Rock Wars : SOLD OUT : Ventura Theatre credited with boosting music scene and accused of wooing acts from other clubs

Ticket-holders at the Ventura Theatre’s recent concert by Clarence Clemons couldn’t believe their luck when the former saxophone player for Bruce Springsteen made room on stage for The Boss himself.

After the impromptu serenade by the performer whose last Southern California concert sold out the Los Angeles Sports Arena for four days, they watched in awe as Jackson Browne and frequent companion Daryl Hannah jumped into the fray.

“They had a treat like they’ve never had before,” said the nightclub’s owner, Gary Folgner.

Perhaps no single event better illustrates how far the local music scene has come since Folgner, a veteran concert promoter from Orange County, opened the 62-year-old movie place in 1988 to a caliber of acts that Ventura County residents once found only in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Ventura, after all, was the community that two years ago turned a cold shoulder to the Grateful Dead over complaints of rowdy behavior on the part of fans at a previous concert.

And this was the 12,000-square-foot pre-Depression gem where a group of local businessmen had failed four years ago to establish a nightclub. Now, after nearly two years of losses routine in launching a business, Folgner said he has begun to break even at the 850-seat venue and expects to begin turning a profit next year.

The club owner even has plans, he said, to add three more clubs--in Sacramento, Riverside and Tempe, Ariz.--to his portfolio, which includes the Coach House, a nightclub in San Juan Capistrano. As an additional measure of the theater’s strength, its management has persuaded the city to triple the size of Ventura’s annual fall music festival, move it from Arroyo Verde Park and place it in the theater’s downtown neighborhood.

“We’ve pioneered a lot at the Ventura Theatre,” said Folgner, “and we’re going to continue to be pioneers.”

This news is music to the ears of many concert-goers, who applaud the theater’s mix of up-and-coming acts, big-name underground bands and established performers with more loyal fans than recent hits. Ventura city officials and business leaders are also pleased.

“It provides a real variety of entertainment, and that’s beneficial . . . for all the cultural reasons and what economists call the ripple effect,” said Ventura Mayor Richard Francis. Theater-goers also “go out to dinner and bars here and enjoy the rest of the community once they’re here,” he said.

But some local bands, music critics and other concert promoters aren’t as enthusiastic. They paint an unflattering picture of a place where band members say they are pressured to sell tickets and bouncers are accused of being overly aggressive. And Ventura Theatre, it is alleged, has wooed name acts from Central Coast nightclubs after promoters spent time and money developing an audience for them.

“They’re the boss, and they don’t let you forget it,” said a band member who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “They’re really arrogant to deal with.”

Folgner, whose acts range from jazz to salsa to rock to country, dismissed the complaints as “professional envy and maybe not understanding the business.” Concert promoters, who say that the Ventura Theatre has wreaked havoc with the club scene along the Central Coast, counter that Folgner knows only too well that they understand the business.

“We put in all the brain work and the savvy and they reap the rewards,” said Loanne Wullaert, an Isla Vista record store owner who has brought acts to the UC Santa Barbara watering hole, The Graduate.

Wullaert says she has watched a string of acts including Fishbone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Neville Brothers go to the Ventura Theatre after she introduced them to local audiences.

She maintains that the turn of events violated “an unwritten rule called ‘the first right of refusal.’ ”

“If you’ve booked an act before in a market, you’re supposed to get it the next time,” she said. “That way, if you’ve lost money on it the first time, you get to make it up.”

While he bristled at the suggestion that he’s riding on anybody’s coattails, Folgner insisted there’s nothing wrong with wooing acts away from the clubs with the promise of bigger audiences and higher pay.

“Just because you had Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen when they were starting out doesn’t mean they’re going to come back to your club when they’re in town,” he said. “Acts grow out of clubs. They move into theaters, then go to sheds and then arenas.” Signs of a lopsided battle among music showcases along the Central Coast nonetheless abound. The list of casualties includes:

* Ventura’s Holiday Inn Beach Resort. The number of concerts offered in the inn’s Top of the Harbor restaurant has dropped from 50 in 1987 to 20 last year because of competition from the Ventura Theatre in combination with company policies that restrict days and months when acts can play, said Greg Bennett, the inn’s general manager during the 3-year-old “Classic Concerts Series.” Plans next year, he said, call for only six acts.

* At least one pair of independent promoters in Santa Barbara County, Wullaert and her husband, Robert, claim they have stopped booking acts because they can’t compete with the theater. Stephen Cloud, an 18-year veteran of concert promoting in Santa Barbara, said competition from the theater was one of many reasons he has stopped booking acts at the 664-seat Lobero Theatrer and the 2000-seat Arlington Theater. “It’s eliminated the scene here,” Cloud said.

