Serving Up a Strange Brew : Talent Night at Costa Mesa Coffeehouse Attracts Caffeine Achievers

A snorting espresso machine pumped out gallons of black brew for the art-school crowd, which filled a small room adorned with well-thumbed paperbacks, newspapers and dolphin-related paintings. Weary of television, video games and the other stultifying diversions of modern life, they had come to sample the kind of creative rebellion brewing in the area’s thriving coffeehouse scene.

Attention focused on a quartet of bespectacled college students occupying the room’s small corner stage, preparing to inaugurate an evening of acoustic music and spoken word. In harmonies recalling the folk combos of an earlier time, they sang:

Oh say can you see

By the dawn’s early light

What so proudly we hailed

At the twilight’s last gleaming

Not perhaps the first number Bob Dylan or Joan Baez might have done back when they played the smoky cafes of Greenwich Village, but “The Star-Spangled Banner” did lend a peculiarly Orange County flavor to Monday night’s proceedings at the Blue Marble Coffeehouse.

For this was talent night at the caffeine den, and the singers--a barbershop quartet called the Four Special Guests that won October’s contest--were on hand to lend an air of continuity to the monthly event called Jammin’ Java Jive.

For about three hours starting at 7:45 p.m., a procession of performers took the stage to strum, warble or declaim, in hopes of winning a pound of coffee, a $50 grand prize--or something more elusive.

“I have a message, and people need to hear it,” said Dan Richardson, 37, a Huntington Beach waiter who came to sing about his struggles with drugs, alcohol and uncaring relatives. “My music is about finding a balance in living, a balance between the emotional, the spiritual and the physical,” he said.

“One of the gifts of sobriety,” he said, “is that all these things start coming up out of you” and into songs like “The Child Within,” which goes, in part: “How could I ever have learned to be a father / When you never learned to be my dad?”

Dressed head-to-toe in purple and sporting a matching guitar, Kelly Conway, 27, said her music also had a mission.

The founder of a firm that promotes lesbian-themed art events, Conway said “there’s a real hunger for what I do,” which is to sing folk songs about such issues as abortion rights, equal pay and “the time of Sappho, when society was matriarchal.” The audience apparently agreed--it voted her third place in the contest.

Such personal topics dominated the evening’s repertoire, but some artists found their muse in the very soil of Orange County.

For Robert Conce, a recent graduate of Georgetown University’s law school who came to Orange County six months ago, it was the area’s “unbridled development” that drove him to his six-string.

“Every day when I drive to work, I see the land movers turning every hill into exactly the same thing, more pink stucco houses,” said the Newport Beach tax attorney, who lists the Sex Pistols and the Who among his musical inspirations. “It’s so mundane, it’s so banal, it’s so sad,” he said.

Thus, Conce’s Orange County anthem, “Residential Area,” went: “I think I’ll go for model No. 8 / Who cares if they all look the same. . . . We’ll drive in my car/We live in a jar/We all look the same/Won’t feel any shame/I want you in a Residential Area.”

“It’s great that I can perform this kind of thing here,” Conce, 30, said. “After all, they don’t have open mike nights at the Board of Supervisors.”

Audience members said they, too, appreciated the atmosphere.

“It reminds me of the ‘60s,” said Shirley Bent, a Dana Point grocery clerk who said she used to play tambourine in South Bay cafes during folk-rock’s heyday.

Longtime Costa Mesa resident Joseph Kitts, 47, was even more effusive about the coffeehouse milieu.

“As a sensitive, artistic individual, it’s the first time I’ve felt good about my town in 30 years,” said Kitts, a grizzled former airman who described himself as a homeless alcoholic. “It gives the creative young people a chance.”

Nevertheless, the program did inspire its share of complaints, mainly about the method of awarding prizes, which seemed geared to favor the contestant who brought the largest number of customers to the coffeehouse. In this event, whoever receives the most applause, as measured by cafe employees, receives the prizes.

“The people who win are the people who bring their own cheering sections,” grumbled John Askew, a Placentia fumigator who sings comical songs in a country style. “I intentionally don’t bring people here, because I want genuine reactions from the audience,” he insisted.

Nonetheless, Askew, 42, won second prize--which also gave him cause for dissatisfaction: “It’s a pound of coffee. I was trying to quit,” he said.

Feeling a bit more gracious was Tom McLain, a previous Blue Marble prizewinner who served as the evening’s master of ceremonies, and who is a manufacturing engineer by trade.

“During the day, I do the regular job, you know, I’m Joe Schmuck,” McLain said. “Then at night, I get to do this. All of a sudden, I’m in front of a roomful of people, looking at me, listening to me, wanting to know what’s on my mind. It’s like Andy Warhol said, my 15 minutes of fame.”

“But now,” he said late in the evening, as he took apart the sound system in an empty cafe, “it’s all over. It’s back to the old ho-hum, the old lah-de-dah.”

“Jammin’ Java Jive” talent night is held the fourth Monday of every month at the Blue Marble Coffeehouse, 1907 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 646-5776.