Fair to Middling : Expo Books Routine Acts; Other Counties Land Hits

“How Sweet It Is” is the bee-oriented theme of this year’s Orange County Fair, but the entertainment lineup for the 12-day event might be starting to seem just a bit sour to some fair-goers.

The name entertainers appearing on the Fairground’s Arlington Theater stage this year include Donny Osmond, Elvin Bishop, Michael McDonald, Air Supply, the Little River Band, Jan and Dean and--a drum roll please--Tiny Tim.

A number of these acts follow the Ferris wheels across the country, touring every year from fair to fair on what some musicians disparagingly refer to as the “Corndogs Across America” circuit (which also includes the Los Angeles County Fair and San Bernardino’s National Orange Show). This year’s O.C. lineup certainly is consonant with past fairs here. “We have the feeling,” said Fair spokeswoman Jill Lloyd, “that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

For some other fairs in the area, though, business as usual isn’t good enough anymore.

While most of the O.C. Fair’s entertainers are middle-of-the-road club-level acts, if that (Coach House talent buyer Ken Phebus said he would consider only two of the fair’s 12 acts to be bankable), other fairs are now booking theater headliners, musicians who have played a part in this country’s cultural growth and who are helping to shape its future.

Bearing in mind that the O.C. Fair this year also has the former drummer of the Monkees and a Lionel Richie-less Commodores, consider that south of the O.C. line, the Del Mar Fair offered Linda Ronstadt, the Neville Brothers (with recent Grammy winner Aaron Neville), Della Reese, Los Lobos, Take 6, the Texas Tornados, Tony! Toni! Tone! and Tito Puente, among varied others.

The California Mid-State Fair at Paso Robles has Michael McDonald in common with the O.C. Fair, but it also has M.C. Hammer, Diana Ross, Robert Palmer, George Strait and other top names.

If Orange County is the slow kid on the block here, several reasons exist for it, including the difficulty of buying talent in what is regarded as the nation’s most competitive concert market, and the relatively small size of the fair’s Arlington Theater.

There’s also the fact that the O.C. Fair, according to Lloyd, would rather not rely on name entertainers to attract fair-goers.

“Our goal here,” Lloyd said, “is primarily to provide a wide variety of entertainment all over the fairgrounds.” About $200,000--nearly half the fair’s total entertainment budget--is set aside for the fair’s other attractions: races, strolling oompah bands, clowns and such.

But the major reason O.C. is stuck with such unadventurous fare, evidently, is that we like it that way. According to Lloyd, “Jan and Dean do very well for us here. What we have is still headline entertainment, but it’s more nostalgic here. Our largest market is age 34 to 60. We have found in our surveys that our fair audiences enjoy the sounds of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Orange County is the conservative, more family-oriented county. The fair is geared to a lot of our patrons to be a release from the hustle and bustle.”

That perception is borne out by demographics, Lloyd said.

“Our surveys tell us the kinds of things people want to see here, and that’s what we use as our formula, not (what) Del Mar is doing, or Paso Robles or Lancaster, because we’re a different area,” she said. “What’s good for one fair is not necessarily good for another.”

Del Mar Fair talent buyer Mel Simas, however, feels that fairs need actively to court a new, younger audience.

“An extra effort is what it takes,” Simas said last week. “The status quo would be the easiest thing to book, but we have to look for tomorrow. I’m 48 years old, but you’ve got to think about the young people, because they’re the future of the fairs. If we don’t satisfy those people today, they won’t come back tomorrow. You can’t forget the older people--I had Al Hirt and Della Reese--but I also had the Neville Brothers.”

Simas works with a talent budget of roughly $500,000, more than twice the O.C. Fair’s $225,000 allocation for its Arlington stage acts. But the Del Mar Fair runs 20 days to the O.C.’s 12, making the per-day budget not much different.

With a 15,000-seat grandstand, though, Simas was able to contract with his acts for single performances. The Arlington Theater seats only 5,000, with standing room for an additional 1,000, so the O.C. Fair contracts each act to appear twice, to accommodate a maximum audience of 12,000. (Last year, O.C. attendance on some days topped 70,000, which left a lot of people doing something else at the fair.)

However, Pacific Amphitheatre General Manager Susan Rosenbluth has offered to make the 18,765-seat facility available to the fair for its concerts. In fact, O.C. Fair General Manager Norbert J. Bartosik, who is also the in-house talent buyer, said that was part of the state’s original intent when the Pacific was built eight years ago. When the dust from this year’s fair settles, Bartosik said, he intends to meet with Rosenbluth to study the feasibility of putting fair acts into the Pacific.

Still, Bartosik doesn’t see the fair’s focus shifting much.

“We have to look at our demographics,” he said. “And we’re getting that mid-range group. I hate to use the term, but it’s the yuppie group that our market surveys tell us come to the fair.”

A polar contrast to Orange County’s staid approach to a fair is the Bumbershoot Festival, Seattle’s yearly celebration of itself. Held each Labor Day weekend at the Seattle Center, Bumbershoot offers the usual carny rides and crafts exhibits (though they tend to be more arts-oriented than ours), but it also presents a dizzying panoply of performers of all musical stripes.

It’s not the least bit unusual at Bumbershoot to find the Seattle Symphony performing in one concert hall, with X and Nina Hagen playing in the hall next to it. A sampling of past performers also includes Miles Davis, Randy Newman, Japan’s Grand Kabuki Theater, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Spinal Tap, B.B. King, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Israeli singing sensation Ofra Haza, Richard Thompson, Nigerian superstar King Sunny Ade, John Hiatt, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Stan Freberg, Bonnie Raitt and an Indonesian Gamelon orchestra.

“Audiences are absolutely a lot smarter than people give them credit for,” says Norm Langill, general manager of One Reel Productions, which produces the Bumbershoot fest for the city. “You have to learn to say no to the agents who keep trying to feed you predictable, middle-of-the-road groups, and keep reaching out to get things that are challenging.

“What we’re looking for in an artist is: Are they the originators of the style? For instance, if it’s Miles Davis versus someone who imitates Miles Davis but is more popular, we’ll get Miles Davis. We also do a lot of world music, and we want to make sure we get the ones who are actually moving forces in their music.” Toward that end, Bumbershoot has a staff ethnomusicologist.

Is this an elitist approach that’s lost on the general public? Hardly. Now in its 21st year, Bumbershoot annually attracts some 250,000 patrons over its four days, an average of 62,500 a day. The Orange County Fair last year pulled in 560,189 over 12 days, or 46,685 a day.

Bumbershoot admission is $6 daily, contrasted with $5 in O.C.

“Our biggest satisfaction each year,” Langill said, “is people telling us how excited they were by the new things they heard. We did a show last year with David Lindley and Ry Cooder that epitomized what it is all about (the pair filled an arena with an acoustic set ranging from American blues to Turkish saz tunes). Who would think you could get 18,000 people anywhere in to see those two performers? But they did, and they loved it.”