A Healthy Interest in Musicians : Benefit: Orange County foundation’s concert will raise money to funnel grants to those who need cash in a medical crisis.

Playing music for a living may offer certain social perks and psychic payoffs, but the job seldom carries health benefits.

So when a musician friend of his was badly hurt in a motorcycle crash in the fall of 1990 and ran up uninsured medical bills, veteran Orange County club-band leader Greg Topper did what musicians tend to do in such circumstances: He got together a bunch of bands and staged a benefit.

A few months later, a piano player fell off a roof. Another uninsured medical crisis, another occasion for a benefit concert. Topper, who advertises his oldies ensemble as “Orange County’s longest-running and best-known rock ‘n’ roll band,” was again in a position to help.

The concerts were big successes, each raising $7,000. But after organizing those two shows, Topper began to think there had to be a more consistent way to answer musicians’ health emergencies.

“Musicians are notorious for not having any pensions or major medical or savings,” Topper said. “They’re independent contractors who don’t get benefits. It made me think we need something ongoing, so every time a musician is in real trouble, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

For the past eight months, Topper has worked to launch a new charity, the Orange County Musicians Foundation. Its primary purpose is to raise money on a continuing basis and to funnel grants to musicians who find themselves strapped for cash in a medical crisis.

On Feb. 16, the Musicians Foundation will sponsor an All-Star Benefit at the Righteous Brothers Hop in Fountain Valley. Topper says the event, to be headlined by Dick Dale and the Deltones, is intended to be held annually and has two goals: to draw attention to the new organization and the issues it will address, and to raise $10,000 in “seed money” to help it get started in its work.

Topper has some big plans for the foundation. Starting this fall, he hopes to sponsor a sort of “mini Grammys” for Orange County--an annual music awards program to honor the county’s best performers in a variety of categories. The event also would serve as a major fund-raiser for the foundation. Longer-range ideas include building a home for destitute musicians and offering group catastrophic health insurance at a lower rate than musicians could find on their own.

But the charity’s first mission is to address emergency financial needs so that musicians won’t have to go through what guitarist Will Brady did when he cut his hand a while back.

Brady, a fixture on the local blues and rock scene since the 1960s, decided he couldn’t afford to have a doctor inspect the wound.

“After pondering what to do for a day or two, I kind of glued it shut with adhesive tape,” Brady recalls. “I was afraid it might hamper my guitar playing, but it healed well. I can still feel it a bit. Maybe medical treatment would have been better.”

Walter Trout, a veteran Huntington Beach blues-rocker, says that for most of his medical care over the years, he has relied on public hospital emergency rooms and local free clinics--both dwindling, overloaded resources in today’s economy.

“I have health insurance now, because I’ve just been able to afford it in the last few months,” said Trout, whose band has developed a solid following in Europe. “But there are so many musicians around here, and there are some very good ones who are struggling, and the health system is so rough.”

Trout thinks the Musicians Foundation is “a great idea. If (Topper) can make it work, he’d be performing a pretty needed function until the government gets around to creating some sort of national health insurance.”

Topper began by recruiting friends and contacts in local business, the media and the music industry to serve on a committee of advisers. With Topper serving as the president (he says all foundation officers and advisers now and in the future will be unpaid volunteers), they are charting policies and procedures.

“It’s a fledgling deal. We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us and we’re just starting to crawl,” Topper said. Eligibility requirements have been an important topic in the group’s monthly meetings. Topper said the emergency grants will be intended for people who earn their “primary living” as musicians and have lived in Orange County for at least six months.

Part-timers--including players whose ambition may be a music career, but who support themselves mainly through non-musical day jobs--”would be considered, but they would be a very low priority,” Topper said.

He added that the Musicians Foundation won’t just count on benefit concerts and awards dinners to raise money. He plans to engage in “major fund-raising,” soliciting corporations and philanthropists, just as most established charities do. He said he will try to persuade prospective donors that musicians deserve support “because they’ve given us so much good music over the years, and they’re very needy.”

A self-taught piano player who lives in Laguna Niguel, Topper isn’t one of the needy ones. His band, which currently plays four nights a week at the Airporter Inn in Irvine, has been working steadily since the 1970s and is reputed to be the highest-paid club band in Orange County. Topper said he buys his own health insurance.

Topper grew up in Orange County but spent his high school years in Jamaica, where his mother owned a hotel. He found his main musical inspiration in the records of rock ‘n’ roll piano greats of the ‘50s: Little Richard, Fats Domino, Huey (Piano) Smith and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as guitar-toters Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochrane. Topper said his family didn’t own a piano so “I used to find pianos in school music rooms or hotel ballrooms” to practice his heroes’ songs.

After high school, he returned to Orange County and then enlisted in the Marines, spending part of his three-year hitch as a radio operator during the Vietnam War. Then, he attended Cal State Fullerton, graduating in 1969 with a degree in journalism. Topper said he worked for a few years after graduation as a fund-raiser for political and educational causes while continuing to play in bands as a sideline. By 1975, though, he was performing full time.

He says his career highlight came in 1971, after he met Little Richard between sets at the Grand Hotel in Anaheim. During the second set, the star called his fan out of the audience to join him on the piano bench and sing “Tutti Frutti.” Topper remembers that he hesitated at first, unsure whether he could manage it in the key Little Richard had in mind.

“He said, ‘Just shut up; I’ll play piano, and you sing.’ I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Topper, who has a 21-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, says he has been content leading bands that cover familiar, danceable rock songs, rather than taking off and exploring material of their own.

“I’ve been an interpreter, and I enjoy doing it. I’ve never really had the time” to do original music, he said. “I’m not a songwriter. But I’m going to start doing some songwriting, because I’m ready to now.”

That’s if his new avocation as spearhead of a musicians’ charity allows him the time. Topper says he has been devoting about 20 hours a week to the Orange County Musicians Foundation.

“I’ve been lucky. I’ve always been working, and I haven’t had any problems,” Topper said. “This is just something I want to do and leave behind.”

* The Orange County Musicians Foundation’s All-Star Benefit concert, featuring Dick Dale and the Deltones, Derek & the Diamonds, Dick Dodd, Bob Gully, the Surftones, Billy Swan and others, will take place Feb. 16, from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Righteous Brothers Hop, 18774 Brookhurst St., Fountain Valley. Tickets: $20, available at the Hop or, Wednesday through Saturday nights, at the main bar at the Airporter Inn, 18700 MacArthur Blvd., Irvine. Information: (714) 963-2366.

The Orange County Musicians Foundation can be contacted at 3857 Birch St., Suite 204, Newport Beach, Calif., 92660. Information: (714) 962-6263.