Country Gentleman : Tony Longval is changing his Reseda club’s music as well as creating a constructive role for it in the community.

Tony Longval has been backstage since he was 14. He’s been hanging out, hauling sound and lighting equipment, checking tickets and passes in venues big and small, and for artists unknown and as massive as the Rolling Stones.

By the time he left those Atlanta clubs and arenas in 1990 for the West Coast, Longval had begun dreaming of opening his own club, maybe a little jazz bar, or a refurbished warehouse for rock ‘n’ roll.

“I just wanted a little 300-seater bar,” said Longval, now 29. It seemed like a reasonable step, a way to pay the rent for him and his daughter, without needing to work construction jobs on the side. Most of his youth had been spent as a roadie, after all. “That was my college, my high school.”

Now Longval is running Reseda’s embattled, controversial and once-glorious Country Club, the 1,000-seat venue that in the late 1980s fell on hard times, alienated the local community, and even lost its crucial liquor license. He heads a corporation that bought the hall in 1991 with the plan of returning it to its earlier status, when such popular acts as Chuck Berry, Waylon Jennings, Elvis Costello and X helped fill a crowded entertainment roster.

Since then, the club has worked to present live music again regularly, including a recent performance by the neo-rockabilly act Reverend Horton Heat, sponsored by Goldenvoice Productions, and a series of blues shows organized by Randy Chortkoff. And the club has regained its license to sell liquor.

Now the club has announced plans to have live country music three nights a week, beginning a full schedule in May with performances by the local acts Larry Dean and the Shooters, Geary Hanley and others. Which is fitting, since the late original owner Chuck Landis actually opened the club as a country venue in 1980 with a performance by Merle Haggard.

In recent months, Longval has created about 3,000 square feet of dance floors, installed two pool tables and video poker machines, and countrified the decor with wagon wheels, old chandeliers, bearskins, a moose head and steer horns. DJs spin hit country records between live bands, and the club offers free dance lessons (for line dances, waltzes, etc.) on concert nights.

“I wanted to revitalize or save something,” Longval remarked. “This was about to be one of the largest Blockbuster video stores in the Valley, from what I heard. I fought and scraped for it. Everybody told me I was out of my mind, there was no way in the world I was going to pull this off.”

At the grand opening March 24, City Councilwoman Laura Chick arrived for the ribbon-cutting in a covered wagon, demonstrating a renewed faith by the community leadership in an establishment that had long ago become a problem.

Local residents had complained about and videotaped the unwelcome behavior of certain members of the Country Club’s pop music clientele. “People were making love in their front yards,” Longval said. “People were urinating in their gardens. It was not a very pretty scene. The out-of-line crowd just wasn’t handled. No respect was shown to the community whatsoever. If you bring 1,000 people into a community, you’ve got to be part of it.”

His predecessors, with the exception of Landis, had tended to isolate themselves from the local business leaders. After Longval took control of the Country Club in July, 1991, “It took a good five months to get to know the folks, to get them to know me,” he said. “From then on, we had full support. We just handle the gigs and try to do what’s right, that’s all. You can have any kind of show here that you want, as long as you handle it right, and do what’s right.”

He’s gone on to become one of the 18 regular board members of the Reseda Chamber of Commerce.

Longval, who lives at the club with his 12-year-old daughter, Jade, in an apartment he created there, is also involved in the community-based program Keep Youth Doing Something, a program for at-risk children that offers softball games and other sports activities at Reseda and Lanark parks. “I plan to stay for a while. That’s who I am,” he said.

Rayna Gabin, envoy to the Reseda community during Chick’s first nine months in office, said of Longval, “He’s very much involved in the community and wanting to help in any way that he can.”

Evidence of that, she said, includes his making the Country Club available at no charge for community events, including dances and Halloween parties for the Keep Youth Doing Something program. After the Northridge earthquake, the Country Club also hosted meetings for Federal Emergency Management Agency, the police, the Small Business Administration and others.

Ann Kinzle, executive director for the Reseda chamber, suggested Longval “is older than his years. He’s really becoming one of the pillars of the community.”

As for the once-contentious battles between the club and neighbors, Gabin said, “I have had no complaints since I got here last July.”

The hall has sometimes been rented out as a film and video location. In recent months, En Vogue and Maurice White have shot music videos there; scenes for a kick-boxing movie have been filmed there, and one day a car was exploded for cameras in the parking lot.

The next scheduled entertainment event comes this morning, when “Mike the Maintenance Man” participates in a 9 a.m. boxing match live on “The Kevin and Bean Show” on KROQ-FM (106.7). Then, from May 3 to 8, the male exotic dance troupe Man Power performs. And more boxing events are expected by late June.

But on May 19 and 20, country music returns with Larry Dean and the Shooters. “It’s always healthy to have another venue to play,” said Dean, whose five-man band has played on the local country scene since 1981. “They have an excellent stage, and excellent sound system, and excellent dance floor.”

Dean remembers seeing a few live shows at the Country Club in its early days, and opening for Don McLean and a few other artists there. It now helps make up for the loss of the Longhorn Saloon, the 300-seat North Hollywood country venue that closed in January.

“This is more of a big concert atmosphere. A honky-tonk has a different flavor. I like honky-tonks; I play in a lot of them. But this is just a different atmosphere, bigger and more open. A really great place for concerts.”

Added Marilyn Crispen, who booked talent at the Longhorn and who now helps Longval at the Country Club: “Once the word gets out about the Country Club, I think the younger people will come out and see what this venue is like, and see what it’s like with the live bands and the people. I really do.

“I think it’s going to be a happening place,” she said. “Give it time.”

Where and When

What: Country Club.

Location: 18415 Sherman Way, Reseda.

Hours: Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Price: Free before 8 p.m.; $5 after.

Call: (818) 881-5601.