O.C. POP BEAT / MIKE BOEHM : Topper Rocks in an Exclusive Club

People hardly ever pay to see Greg Topper play.

Record stores don’t stock his albums.

In fact, Topper says that only once in his 25-year professional career has he heard a song he recorded played on the radio.

And yet, the 48-year-old piano pounder can make a solid case for inclusion on the list of Orange County’s most successful rock musicians.

Topper long ago decided that he would be satisfied if his musical path did not bring him the glamorous life of recording contracts and concert tours, of creating his own music and having it heard by a wide, waiting world.

At 23, as a student at Cal State Fullerton, he headed into the clubs--the nightspots and hotel bars where bands make their living serving up favorite oldies and hits of the day for people who are less interested in what’s in a musician’s heart, mind and soul than in finding a conducive backdrop for dancing, drinking and dating.

Topper has done it well enough to stay constantly employed as a musician for the past quarter-century, and to make a good living in the process.

It’s cause for him to mark this, his 25th anniversary on the local club scene, with some low-key celebrating at the Airporter Garden Hotel in Irvine, his steady, four-nights-a-week gig for most of the past 10 years.

A wall of framed photos in his Aliso Viejo home proves that Topper has had occasion to hobnob over the years with musicians who became icons by playing rock ‘n’ roll on a grand scale.

There’s Topper with Roy Orbison. Topper with Tina Turner, with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Garth Brooks, Bonnie Raitt and Bob Seger, among others. One wonders whether he hasn’t daydreamed about being in their place.

“Of course I do. All the time,” he said. “And it might still happen. But it’s not something I’ve been preoccupied with. It hasn’t been a major thing on my agenda.”

From the start, Topper said, “I made myself a commitment that if I never get beyond nightclubs I’ll be OK. I didn’t go into it looking at these clubs as a stepping stone to big stardom. If I had, I would have felt like a failure.”

On the other hand, Topper notes, fame can be fleeting, while a good club gig, as his run at the Airporter attests, can be the next thing to an annuity.

“There are guys who have had fairly major success who would love to trade places with me,” he said, noting the up-like-a-rocket, down-like-a-bomb trajectory of some rock careers. “It’s a tortoise and hare of rock ‘n’ roll kind of concept.”

In 1984, Topper the tortoise had a chance to run with the hares: He says Rick Nelson’s manager offered him a spot in Nelson’s touring band. “The glamour of it was (tempting),” Topper recalled, “but I was making three times as much money (on the local club circuit).”

There’s something to be said for steady money, and a steady routine. For Topper, it means being able to devote himself to his top priority: helping to raise his 5-year-old daughter, Caitlyn (Topper and the girl’s mother are divorced, but he lives within a few blocks of them).

“She’s more important than anything,” he said. “More important than music, touring, fame.” Topper, who has been married and divorced five times, also has a 22-year-old son, Jeff, who played drums in the Popealopes, a UC Davis band that won some notice on the college/independent rock circuit. Jeff is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Topper’s parents divorced when he was 2. The family was well off, and Topper says he spent his childhood attending a succession of boarding schools. He was at a school in Solvang when he encountered his first piano.

“I was in third grade, and I saw a piano in the schoolhouse, and I could tell it was right for me,” Topper said, dabbing one of a succession of Marlboro Lights into a piano-shaped ashtray on his coffee table. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, the organization, the symmetry of the keyboard.”

He taught himself how to play by setting a portable record player on top of a piano and spinning 45s and 78s by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino and Huey (Piano) Smith until he had figured out how to play along.

Topper spent five years in Jamaica, where his mother had opened a hotel, then wound up briefly at Fullerton High School, where he joined a surf-rock band.

After the confining life of a boarding-school upbringing, “I just wanted to get out into the world,” so the underage Topper lied his way into the Marines, where he served as a radio telegrapher, including a brief tour of shipboard duty in Vietnam in 1964 (he said his older brother, Jeff, was killed in the war later that year).

Following his discharge, Topper returned to Fullerton to pursue a degree in journalism. One night in September, 1968, he wandered into an Anaheim club called the Bean Hut and started playing the piano. The owner quickly hired him for $25 a week.

“There was a real rough biker bar across the street,” Topper recalled. “Its owner used to come in and sit there throwing lime wedges at me, because I was taking away his business from across the street.”

Topper credits Joe Tatar, a veteran Orange County nightclub performer who happened to be his fraternity brother, with getting him a job at the Brook, a busier, more upscale place where he wouldn’t have to worry about the competition throwing fruit slices at him.

Topper played nights while going to college by day. He continued performing after he graduated and moved on, first to abortive stabs at business school and law school, then to day jobs in advertising and public relations.

“I always liked (music), but I didn’t think it was a respectable way to make a living. That was the family values of the day,” he recalled. “My dad had a gun to my head to get out of college and go into business.” In 1974, Topper decided he wasn’t made for business. He would be exclusively a musician.

“My dad wouldn’t speak to me for three years,” he said. “Then, when I became relatively successful, he was coming to my shows every few weeks with his buddies. He could see it was my calling. He came around and buried the ax.”

Topper wasn’t reticent about rocking--on or off stage.

One night in 1971, he went to a Little Richard performance in Anaheim, sought out his hero in the dressing room between sets and pleaded for a chance to sing with him during Richard’s second show.

“I told him I idolized him. He let me sing ‘Tutti Frutti’ with him, although he wouldn’t let me play the piano. I think he could feel my honesty and sincerity and real intrinsic love for it. It was the biggest thrill of my career.”

Taking cues from the flamboyant Messrs. Penniman and Lewis, Topper conceived an act built around swagger and flash.

