Underground Scene Stages a Comeback : With their once-a-week clubs, independent young promoters finally give O.C.’s up-and-coming rockers a place to go for starters

It’s a Friday night in Costa Mesa, and a band called the King Rockers has just taken the stage for its first-ever performance.

Actually, the stage is more like a doorstep, rising all of six inches or so off the floor. Only a yellowish dim light keeps the three leather-jacketed King Rockers out of the shroud of blackness enclosing the nearly 40 people watching from up close.

The King Rockers start up, cranking out loose, jumping rockabilly riffs juiced up with a punk rawness.

Best not to jump to the beat’s command, though. The wooden ceiling beam hangs so low that any leaping King Rocker would be in danger of being instantly crowned.

This is the Rat Trap club at Sargenti’s, truly the ground floor of rock ‘n’ roll. The club may be dingy, dark and unadorned, but with its appealing coziness and informality, it’s easy to imagine it as heir to the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the place where an unknown band called the Beatles started playing for neighborhood kids almost 30 years ago.

Mike Ubaldini, the King Rockers’ singer, stops to give his next number a special introduction: “This song’s about the decline of the club scene. It’s called ‘Another Boring Weekend.’ ”

Later, as the King Rockers unload equipment on the sidewalk outside Sargenti’s, Ubaldini says he wrote the song to express the frustration of being a grass-roots rocker in Orange County, of being all dressed up with nowhere to go in a dead club scene.

But things are changing, according to Ubaldini and his band mates, Jim Camp and Johnny Minguez, all of whom are veterans of several years on the Orange County original-rock circuit.

“There are better places to play,” says Camp, a tall, angular man with slicked-back hair and a scruffy dark beard. “The club scene’s starting to happen.”

The grass roots of rock are taking hold again in Orange County, and career nightclub operators and big-dollar music professionals have little, if anything, to do with it. The resurgence is the work of amateur promoters--amateur in the sense of its Latin antecedent: a person whose primary motivation is love, not money.

The Rat Trap at Sargenti’s is one such amateur operation. So are the kindred weekly original-rock soirees with names such as Club Cannibal, Club Tangent, and Placebo. In each case, amateur promoters with close connections to the grass-roots rock scene take over--for one night a week--an established nightclub that normally doesn’t book live original underground rock and may not feature any other live music at all.

It’s a convenient symbiotic relationship between bar economics and musicians’ and fans’ desire to congregate and hear fresh rock. The bar owners know nothing about the local original-rock scene, so in step the ad-hoc promoters and the bands hungry for places to play. The result is what Placebo’s promoter, Aldo Bender calls “parasite clubs.”

In the best of rock scenes, the clubs are self-sufficient. The owners are the promoters, and they’re knowledgeable about the music and the bands--or at least savvy enough to hire full-time assistants who are. Equally important, the owners are committed as entrepreneurs to make money by staging rock shows night in and night out.

There have been a number of clubs like that in Orange County, but the history of grass-roots rock clubs here during the 1980s tells one story after another of disaster. Clubs such as the punk-rock Cuckoo’s Nest and the alternative-rock Safari Sam’s emerged as active, fertile places to hear and play new music only to be shut down after they ran afoul of police departments and city councils that had little tolerance for rock’s disorderly, noisy, youthful spirit and the occasional outbreaks of violence.

As the 1990s begin, there is no full-time rock club in Orange County that does its own booking and regularly features local bands who play styles other than heavy metal.

Instead, the rock scene is rebuilding itself with the growing ranks of gypsy clubs.

“I’ve noticed a definite influx,” said Stephen Zepeda, the concert booker for Bogart’s, the imaginatively run Long Beach club that, over the past 2 1/2 years, has emerged as the only regular outlet for Orange County’s alternative-rock bands. “Going to record stores, I’m noticing there are a lot of flyers for these (once-a-week) things. All this means is that the area is venue-starved, and there are more bands than one club can support. It’s a healthy thing for the bands. It gets them out there playing.”

The amateur promoters who are cultivating Orange County’s grass roots operate on a combination of nerve, do-it-yourself spirit, pride of patronage and a business philosophy that calls for keeping overhead costs down and ticket prices low.

All have been exasperated by the long history of weakness in the local original-rock scene, but in that very weakness, they have seen opportunity.

