Punk Rockers and Police--O.C. Tug of War Continues : Music: Two recent stabbings in Fullerton have set off the latest in a series of battles dating back to the late ‘70s.

Since 1979, Orange County bands have been playing songs that reached punk rock fans around the world.

And for just as long, Orange County police and elected officials, alarmed by the noisy, unruly, and sometimes violent behavior that accompanies punk shows, have made a habit of shutting down the leading local venues where punk rock is played.

“As far as I’m concerned, this is the most conservative place, and rock ‘n’ roll is not conservative. I guess it just doesn’t fit in,” says J.P. Boquette, a 30-year-old Huntington Beach punk fan who grew up loving Orange County’s most prominent style of indigenous music and these days promotes it.

Today, even as Orange County’s own punk rock band Offspring is near the top of the charts nationally, the local battles continue. The latest punk venue to come under fire is the Ice House, an active, 578-capacity hall in Fullerton that has been beset by violence at two recent concerts.

Stabbings in December and February rekindled longstanding official antipathies toward punk rock, and today the Fullerton Planning Commission will conduct a hearing on whether the concerts will be allowed to resume.

“Their music is violent, their demeanor is violent,” says Fullerton Police Chief Patrick McKinley. “They come in here and have these weird dances where they throw each other around. We can’t have that.”

Fighting back is Eric M. Addeo, Orange County’s most ambitious grass-roots rock entrepreneur of the moment, who says his company, Culture Shock, staged 52 concerts at the Ice House with little trouble until the two stabbings. He is proposing additional security to curb violence.

But, says Addeo, “the Police Department and people in (city government) have to realize: This is your future, your kids. If you keep taking and taking, eventually the kids aren’t going to have anything, and then what?”

Orange County’s famous suburban sensibilities and the now-famous music that first gathered force here at back-yard parties in Huntington Beach and grimy crash pads in Fullerton first clashed in September, 1979. That’s when police in Huntington Beach began to publicize a wave of crime and vandalism they attributed to followers of punk bands.

“They’re really freaky kids,” warned a police spokesman at the time. “Basically they’re into violence. They have hatred virtually for everybody.” Orange County’s punk rockers had made their nasty first impression.

More than 15 years later, punk rock and its offshoot, alternative rock, have won their long fight for prominence in the musical world at large. Thanks to bands like Green Day and Offspring, punk surged into the mainstream last year, becoming a staple of rock radio and MTV.

But the Ice House stabbings have called into question whether, mainstream or not, the violence that shadowed the Orange County punk rock movement in its early days still is an inescapable part of the scene.

With its raucous, careening guitars, rough-hewn, shouted vocals and hammering beats, punk music thrives on rebellion. It is not surprising that Orange County, with its widespread affluence and prevailing conservatism, has proven such an effective launching pad for youths brandishing instruments while nurturing a rebellious resentment of the status quo.

For some early Orange County punks, the rebellion was more of a musical statement than a social protest. They were jolted by the high-energy bursts they heard coming from New York City’s Ramones and London’s Sex Pistols, and the music’s raw, anyone-can-do-this delivery encouraged them not just to buy records, but to take up guitars and drums.

“The (Orange County) scene was so stale that within six weeks of our getting together, we had hundreds of people coming to see us,” Jay Decker, the Crowd’s bassist, once recalled. “We couldn’t play. It didn’t matter.”

For many, punk was a refuge. “Lack of companionship, lack of love, lack of relationship at home” brought together the network of Fullerton punks, recalled Frank Agnew, the former Adolescents guitarist. “We were all each other’s brothers and sisters, and we took care of each other.”

Such influential local bands as T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty), Social Distortion, Agent Orange and the Adolescents emerged from the local scene during the early ‘80s to make enduring, critically praised music at a time when punk, both nationally and in Orange County, remained the choice of only a limited, underground following.

Now “Smash,” the traditionally raw but uncommonly catchy third album by the theretofore virtually unknown Offspring, has sold 6 million copies worldwide in 11 months. When 5,200 tickets to the band’s March 24 show at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center went on sale last month, they were gone within hours.

Still, away from the UCI campus--where two heavily-secured venues, Bren Events Center and the 2,000-capacity Crawford Hall, combine for a handful of major shows each year--punk concerts remain a haphazard, fringe business left mainly to small clubs and part-time promoters.

Since July, Addeo, 30, had been trying, with growing success, to turn the 1902-vintage Ice House into a stable, regularly-programmed venue that can mix developing local acts with hot touring talent. (Like some other grass-roots promoters, Addeo feels that the term “punk rock” carries a stigma, and prefers to call the Ice House’s variety of music “hard alternative.”)

But recent violence has left him fighting for one more chance to keep his vision alive.

On Dec. 16, an 18-year-old was beaten and stabbed while waiting for a performance by the Vandals, one of Orange County’s most venerable punk bands. The teen-ager, who suffered a punctured lung, said he had been set upon by 11 or 12 white supremacist skinheads; he said one of them had taken exception to his shirt’s image of Jimi Hendrix. On Feb. 10, two men left a show in progress, were chased, beaten and stabbed across the street from the Ice House during an attack by 20 to 30 assailants. Police believe the nonfatal attack was gang-related.

