Complaints Foul Up Permit Status of Foul Play Club

Foul Play, one of the few nightclubs in the county that present local original rock bands--and the one that’s been at it the longest--is in jeopardy of losing its live entertainment permit because of neighbors’ complaints about noise.

Police first ticketed the club on March 18 for “maintaining a loud and noisy premises,” according to Orange County Municipal Court records. Foul Play’s owner, Ezra K. Joseph, said the club, formerly known as Night Moves, has been cited twice more since then.

Also pending against Foul Play, located in the corner of a shopping center at 5902 Warner Ave., is a citation for alleged overcrowding at a concert last October. Joseph said attendance that night was within the club’s capacity of 295, asserting that police counted band members and their technical crews who were in a rear dressing room. Joseph disputes the count, which placed club occupancy 19 persons above the limit.

Joseph said this week that his greatest legal concern is for the entertainment permit. Instead of allowing him to renew the year-to-year permit in December, Joseph said, the Police Department withheld renewal, telling him he could continue to operate while Foul Play remains “under review.” Revocation of the permit would effectively close the club, which has booked original rock bands since mid-1986.

Meanwhile, he said, having his permit in limbo is complicating his efforts to solve the noise problem.

The 44-year-old club owner said he has spent $7,000 since January to soundproof the 295-capacity club in response to complaints from a neighboring apartment complex. But the sound experts he hired estimate it will cost an additional $10,000 to finish the job. With no assurance that Foul Play will receive its entertainment permit, Joseph is reluctant to pour more money into an operation that could be shut down.

“I’d like to get out of being under review and get the permit in my hand. Then I could deal with more of the sound problems with soundproofing,” he said.

In a recent letter to police officials, Joseph’s lawyer, Larry B. Bruce, proposed a meeting to discuss police concerns about the club. Bruce said in the letter that besides the soundproofing, Foul Play would like to hire off-duty Huntington Beach police officers as security workers. That would assure the club of a well-trained security staff, Bruce wrote, and it would reassure the Police Department that “club operations would be in compliance with all laws.”

Bill Sage, the deputy city attorney who serves as the Police Department’s legal adviser, said Wednesday that he will make a recommendation on the entertainment permit after he receives “a further report about some of the details” concerning Foul Play’s operations. Lt. Mike Miller, whose vice unit is compiling the report, said he could not comment because the investigation is still pending.

As part of the review process, Sage said: “I definitely would have a meeting with (Joseph and his lawyer). I think it’s arrogant not to.”

The noise complaints against Foul Play have come from the Huntington Continental apartments, a two-story complex behind the nightclub. The closest units are about 100 feet from Foul Play’s rear wall.

Vivian Springer, manager of the complex, said Thursday that although there have been fewer complaints from tenants recently, the noise problem remains. “It has quieted down some, but it is still there,” she said. “It was terrible, especially in the summer, because we don’t have air conditioning. The music would start at 9:30 or 10, when everybody’s getting ready to go to bed, and it was that ‘boom, boom, boom’--the bass.” Springer said there also have been three or four late-night incidents over the past 18 months in which trespassing patrons of Foul Play used the complex’s swimming pool.

However, a tenant in one of the apartments closest to the nightclub said Thursday that noise has not been a problem, except for one night last summer.

“Half of us don’t ever hear it,” said the tenant, a 21-year-old woman who refused to give her name. The woman, who said she has never been inside Foul Play, said she refused to sign a petition circulated against the club by another tenant--but that she did sign a petition circulated by Joseph to establish that noise from Foul Play has not been severe.

Beyond the noise issue, the nature of Foul Play’s clientele apparently is perceived as a problem by some neighbors and city officials.

The club’s main attraction over the years has been punk rock and hard rock bands who draw a crowd that tends to make a blunt fashion statement featuring unconventional hairstyles and plenty of black leather. Those betoken the latest incarnation of the traditional rebellious rock ‘n’ roll attitude that can be traced back to the heyday of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Springer, the apartment manager, said Foul Play’s clientele seems to include some “unsavory characters”--a concern she said was heightened when she saw police on several occasions conducting body searches of people behind the club. The silver-haired woman also recalled one time when she was shopping at a seafood store in the same shopping center as Foul Play:

“These guys were going by there with the Mohawks and shaved heads. They may be the nicest people in the world, but they certainly don’t present a good picture,” she said. “It just didn’t seem to be a very nice place to be walking around there after dark. They may be fine, but the outward appearance is a bit too much.”

In a May 2 letter to Sage, Foul Play’s lawyer noted that “while the First Amendment certainly protects even the most avant-garde of the fringes of popular musical interests, we are taking steps to focus on a more mainstream clientele.”

Since renaming the club Foul Play in January, Joseph has tried bookings that branch out from the club’s staple punk and hard-rock fare. But he said that oldies nights, featuring tributes to such ‘50s bands as the Coasters and Drifters, have not caught hold yet.

The uncertainty over Foul Play’s entertainment permit also “has affected the way we’ve been operating, the kind of entertainment we’ve attempted to change to,” Joseph said. “It’s been a topsy-turvy format, where customers don’t know whether to come or not” because of uncertainty over what sort of music will be featured. “We’ve been losing money this year. It’s hard to change a format like ours.”

Noise complaints figured prominently in the 1986 closing of Safari Sam’s, a respected Huntington Beach alternative rock club that went out of business after its entertainment permit was not renewed.