“I wanted to start a club because there was nothing to do here,” said Steve Wagoner, who, with partner Craig McGahey, runs the 4-month-old Rat Trap. “I was bored myself. It got to be a drag going to L.A. all the time.”

So last summer, Wagoner approached Dick Smith, the operator of Sargenti’s, a bar in a strip mall on 19th Street in Costa Mesa.

Wagoner said he fed him a bunch of nonsense. “I told him I had a club in L.A. I made up a flyer for this (imaginary) club I did in L.A. and showed it to him. I told him we sell out and everything, and we want to move into Orange County and franchise the club.

“He gave me Wednesday night, a real happening night in Orange County,” Wagoner said sarcastically.

Wagoner’s first venture there, the Billy Club, was a weekly rockabilly night that never caught fire. But last October, he launched the Rat Trap with McGahey, owner of the Costa Mesa clothing shop called the London Exchange, a rock-oriented fashion business that keeps him in contact with bands on the local alternative-rock scene.

Wagoner and McGahey were teen-age fans when the Orange County punk rock scene was at its zenith in the ‘80s. That scene gave rise to much of the alternative rock in the county today, and the pair, now in their mid-20s, hope their Friday night shows will help it continue.

The stories are similar at the other once-a-week clubs. Chris Martin was a longtime Orange County punk-rock fan when he and two partners started promoting weekly Saturday night shows at the Meadowlark Country Club in Huntington Beach in 1988.

“We lied through our teeth and told ‘em we’d been doing it forever and we were professionals and we could get people in here,” Martin recalled. Professional background or no, Martin, was convinced that his do-it-yourself promotions could succeed.

“The bands just never had a place to play, and we made it a fun place to be. There’s definitely a demand. People are starving to have a good time and see some live music.”

Martin’s original partnership split up, but he continued last year with Club Cannibal, which takes over the 400-capacity Meadowlark every Saturday night.

Like the others, Martin, 26, and his new partners, J. P. Boquette and Karen Mitchell, don’t have the budget to advertise their weekly clubs through conventional channels. So they, like their compatriots, hustle around, handing out leaflets and plastering flyers on car windshields parked outside other rock outlets.

“Basically, we do it by word of mouth,” Martin said. “It’s the underground club scene. We’re not doing any heavy name bands, just bands that are trying to get signed; but they’re good, so people want to see ‘em.”

“We don’t make a lot of money,” added Martin, who earns his living as a cable-television installer. “That’s not what it’s about. We go to a party every week, and we make a little”--perhaps $100 to $200 profit when the night is over.

Says Rat Trap’s McGahey, “You can make a little bit of money, but it can only go so big.” Sargenti’s will hold 200 or so people, and the Rat Trap’s policy is to charge no more than $5 admission, even for headliners such as Tender Fury or Gherkin Raucous, who normally command higher prices. “To make money you really have to do (large) concerts,” McGahey said. “It’s a learning experience. Maybe in the future we will do a bigger show” at a larger place.

Although the once-a-week clubs can’t match the advertising, sound quality and staging amenities of an established full-time club such as Bogart’s or the Coach House, they get good reviews from the musicians who play them. Several local band members said they like the informality of the gypsy clubs and working for promoters they can consider music-loving peers.

“Maybe I’m biased, but I’d rather deal with people who’ve come up through the whole Orange County scene than a promoter who I have no idea who he is or what his angle is,” said Steve Soto of Joyride, who has been playing in local punk and alternative-rock bands for more than 10 years. “I’ve known Chris Martin for a long time. I’ve known Craig (McGahey) a long time. When you have a promoter like that, it’s someone who likes what they’re doing and cares about the bands they’re booking. It’s not just a guy who says, ‘Come on in and I’ll make some money off you, kid.’ ”

But before the gypsy promoters can become patrons of this grass-roots art, they must find a nightclub operator willing to play host to original, live rock.

“It’s just extremely hard to find somebody who is open enough to the stuff we’re doing,” said Bender, 27, who, with partners Scott Powel, and Richard Jones recently launched Placebo, a weekly techno-rock showcase done Wednesday nights at Out of Bounds in Huntington Beach. “Between myself, Scott and Richard, we contacted over a dozen Orange County nightclubs,” said Bender, who formerly booked concerts at Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach. “Their whole (attitude) was, ‘We’re safer right now; we’ve got a set income.’ They’re happy with the status quo and they don’t want to venture out and try something new.”

