Tracing Missing Links in County’s Rock Past : After Dick Dale, his Chantays and the Righteous Brothers, there is a gap in Orange County rock history. A Fullerton man is trying to fill it.

It doesn’t take a great expense of ink to tell the history of Orange County’s impact on rock music in the 1960s.

The decade started off promisingly enough, with Orange County surf rockers such as Dick Dale and the Chantays making a national mark with guitar-driven, high-drama instrumentals that defined the surf sound. Then came the Righteous Brothers, who got together in 1962 and soon showed the world that white suburbanites could have soul.

After that, virtual silence. While all sorts of fresh rock sounds exploded across the globe, touched off by the British Invasion of 1964-65, no more was heard from these precincts. The proverbial Orange Curtain had descended.

It’s a history that sits so poorly with Tracy Sands that he has decided to do some archeological digging. Sands, who runs a tiny record company from his cluttered garage in Fullerton, thinks he can add a small footnote to rock’s history, one that will prove Orange County did not hibernate through the post-Beatles ‘60s.

At 40, Sands still wears his hair in a modified Beatle cut, plays keyboards a couple of nights a week in a pickup rock band and earns his living fixing broken amplifiers for local musicians.

Amid the mountain of boxes, tubes and electronic innards that fill his garage, Sands is also trying to reassemble the lost past of Orange County rock. Dubbing the project “Behind the Orange Curtain,” he aims to publish a book and release a record album that will tell the story of the Orange County rock scene from 1964 to 1970.

There is plenty of music to uncover, Sands insists, and many tales to tell about the youthful bands that created it. Sure, the garage rockers and psychedelic teens of Orange County never made it into rock’s annals. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t trying. And Sands is certain that some of the music they left behind is well worth bringing to light.

Sands was an Anaheim teen-ager when he saw the Beatles on television. Like a lot of his local peers, it made him rush right out and start a band.

“There was a guitar player on every corner,” he recalled. “Behind me, next door to me--everyone wanted to be a Beatle. And the people who didn’t want to be a Beatle wanted to be a Stone. I got in a band right away. But with all the flurry of activity we had here, not one band became famous.”

The reasons for that, Sands said, were bad luck and Orange County’s image as a bastion of ultraconservatism. It was not a fashionable address for anybody trying to establish credentials within the counterculture.

“Orange County bands had a stigma attached to them,” recalled Bob Ellis, who was the drummer for the Fabs, a strong Fullerton garage band that Sands plans to include in his “Orange Curtain” project. “When we played in L.A., we would say we were from L.A., and everything went just fine. Once they learned we were from Orange County, it was, ‘John Birchers. White Protestants. You’re not a rock ‘n’ roll type of guy.’ ”

Brian Carman, who played guitar with the Chantays, thinks it wasn’t a matter of sociopolitical prejudice that accounted for Orange County bands’ failure to thrive after the early ‘60s surf rock era, but simply the difficulty that musicians based in any suburban area encounter in forging connections in big-city music centers.

Despite those obstacles, rockers such as Sands and Ellis persisted.

The Fabs, who played garage rock dominated by a rinky Farfisa organ sound, put out one single on a small Texas label before evolving into the Stack, a Cream-style heavy-rock band that Ellis says received a good deal of attention from record companies in the late 1960s. The Stack made an album for Charisma Records in 1968, but only a few promotional copies came out. The band toured the West Coast with the then-unknown Alice Cooper, and it also appeared on bills with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Three Dog Night. But when Stack’s album was stillborn, the group fell apart.

Sands played in bands with names such as the Lords, the Invasions and Jubal’s Children, getting the occasional look from a big label but no substantial offers.

After moving to Ohio for a few years in the early ‘70s, he returned to Orange County and got the notion of starting his own record company. The result was Torchlite Records, which recorded local talent on a modest scale, selling several hundred copies of each release, which, says Sands, was enough to break even and keep the company going.

In 1986, Sands took his first stab at an Orange County ‘60s revival release, getting approval from his old friend, Ellis, to put out a single featuring two songs by the Fabs that were originally released in 1966 (the songs, “Dinah Wants Religion” and “That’s the Bag I’m In,” both stand up well as examples of the sort of rough-and-ready garage rock popularized by more successful Southern California groups such as the Seeds, the Leaves and the Standells). While the 45 sold only about 200 copies, Sands decided to become more involved in what he sees as a small but solid market for obscure ‘60s collector’s items.