Some competitors have taken steps to protect their turf.

Ventura’s Holiday Inn has switched from rock and jazz to country music, said Bennett, the former manager. However, the approach has lost some of its punch because the Ventura Theatre shortly afterward began offering some of the same acts.

Carnaval, a 350-seat dance club in Santa Barbara, has retaliated by shunning established artists in favor of rising stars.

“They can have the dinosaurs,” said club Manager Bill Hardie.

Ventura Theatre also has its share of detractors among local band members, who complain of being pressured to sell advance tickets to concerts under an arrangement that allows them to pocket a $2 profit on each ticket instead of getting paid.

“He’s never said, ‘If you don’t do this you won’t be asked back,’ but you kind of assume it’s that way, said Frank Barajas, the lead singer of Durango 95, a Ventura-based folk rock group.

Because they sometimes find it difficult to sell tickets, band members will forgo their cut to sell the tickets at a cheaper price, he said. “It’s like paying to play.”

But as Raging Arb has found, even selling tickets to a concert is no assurance that a local performer will appear.

“We’ve sold 150 to 200 tickets and then they called to say they’ve changed their minds about playing,” said Ross Emery, a member of the Ventura country-blues band, of the theater.

Folgner said he didn’t remember the incident, but said if it happened, it was the decision of the name act playing and not the theater.

“You always have the pressure of the act that’s playing there to have someone they’ve been playing with,” Folgner said.

Folgner said he does pay local bands--$100 a concert--and defended the ticket-selling practice.

“It gives the opportunity for them to make more money,” he said, noting that the approach is used by some Los Angeles clubs.

Then there are complaints about the theater’s bouncers.

“I’ve seen them use chokeholds,” Wullaert said. “I’ve seen five men descend on a woman. They’ve grabbed people by the hair to get them off the stage.”

So allegedly hard-handed is the theater’s approach that Christina Zafiris, an rock radio show host at UC Santa Barbara radio station KCSB, said she no longer promotes its shows on the radio.

“They use Nazi-type tactics,” said Beth Allen, a music critic for the Santa Barbara Independent, a weekly entertainment tabloid.

Folgner said he doubts that the violent incidents occurred but said his bouncers routinely remove fans who try to go on stage or engage in slam-dancing.

“You’re making entertainment,” he said. “You have to make sure people don’t get hurt. They come to see concerts--not gang wars.”

He said he learned that lesson the hard way. The Ventura Police Department had to be called in to quell a disturbance that broke out between rival gangs during a performance by Social Distortion, a punk band that was one of the first acts to play the theater. If the latest incarnation of the Ventura Theatre has become the new bully on the block, it started out as an 98-pound weakling.

Built in 1928 for vaudeville acts, the ornate theater had gone through two revival attempts before Folgner signed a 10-year lease and completed $250,000 in renovations.

Folgner also had his spate of bad luck. He said he lost $300,000 in the first year and $250,000 in the second.

“We’re not where we should be,” he said. “We’re just barely breaking even. I think next year we’ll start to make up for the losses.”

What has made the latest version of the theater succeed, it turns out, is also what has made it a nearly invincible opponent in bidding wars.

The theater is part of a booking network that includes not just the 400-seat Coach House but also The Strand in Redondo Beach, Calamity Jane’s in Las Vegas and Bogart’s in Long Beach.

“Basically, you can say, ‘If you give me one day, I’ll give you four others,’ ” Folgner said. Folgner’s plans to open three new clubs in California and Arizona would presumably enhance the theater’s ability to attract talent. Folgner also points out that he doesn’t have to battle some of the same weaknesses as his brethren in the Santa Barbara market, which has a potential audience of only 300,000 within a 30-mile radius. Ventura has 750,000 people within the same number of miles. It stretches from Santa Barbara to Thousand Oaks. If Folgner has profited at the expense of the music scene elsewhere, he appears to have spread the wealth.

Consider Peter Weal, owner of Wild Planet, a Main Street record store located less than a block from the theater.

“If there’s a good show, I’ll stay open late and make an extra $100 to $200,” he said.

Another benefactor has been the San Souci Cocktail Lounge, a cowboy bar located across Chestnut Street from the theater (see related story below).

Even the Holiday Inn has profited, Bennett said. Many of the bands stay there after playing the theater and concert-goers frequently drop by for dinner or even spend the night.

“It’s healthy to have someone like the Ventura Theatre in town,” he said.