But some club owners who would not have otherwise been booking live rock say they have done well giving a weekly home to gypsy promoters.

“At first we had some apprehensions” about letting rockers into the clubhouse ballroom, said Meadowlark’s Paul Horio, who, with his wife, Yoshi, runs the clubhouse and snack-bar businesses at the city-owned club. “But as we get to know the members of the bands, they all turn out to be personable young people.”

Horio’s arrangement with Club Cannibal’s operators is fairly standard among the once-a-week rock clubs: The promoters set the admission prices and keep all the cash paid at the door, from which they must pay the bands and cover the costs of renting a sound system and stage lights. The club operators make their money by selling drinks to concert-goers, and they keep all bar income.

Sargenti’s Dick Smith said hosting the Rat Trap every Friday is a good income boost for the bar. “The volume steps up considerably,” Smith said. “It’s very, very consistent. You can about predict what’s going into the register that shift. Needless to say, it makes money. You can draw from such a large customer base with that age group.”

Ezra Joseph, whose Night Moves club in Huntington Beach had been the only Orange County club consistently booking grass-roots, non-metal rock over the past few years, says that he would now rather host a series of gypsy promoters each week than run his own shows.

“I don’t have time to be a good promoter,” said Joseph, whose club, recently renamed Foul Play, has been feeling the heat of competition from Club Cannibal, Rat Trap and Club Tangent. Rather than have an in-house booking agent, as he has in the past, Joseph is throwing open his doors to independent promoters who want to use Foul Play the same way Club Cannibal uses the Meadowlark and the Rat Trap uses Sargenti’s.

The once-a-week arrangements do have a disadvantage, though--instability. With no ownership interest or conventional owner-employee relationship with the places where they book, promoters can move on, or be told to go, at any time.

Kitty Bash and Octavious, the 22-year-old partners behind Club Tangent, found out firsthand about that one chilly Wednesday last month when they found themselves literally shut out in the cold. They and the bands they had booked showed up that night at Manhattan’s, the Stanton bar where Club Tangent had been featured regularly, only to find that Manhattan’s had closed without notice because of a financial dispute among its owners.

Bash and Octavious stood outside turning away the arriving fans.

“I wish I was rich, so I could give bands a place to play,” sighed Bash, of Fullerton, who is pursuing a future in nursing rather than as a concert promoter. (Octavious is a civil-engineering student.)

Lacking the resources to open their own club, the Club Tangent partners regrouped, knocking once more on the doors of people with enough capital to own a bar or nightclub and a liquor license. They now have an agreement with the Marquee in Westminster. Co-owner Trojan Tabak decided to depart from the club’s usual diet of heavy metal to give Club Tangent and its college-oriented alternative rock bands a shot on Wednesday nights starting March 7.

The emergence of once-a-week clubs clearly signals a quickening in the pulse rate of the Orange County alternative-rock scene. But some observers still question whether true health can be achieved through any means but a well-established circuit of full-time clubs dedicated to presenting local bands and rising touring acts.

Jim Palmer, who was active for several years in the Orange County alternative-rock scene as a promoter and booking agent until he moved to Las Vegas last year, points to Bogart’s as an example of what he hopes will develop in Orange County. Original rock was gradually established there as a regular attraction over several years. The club’s owners eased their way into the rock scene until they became convinced that the live original rock format would work for them.

Similarly, Sam Lanni, former owner of Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach, sees the once-a-week clubs as a helpful development but not a real foundation for a strong local club scene.

“Each one (of the weekly clubs) has its own personality and ideas behind it, and that’s neat,” said Lanni, now a band manager who says he isn’t looking to open a new club. “But I think we should be putting more energy to opening more full-time clubs. In the (absence) of that, this is the alternative. If we can get a half-dozen (full-time) clubs open, we’ll have a scene again. It’s nice to have these once-a-week gigs, but you need some place where bands are playing every night.”

The once-a-week promoters have two essential ingredients for launching an original-rock club that really counts: a love for music and an enthusiasm for putting on shows. If a brighter future is to arrive for the local club scene, the heart of the amateur promoters will somehow have to attach itself to the brains and financial means of entrepreneurs with the commitment to run a club as an effective, full-time business.