaction you don’t find working a big arena. “When someone is moved to tears by one of my songs, there is nothing to compare that to. A lot of these people are my friends.”
As smoke curls up into the amber spotlight, he plays “Tomorrow,” then one of the male patrons takes the microphone. He sings “You Are So Beautiful,” and sounds like Joe Cocker with a Kenny Rogers twist. Somebody else sings “Georgia,” a Ray Charles classic, to a hearty round of applause.
“This is a great piano bar,” announces customer Johnnie Dean Garrett, who says there are few of them in his hometown of Austin, Tex. He is drinking port on this night during one of his monthly business trips to Newport Beach.
During “Banana Boat Song,” a small scuffle erupts at the piano bar. Never missing a beat, the piano player launched into “You Send Me,” swaying back and forth. Ten waiters and other employees tried to break it up before the party was politely asked to leave the restaurant.
One of the customers sings “Summertime,” and Garrett is in rapture, convinced at first that it is “Georgia.”
“Now this song, this song transports me back in time. Ten, no, 20 years! That’s what a piano bar is supposed to do,” he says. Asked what the name of the song is, he shrugs. “I don’t really know. And who cares!”
A customer named Gary sings “Since I Fell For You” as a middle-age couple does some serious necking beside him, and a woman in her 20s mouths the words with her eyes closed. The Judy Garland ringer is next, and what a chanteuse. She sings “You Made Me Love You” complete with growls that are met by smacking noises and whistles from the crowd.
“Here’s hoping you live forever,” yells a man who looked about 90, “and I never die!”
All the regulars have arrived at the Coachman by 9:30, and the instruments have been passed around the Garden Grove piano bar--tambourines, a saxophone and maracas of various sizes.
Charles Kapowai, a Hawaiian gentleman affectionately called Kappy by his customers, is playing a Casio organ because the cancer in his left arm restricts his movement on the piano. His left wrist rests in a special cradle attached to a modified cane. His lei is fresh, his manner engaging.
Three men and seven women, most festively dressed in Christmas corsages and jewelry, prepare to sing the chorus of “La Bamba.” An older woman winks and says, “I hope you’re tone deaf.” The group is slightly off-key, but the dance floor rapidly fills with couples swaying beneath red garland and green tissue-paper bells.
Kappy swings into “Mack the Knife”--”look out that ol’ Mackie’s back!”--as customer Jean Meger of Anaheim tells the story of the Coachman piano bar and the man who is like a family member to his fans.
“I’ve been a regular for years and years and years,” says Meger, a middle-aged security guard with a long ponytail and a T-shirt that reads, “Almost grown up.”
Now tapping her fingers to “Jingle Bell Rock,” she adds that Kappy “has been through the hinges of hell and back. He is a pianist who can really play the piano, anything from classical to the oldest rock, but he’s got cancer that comes and goes, so it’s hard for him. But his customers keep coming back. He is one of the sweetest people in the whole world!”
As the crowd sings “The Christmas Song,” Meger introduces each crooner. “We have a few people who come in and out but mostly it’s the neighborhood here. This whole front row has been coming here for years and years. And Kappy has been here over 10 years, because I didn’t come here until my husband died and that was late 1980.”
Martys Ownby, 53, of Tustin, has the mike now. With her eyes lowered, she sings a 1940s tune called, “I’m Confessing” with a husky voice.
Betty Loadholtz, a 62-year-old Fullerton beautician, has been coming to the Coachman every Friday night for five years, at one point driving from her then-home in Santa Monica. She sings “Someone to Watch Over Me,” then describes the allure of a piano bar.
“I can come in here by myself and the guys don’t bother me.”
So friendly is this crowd that a huge group packed the bar in July, 1988, for a fund-raiser to help pay for the piano man’s cancer surgery. That night they raised $10,000.
“He’s given a lot of happiness to people over the years, and he is loved,” Loadholtz says. Toward the end of the evening, a man sings “Route 66.” He is not Mick Jagger. And nobody cares.
It’s a mixed age group that seems faintly hesitant sitting around Gary O’Brien’s piano bar at J.J.’s, a small neighborhood pub in Orange. Sing-along piano bar customers learn about such spots quickly. Many of the singers hit several a night, sort of a piano-bar circuit: Murph’s Irish piano bar, the Kettle in Anaheim, Shadrak’s, and so forth.
O’Brien is playing folksy, bluesy music on his piano, aided by a synthesizer for percussion. He wears a sweet grin beneath his white racer cap. He does “Steam Roller Baby” and “Cat’s in the Cradle” and the mood is melancholy.
A 25-year-old piano bar regular, Robert Wucker of Anaheim, sings rich versions of James Taylor tunes like “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”
Marilyn McPherson, a bit weepy, can’t take it anymore, though. Her boyfriend had moved out two days earlier and the 51-year-old Placentia resident resolves to “have one good drunk and one good cry.”
O’Brien tried picking up the tempo by playing “American Pie,” but Wucker sings “Fire and Rain” to his fiancee, Stephanie. In front of the cigarette machine, a couple in a dramatic lip lock are barely moving as Wucker belts out “Help Me Through the Night.”
We are talking melancholy, babe.
“Gary, we want something happy now! We’re tired of these sad songs,” McPherson pleads.
Other customers console her and get her giggling, but then someone requests, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and everyone groans. Bad idea.
“Beer Barrel Polka” comes next. Finally Bud Young takes the microphone and, his voice reminiscent of a rat-packer, sings “Our Day Will Come” with the whole bar singing along. Through tears, McPherson joins in.
“You cry on my shoulder for the first half of this,” says the man beside her, “and I’ll cry on yours for the second half.”
Young, a 63-year-old former Chicago comedian who now owns an industrial supply company, flirted with 73-year-old Eileen Linder, alone at the bar beside him. He sang an upbeat “For Once in My Life.” Before he passed the mike back, he squeezed an arm around her. “You cradle robber,” he teased. She burst into giggles.
“At a piano bar,” he says, “it’s important to feel a part of the place.”