Police Chief McKinley expressed alarm after the first stabbing, but his department allowed the Ice House to continue staging shows when the hall agreed to replace in-house guards who had no specialized training with beefed-up professional security.

But after the second stabbing, a frustrated McKinley said he wanted the venue’s concert permit revoked. “We’re going to (see) somebody killed, and it’s not OK,” he said last month, adding that he is convinced shows inviting “that punker-type mentality” will inevitably lead to further trouble.

If Addeo fails to make his case, the Ice House will join a long list of Orange County rock venues closed by official pressure since the dawn of the local punk era.

Long gone are such venues as the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa, which from 1978 through 1981 served as the cradle of the Orange County punk movement. Today, the scene for punk and alternative rock in Orange County is active but fragmented between a maze of small or haphazardly-booked venues, most of them bars that can’t admit the under-21 crowd that is crucial to most punk bands’ draw.

Los Angeles County venues also had their share of punk rock violence. in the 1980s. But today, punk and alternative rock have a number of well-established outlets in Los Angeles to accommodate the genre’s exploding popularity. Among them are the Hollywood Palladium, the Palace, the Whisky and the Roxy.

Orange County’s combination of a rich punk rock legacy and its historic dearth of live outlets makes promoters regard it as an untapped mine for profits--but a precarious one to enter.

Officials at Goldenvoice and Avalon Attractions, the two major Los Angeles concert companies that have been the region’s most active promoters of punk and alternative rock shows, say they have looked, so far without success, for mid-sized Orange County venues that can accommodate popular touring bands. “It’s wide open,” says Bill Hardie, a local independent promoter. “If there was an all-ages venue between 1,000 and 2,000 (capacity), it would kill.”

But promoters will have to persuade authorities that their shows won’t lead to a killing in more ways than one.

While they have kept a tight leash on punk rock venues, and continue to look guardedly upon the music and its fans as trouble waiting to happen, police in Fullerton, Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa, Orange County’s historically most-active cities for punk rock, say they are not out to silence the local punk movement.

The southwestern end of Costa Mesa, former home to the Cuckoo’s Nest, has been a relative hive of small-time punk and alternative rock activity over the past year or more. After a fracas involving skinheads broke out at Club Mesa about six months ago, police insisted on changes in operations, but they did not try to close the club or banish punk.

“Back in the Cuckoo’s Nest days, we tried to run it out of town; that was our only solution,” said Lt. Alan Kent, area commander for the city’s west side. “Since then, we’ve had nothing like the magnitude (of problems) we experienced then, with assaults and damage of property.” Kent acknowledged that, given his druthers, he would rather not have to deal with anything as potentially volatile as punk rock; but he said it’s not up to the police to pass judgment on the music or to stop it from playing, as long as city requirements are met.

While Fullerton has clamped down on the Ice House, police say they have had no problems with Club 369, which programs punk and alternative shows for an over-21 audience.

In fact, many observers of the punk scene say, 1995 is not like the early ‘80s, when punk was making its first impression in Orange County and violence was a staple of concerts.

“It was more intense then,” said veteran punker Joe Escalante, who continues to play in the Vandals, along with his duties as an attorney and associate director of business affairs for the CBS television network. “I was in fear of my safety going to shows in the early ‘80s. There were punk gangs who would beat up anybody, just for the sake of violence. It was so new, they thought that’s what punk was all about.”

Now, Escalante says, the only substantial threat of violence comes from the small but volatile group of white-power extremists who lurk around the fringes of punk rock.

“If you can stay out of that racial thing, there’s no danger to anybody,” Escalante said. “Racial skinheads polarize the crowd, but there’s no (general) anarchy like there used to be.”

Veteran promoters say that there are two essential elements to staging a successful, reasonably orderly punk rock show: the security must be massive and well-trained in the culture of punk concerts, and the bands must take care of their fans’ safety by pausing and calling for calm when slam pits and stage-front crushes grow dangerously frenzied.

The security staff for punk shows at UCI’s 2,000-capacity Crawford Hall can number as many as 58, said Lance MacLean, a longtime employee of the university’s student government who has been coordinating concerts there since 1981. In that time, MacLean said, the venue has avoided any serious outbreaks of violence.

“That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our share of injuries, bloody noses and scrapes”--the inevitable consequence of rituals as risky as punk fans’ “moshing,” in which slam-dancers form a whirlpool of colliding bodies, and “floating,” in which members of the crowd clamber atop the shoulders and heads of their cohorts and are passed along like storm-tossed rafts. Ideally, mosh pits are supposed to be turbulent, but nonviolent, with participants looking out for each other’s safety. The real challenge to security, MacLean says, lies with those who see punk shows as a vehicle not for roughhouse camaraderie, but for mayhem.

“In a crowd, you always have a few bad apples, 10 or 15 individuals who come bent on destruction. If you can weed them out, or not admit them at all,” the chances of a safe show are good.

If nothing else, Addeo said, the Ice House’s travails have brought into focus the issues that will determine Orange County’s punk rock future.

“I hope these (violent) incidents are waking up the scene,” he said. “Are the kids going to help spread the word that it’s not cool? We want to talk to the kids and say, ‘Listen, this is your music scene. It’s going to thrive and there’ll be more places for you to go, or you’re going to ruin it for yourselves and there’ll be nothing.’ ”