Noise Problem Ends in Muting of Golden Bear

Unable to keep noise from blasting through its ceiling into an upstairs movie theater, Peppers Golden Bear has closed, ending its bid to become a major concert venue for pop, rock and jazz.

The decision to close the $4-million club and restaurant, located on the ground floor of the downtown Pierside Pavilion at 300 Pacific Coast Highway, came after an expensive but fruitless effort to stifle noise so that Peppers could co-exist with a six-screen Mann Theatres complex that is scheduled to open May 24.

“We had many a sound consultant in. We’d done everything a professional could suggest to us,” Ken Moon, Peppers senior vice president of marketing and entertainment, said Tuesday. Even so, Moon said, at 100 decibels, a normal sound level for a loud rock band, “you can dance and sing in the theater” to sound coming from the club below. “Obviously, that won’t fly.”

Unable to stage concerts without interfering with the theaters, but armed with a 30-year lease that included the right to generate up to 110 decibels inside the club, Peppers officials negotiated a settlement with the developers of the Pierside Pavilion.

“We’ve arranged a landlord buyout of our lease,” Moon said, declining to give details of the deal. “It’s favorable to both parties. But all of us hate to see the Bear go. No one feels good about that.”

Moon said that Peppers Golden Bear employed about 70 people, all of whom are being offered the chance to transfer to other Peppers restaurants in Garden Grove, City of Industry and Artesia. Moon said the closing of the Huntington Beach location doesn’t necessarily mean the San Juan Capistrano-based Peppers chain is giving up its hopes to become a major player in the pop concert business.

“We would continue to keep our options open for any kind of entertainment,” Moon said.

California Resorts, a Huntington Beach company that built the Pierside Pavilion with a Japanese partner, Haseko Associates, referred questions regarding the club’s closing to Peppers officials.

In an interview in February, Henry Penso, chief operating officer of California Resorts, said that the developers had spent $600,000 in an attempt to solve the noise problem at Peppers.

“Looking back on it, it was a mistake” to locate a rock concert club beneath a movie theater, Penso said then. According to Penso, Pierside Pavilion had been designed with a 4,000-square-foot nightclub in mind, to be located away from the movie theaters. When Peppers Inc. surfaced with a 13,000-square-foot club and restaurant proposal, Penso said, it could only be fit below the theaters.

Peppers opened last August, laying claim to the heritage of the original Golden Bear, which had been Orange County’s leading pop music club for more than 20 years until it was torn down in 1986 to make way for the downtown redevelopment project that includes the Pierside Pavilion.

The 579-capacity Peppers Golden Bear hosted concerts by such touring acts as Eric Burdon, Koko Taylor and John McLaughlin, as well as disco nights and performances by local rock bands. Peppers officials said the club and restaurant was a $3.5-million venture, with an additional $600,000 spent on an elaborate sound and lighting system.

Club managers suspended new national bookings early this year, saying they didn’t want to go ahead with a full schedule of shows until the sound problem was solved. Peppers’ last major show was a March 7 performance by the Irish blues-rocker, Rory Gallagher.

A series of upcoming Thursday night rock concerts that had been booked by outside promoters at Peppers has been cancelled. Promoter Jay Sheridan said Tuesday that he will attempt to move the shows to other locations.

Peppers’ closing ends the latest challenge to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. Since the closing of the original Golden Bear five years ago, the 380-capacity Coach House has been the only Orange County club venue to have brought a regular flow of wide-ranging national pop music talent to Orange County.

Like Peppers Golden Bear, such previous challengers as Michael’s Supper Club in Dana Point, Club Postnuclear in Laguna Beach and Hamptons in Santa Ana closed or were forced to scale back their operations within a matter of months.

“Yes, it makes me happy,” Gary Folgner, the owner of the Coach House, said of Peppers’ closing. “I was definitely concerned. They were siphoning off business. It takes part of your market and makes ticket prices go higher” because of competitive bidding for high-profile acts. However, Folgner said, Peppers “hadn’t been competitive for (the past) six or seven months.”

Folgner said that before the Pierside Pavilion was built, Huntington Beach redevelopment officials had asked him to consider operating a club there. “I told them that building wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever” for a club, because concert noise would interfere with other businesses under the same roof, Folgner said. “You can’t be (near) other people in this business, because we make noise and there’s no way to stop it.”