A Honky-Tonk Fan Grows Into the Band : Country music: Chris Wall left Orange County in 1980 as a bartender. Now he’s coming back as a singer and songwriter.

Chris Wall lived for 30 years in Orange County, and he got to do lots of things on the local scene.

Wall got to grow up and go to school in Newport Beach. He got to play football at Orange Coast College and Whittier College, where he earned a master’s degree in history. He got to teach and serve as an assistant football coach at his alma mater, Corona del Mar High School. And he got to tend bar at various drinking establishments.

But Wall never got to do what he does nowadays, with increasing national recognition: write witty, old-fashioned honky-tonk songs and play them all over the country, with frequent appearances as opening act for his mentor, Jerry Jeff Walker (including a show Wednesday night at the Coach House).

There is a simple reason why Wall never did any of that while he was living in Orange County: he neither sang nor played the guitar. In fact, after he left the county in 1980 to take jobs as a ranch hand and bartender in Montana, Wall, who is now 40, spent an additional five years as a music consumer rather than a music maker.

The turning point, Wall said in a recent phone interview, came when he became friendly with a bunch of country musicians who were using the ranch where he worked as their home base. Wall would hang out while the band, called Lakota, wrote, rehearsed and recorded its material.

“They were great guys, but a sorry . . . group of pickers,” Wall recalled in an amiable speaking baritone that is a harbinger of his deep, lived-in singing voice. “I thought if they could do it, I could do it too.”

That was about five years ago, Wall said. He bought himself a book of guitar chords and started learning, and soon he was writing songs.

It wasn’t as if Wall had absolutely no previous penchant or preparation for country music.

“My dad was a big country fanatic,” Wall said. As a youngster, Wall fed on a steady diet of country records and concerts, and by his teens he was a big fan of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

It was, he said, an extremely private interest, as teen-age music enthusiasms go. In the 1960s, with rock ruling, it wasn’t exactly hip to be a country fan. “I got so much flak from everybody about liking country music that I kept it to myself,” Wall said.

Later, when he got a job tending bar in San Juan Capistrano, Wall would soak up whatever was playing at the Swallows Inn. In 1980, after his father’s death, Wall moved to Montana, where he had spent summers as a youth working on an uncle’s ranch.

In Montana, Wall said, he got up the courage to play some of his songs for the local bands who were playing at nightclubs where he tended bar. In 1986, he and a friend attended the Northern Rockies Folk Festival in Idaho--just as fans.

“Somehow we ended up with Guy Clark and Rosalie Sorrells and a bunch of Idaho pickers at a party afterwards,” Wall recalled. Along with Sorrells, a veteran folk singer, and Clark, a highly regarded country songwriter whose credits include two Jerry Jeff Walker favorites, “L.A. Freeway” and “Desperados Waiting for the Train,” Wall found himself swapping songs in a kitchen.

“I was scared to play for Guy Clark. But he liked it, and he asked me to send him a tape.”

Wall couldn’t believe his luck. In fact, he had such a hard time believing it that he decided that it couldn’t be true. “I convinced myself that he’d just had a couple of cocktails and wasn’t really interested.”

Wall went back to tending bar, occasionally stepping out from behind the bar to sing with the bands at the Jackson Hole, Wyo., club where he’d gotten a job.

One night in 1987, Walker happened to be in the club when Wall did his singing bartender routine. “That was probably the second or third time I’d been on a stage in my life. I was playing ‘Trashy Women’ (a humorous composition that Walker would later record), and he liked it,” Wall said. Walker knew Wall’s name when he heard it: it turned out that Guy Clark had touted Wall as a good songwriting prospect.

“We went back to his hotel and stayed up all night. We had a good time and kind of hit it off,” Wall recalled.

Soon after that, Wall hooked up with a regional group called the Famous Motel Cowboys. He worked his way into the band after stepping out from behind the bar to fill in one night when the band’s regular singer came up hoarse. Wall got his first taste of touring with the group, including a swing through Orange County. In September, 1988, Walker invited him to his home base of Austin, Tex.

“I was just going to write songs and hang out for a while,” Wall said. “I opened a couple of shows for him, and his wife (who is also Walker’s business manager) got interested in managing me. When Susan handed me $300 for opening my first Jerry Jeff show, that’s when I knew I wasn’t a singing bartender anymore.”

On Walker’s 1989 album, “Live at Gruene Hall,” three of the 10 songs were Wall’s, including “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight,” a song both clever and heartfelt as it depicts a man throwing sad honky-tonk music on the record player to find commiseration during a deep bout with the blues.

Last year, Wall released his first album, “Honky Tonk Heart,” on Walker’s label, Tried & True Music. The songs focus on familiar country icons--singers, gun-toting rednecks, rodeo riders and dejected lovers--but Wall’s nice touch with visual details and his inclination to inject an offbeat point of view heralds him as a songwriter with a personality of his own.

He doubts any of that will earn him much credit with the country-music establishment in Nashville.

“They haven’t come knockin’ on my door, and I haven’t gone after them trying to get them to notice me,” he said. “I’m not 29 and beautiful and sing high, pretty love songs. I’m a honky-tonker, and I don’t think they’d be interested in me. Some of my songs are too left-field. I’d like to have more people hear the music, but I don’t think I’m a Nashville kind of guy. We’ll just keep doing it from Austin (where he has lived ever since that first invitation from Walker 2 1/2 years ago). We’re having good luck with it.”

Wall said he played about 200 dates last year, including a European tour with his own band, and about 40 shows opening for Walker. He figures some of his old Orange County friends will be out to see the Coach House show, his second local performance since hooking up with Walker.

“It’s fun to see the look on their faces,” he said. “Even the ones who knew I loved country music didn’t think I’d get so carried away with it that I’d do this.”