“I used to be real crazy,” he said of his routine during the 1970s and early ‘80s. “I’d get up on top of the piano and play guitar behind my back. I had glasses with windshield wipers on them and capes that lit up.”

The capes weren’t all that lit up.

As part of his act, Topper would sprinkle 151-proof rum on the piano’s lid and keyboard, set it on fire and literally burn his way through a number. He also would sprinkle some on his pants and light it, the better to give a crudely literal twist to his performance of “Great Balls Of Fire.”

Then, one night in 1982, Topper got too much rum on his pants and wound up with third-degree burns on his legs. That marked the end of his pyrotechnic period.

Now his act is more focused on the music, although he still goes in for some Jerry Lee Lewis-style flash by jabbing downward at the keyboard with dramatically raised hands or kicking out notes with his feet.

“He’s got an innate sense of what to play and how to play it,” said Robert Martinez, who has been watching Topper for years both as club-goer and as longtime bartender and night manager at the Airporter.

“He does the ‘50s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll, and he doesn’t just play it by rote. He gets up there, and he performs it. He gets into the show and puts a lot of himself into it.

“If I were to pick one aspect about him other than his music that stands out, it’s his ability to deal with people,” Martinez said. “No matter what they come at him with, he doesn’t lose his temper. . . . People will go up to him and mercilessly demand that he play some song. Occasionally they get belligerent if they’ve had to much to drink. He just manages to smooth it over.”

Brian Curtin, a veteran of the local covers-club rock scene, has been playing bass in Topper’s band for nearly three years (the other band members are drummer Tommy Ellis, whom Topper says he “stole” from Dick Dale 18 years ago, and guitarist Tony Dean).

“I think his greatest attribute is he knows what his audience wants and will steer the band to do that,” Curtin said. “He knows exactly what he wants, which is a good thing for a leader to have. He’ll take tunes and put his own style to them sometimes. On the Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino (songs), he pretty much cops the record. But on others he’ll use his own arranging style, take something mellow and beef it up, for instance.”

Besides what he calls “the five giants” whose songs form the core of his repertoire--Domino, Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley--Topper will range from a Tony Bennett lounge nugget to a contemporary hit to a Bob Seger rocker or a Yardbirds raver.

He once spent an entire evening playing Neil Diamond songs, for the simple reason that a high roller who’d come into the Airporter was putting a $100 tip on his piano each time he played one. “By 11:30 there were 40 C-notes on the piano, and I was playing Neil Diamond songs that he hasn’t even written yet. It was that night that I regretted my longstanding tradition of splitting the tips four ways.”

Occasionally, Topper has taken his act on the road, usually after out-of-town agents or club managers saw him locally. He once opened for Roy Orbison at a private party in Nashville, Tenn. He landed a bit part as a barroom piano player in the Burt Reynolds film, “Hooper” (Topper remembers that one of his lines went, “Get drunk and be somebody”). He has done two monthlong stints in Hawaii and recently played his first-ever stand in Las Vegas.

“I’ll go anywhere if it makes sense and the money’s right,” Topper said. “But the Airporter’s my home base.”

Twenty years ago, a General Mills executive named James Fifield happened upon Topper’s act during a business trip to Newport Beach. A roots-rock lover, Fifield became an instant fan, and, soon enough, a close friend who joins Topper for concerts and bodysurfing outings when he comes to Southern California.

Today, Fifield is president and chief executive officer of EMI Records Group, a music-industry giant whose stable includes Garth Brooks and Bonnie Raitt.

When the subject of their friendship came up, Topper broke from the interview to dial Fifield’s office in New York City. He got right through.

“He just became a friend through the music,” said Fifield--Fife, to his buddy. “When I got in the music business, I’d take him to the Grammys, the country-music awards,” which explains some of the photos adorning Topper’s wall that show him posed with smiling pop stars.

After 25 years of sticking to his home turf, Topper is thinking of trying to get the music industry interested in what he’s doing. He plans to record a studio album with his band and some local guest players, then shop for a record deal (Topper made his only previous studio recordings in the late ‘70s, when he released a single and an album on a custom label. The 45, a cover of “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights,” by Johnny (Guitar) Watson, is the one he once heard playing on the radio). He even has begun to write some original songs with Curtin--something Topper says he never did before.

“Twenty-five years has been building up in me, and the stuff is coming out,” he said. “For the first time, I’m interested in making some serious records. It just never interested me before--I don’t know why. It’s time to get something good out.”

Topper said he can’t expect to exploit his Fifield connection to make his way in rock’s wider world.

“ ‘I’m your friend, give me a record deal’--it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. “I’m smart enough to know that. So I have to fend for myself on the street level with these record companies.”

But Topper, who last year founded the Orange County Musicians Foundation, a charity to help uninsured local musicians with emergency medical expenses, doesn’t sound suddenly star-struck.

He remembers the promise he made to himself 25 years ago, when he vowed never to consider himself a failure if a club musician was all he became.

“I like the consistency and discipline of it, staying in one place,” he summed up. “There’s a certain satisfaction in being here for people all the time.”

There’s also a certain degree of accomplishment in staying in demand for 25 years.

“It’s the consistency,” Topper said. “I don’t deviate and go off on a lot of tangents and get trendy. I survived the disco craze with rock ‘n’ roll. I survived the country-and-Western craze. I never gave in to the fads. Not that there’s anything wrong with those styles. But I kept like a beacon, like a lighthouse, with rock ‘n’ roll. People could always find a way home with me, because rock ‘n’ roll has never gone out of style.”

* Greg Topper plays Wednesdays through Saturdays from 8:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. at the Airporter Garden Hotel, 18700 MacArthur Blvd., Irvine. No cover. (714) 833-2770.