NIGHT LIFE: THE CLUB SCENE : Dynamic Duo : Folk singers Matt Schulte and Bill Coffey are performing Mondays at Charlie’s.

If the city of Ventura could save water the way Matt Schulte and Bill Coffey save electricity, they’d be selling the excess to Santa Barbara so that city could water its lawns.

Schulte and Coffey, local folk singers, don’t use any electricity. When they perform, it’s all organic, all lung power.

They won’t be getting a Christmas card from the Edison Co. again this year.

Schulte and Coffey are playing every Monday at Charlie’s on the beach in Ventura. Since Charlie’s has recently expanded its horizons and doubled its space by knocking out a wall and adding new carpeting, perhaps Charlie’s is no longer appropriate. Charles’ is more like it, certainly not Chuck’s.

In any case, the clientele remains the same--the T-shirt and Bass Ale crowd with a few tourists who haven’t yet discovered the on-ramps. It is still the preeminent local spot for original, local music.

Schulte and Coffey, sort of the local equivalent of the Everly Brothers, have only been performing together for a couple of months, or long enough to learn 16 originals and 14 covers. And, yes, they do a couple of Everly Brothers tunes--”Claudette” and “Bird Dog”--and very well, too.

“The day I met Bill, I was working in a record store,” Schulte said. “I sold him a copy of ‘Let it Be’ by the Replacements, and I told him, ‘If you like this, you’ll really like this,’ and I sold him a copy of my band’s tape.”

“The Crashing Plains was the best band Ventura ever had,” Coffey said. “We learned ‘Bird Dog’ one night at an I-Rails acoustic gig, then we just started doing tunes together. A lot of the songs are Matt’s from the Crashing Plains or new ones. Some are mine; some are written by both of us.”

After the Crashing Plains dissolved a few years ago, Schulte, who came to Ventura via Kansas, continued to write songs, occasionally performing solo before he teamed with Coffey. Eventually, he hopes to make it as a songwriter.

But the pairing with Coffey will last as long as--who knows?

Coffey is the front man of his own band--one of the county’s best--the pop rockers the Mudheads. Coffey and Schulte practice once or twice a week and, lately, have been performing once a week.

Their most important gig thus far was an opening set for the surly Peter Case at the Long Bar in Santa Barbara. They had a real sound system with decibels sufficient to drown out the yapping clientele.

Another gig at the Clock Tower in Ventura ended when the bartender cautioned the duo to “keep it down” because the patrons were busy talking.

Happy Hour, much like being an opening act, is generally a sure-fire continuing education seminar in Humility 101. Let’s just say that this crowd doesn’t always pay the closest attention to the music. At the last Charlie’s Happy Hour gig, one happy guy laughed louder than Schulte and Coffey, who were trying to play. This guy could’ve laughed louder than Pink Floyd. Do Schulte and Coffey need more decibels or fewer (or more polite) fans?

“We didn’t know ‘The Joker’ was going to show up,” Schulte said.

Schulte and Coffey produce great harmonies with both looking skyward like a couple of coyotes howling at the moon. They explore tried-and-true folk messages--big issues and big ideas. Good ones include “Information,” “40 Years,” “Holy War,” “Uncomplicated,” “The Story So Far” and “Never Ending.” Among its covers, the acoustic duo does “Lodi” and “I Shall Be Released.”

Whether Schulte and Coffey will go down with other dynamic duos remains to be seen.

In any case, they’re more fun than the City Council meeting, and the price is right--free.