More recently, Sands formed a partnership with Swak Records (Sealed With A Kiss), a British label devoted to ‘60s reissues. With help from Swak, Sands said, his Orange County compilation should receive wider distribution than he could have managed on his own.

Now all Sands has to do is dig up those lost Orange County rock artifacts, and hope they will gain currency among collectors. He has been trying to get in touch with as many ‘60s Orange County rockers as he can find, in hopes that they’ll have old tapes worth dusting off and presenting on his “Behind the Orange Curtain” collection (he plans a limited-edition run of 1,000 albums).

Sands also wants to sit down and interview as many band members as he can find for his book, with the idea of writing a separate chapter on each band.

So far, Sands said, there have been some disappointments.

“I know a lot of the names of the bands; I knew the people but most of them have disappeared,” he said. “Some of them I contacted flat out told me they would be embarrassed by it. They have a position now in the business community, and they don’t want it known” that they once played in a ‘60s rock band.

But Sands has also found some ‘60s rockers who are eager to have their old tapes heard. One of his discoveries is Aardvark, a British Invasion-influenced band from Buena Park whose only remaining relic is a homemade tape of a song called “The Good Things.”

“A friend of ours had just gotten a tape recorder and he wanted to try it out,” recalled Dale Miller, who played guitar in Aardvark. “It was recorded in an apartment house on a two-track recorder. It was very rushed, because you didn’t want to make a lot of noise and disturb the neighbors.”

Still, Miller is pleased at the idea of having Aardvark resurrected through Sands’ “Orange Curtain” project.

“I’m hoping the theme throughout the album will be, ‘Hey, there was some good material here. There was something worthwhile.’ ”

Brian Carman, the former Chantay, is giving Sands access to tapes he made later in the ‘60s, after surf music had run its commercial course and he turned to vocal music influenced by the Byrds, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

After the Beatles arrived, Carman recalled, the Chantays were pegged strictly as an outdated instrumental surf band. So they adopted different names--the Ill Winds and the Leaping Fearns--in hopes of getting a shot at duplicating their earlier success while moving with the fast-changing musical times.

Sands wants to hear from other Orange County rockers who have other stories, and other songs, to share. He can be contacted at P.O. Box 2425-119, Anaheim, Calif. 92814-2425.

“There are a lot of people who made tapes in the ‘60s and these are just sitting in the closet gathering dust,” Sands said. “If they want to come forward, if they want to be part of the book, if they want to get exposure for something that they thought should have been a hit, I’ll listen to it.”

Three bands who record for Orange County-based Dr. Dream Records--the Swamp Zombies, Food for Feet (which includes John Avila and Johnny (Vatos) Hernandez from Oingo Boingo) and Eggplant--will play free shows Nov. 17 at Tower Records, 306 N. Beach Blvd. in Anaheim. Another Dr. Dream act, Andy Prieboy, will be on hand to chat and sign autographs starting at about 1 p.m., but will not perform. The music starts at 2:30.

The Mighty Flyers, a longtime presence on the local blues scene, have signed with Black Top Records, a New Orleans-based blues and R&B; label. Black Top has scheduled a Jan. 15 release for the Flyers’ album, “Blues in the Dark.”

Tuxedo Cowboy, a folk-country-classical trio from Costa Mesa, will record its debut album next month for a new San Clemente-based record label, Audioquest.

The album, to be recorded live in a Santa Barbara church chosen for its acoustics, will probably be out next spring, said Joe Harley, Audioquest’s vice president.

Audioquest’s main line of business is selling state-of-the-art cable for audiophile sound systems. But the company has begun to branch into producing and marketing music as well.

The first release under the Audiophile name will be “Usin’ Man Blues,” a live solo acoustic album that Huntington Beach blues singer Robert Lucas recorded last summer in the same church that Tuxedo Cowboy will use. That album is due in December. Harley said that Lucas and his electric band, Luke & the Locomotives, are scheduled to record an album next month in Hollywood.

A classical group, Trio Galanterie, and jazz saxophonist Chico Freeman also are scheduled to record for Audioquest, Harley said. The Audioquest roster further includes a flamenco-oriented duo, Strunz and Farah.

Harley said the label will sell its releases through audiophile electronics stores and by mail but is trying to develop a distribution network to move into regular record shops as well.