Tales From Back of Bus : Ride Hasn’t Always Been Smooth for Coach House--or Its Logo

The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano is celebrating its 10th anniversary today. Mike Boehm looks back at a few tidbits, wrinkles, oddities and idiosyncrasies that have marked the history of Orange County’s busiest pop venue.

Automotive Highlights, Part I: With the Coach House buried in a strip mall and not visible from the street, owner Gary Folgner acquired a red double-decker bus to park at curbside to serve as the club’s landmark and logo. Folgner now owns three such vehicles and, unlike concert tickets’, their prices have been falling: Bus No. 1 cost $25,000, its two successors $8,000 and $6,500.

One night after King Sunny Ade played at the Coach House, the Nigerian bandleader and his entourage thought it would be fun to ride one of the double-deckers back to their hotel near LAX. It lumbered up the 405 as far as Long Beach before it broke down.

“I got a call at 4 a.m., and we had to take my dad’s motor home up there and pack 16 or 17 guys in there,” Folgner recalls. The motor home also got a workout after Leon Russell’s bus broke down at the Coach House: Folgner let Russell use the motor home to get to a gig in Arizona.

Folgner says that leaving the bus out on Camino Capistrano costs him more than $300 a year in overtime parking fines--but that it’s worth the expense. “Our sign gets parking tickets,” muses Ken Phebus, the Coach House concert director. “Go figure.”

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Automotive Highlights, Part II: The sporty little red two-seat roadster parked on an elevated ledge inside the Coach House is a Singer, a British car that actually would run if its engine were not in Folgner’s garage.

“That’s decor,” Folgner says with a chuckle. It originally was part of a street-scene motif (which also included a gas station, a bank and a jail) dating from the early ‘80s, before the Coach House became a concert venue.

“I traded $1,000 worth of tacos for that,” says Folgner (the car’s previous owner gave it to him in exchange for dining privileges at Folgner’s Villa Mexican Restaurant in Dana Point). “I was looking for a Model A, but some guy came up with this thing.”

The Singer proved an irresistible attraction to a few of the more combustible figures who played the club.

One night, the late Johnny Thunders clambered onto the car to sing a song, then couldn’t get down. The club staff had to fetch a ladder before the show could continue. Darren McNamee and Warren Fitzgerald of a local band called Gherkin Raucous had no problem getting up or down from the car’s perch.

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945 Pictures Worth a Few Words: Upstairs and down, the Coach House walls are covered with framed, autographed publicity photos of headliners who have played the club. Folgner began the custom in the early 1980s when the Coach House was still a minor venue, offering the occasional country act such as Janie Fricke or the Bellamy Brothers.

“It just seemed like a good thing to do. Better than painting the walls,” Folgner says. “We’ve still got a lot of space. I could fit probably another 600 to 700 in here without having to get imaginative.” He buys the frames in batches of 400.

“When you see young bands come in here, you’ll see them standing in the lobby looking at the big names that have played this place. You’ll see them just staring at the walls,” notes Phebus. “It gives us instant credibility. [They know they are] in a building that’s a real concert club. You see Ray Charles and Miles Davis and Bonnie Raitt up there, you know you’re in a real place.”

Marketing coordinator Nikki Sweet says only one star withheld his signature: Richard Butler of the English band Love Spit Love. “Gary was saying, ‘I don’t care, I don’t want you to sign it anyway,’ ” Sweet recalls. She thinks it had something to do with Butler not liking the way his publicity shot had come out.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Folgner says English rockers generally have shown more “attitude” and have been harder to deal with than their American counterparts.

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Worst Case of Offstage Fright: One English band that momentarily lost any semblance of “attitude” was the Mighty Lemon Drops, who were setting up in the empty club when a mild earthquake hit. “Every single guy was under a table,” Sweet recalls. “They’d never been in an earthquake before.”

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Hospitality Counts: Soon after the Coach House started booking major shows, a down-on-his-luck musician named Calvin Hardy showed up at the door. “He came looking for a dishwasher job,” Folgner recalls. “He was homeless and needed to get some rent money.

“He never got to be a dishwasher.”

Instead, Folgner took the tall, courtly Hardy and named him the Coach House’s master of hospitality, charged with looking after performers while they are at the club, making sure they get their meals and anything else they need, and escorting them to and from the stage. (In a pinch, Hardy, a splendid bass player whose pre-Coach House credits include stints with Etta James and Ike & Tina Turner, undoubtedly could sit in with the bands as well).

Hardy has made such an impression, Phebus says, that performers’ agents sometimes ask for assurance that he’ll be on the job. “I’ve had agents call me: ‘Is Calvin still working there? Yes? OK, let’s proceed with the booking.’ ”

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Your Mama Don’t Dance, and Neither Can You: With rare exceptions, the Coach House always is set up for sit-down audiences only--a format that some performers, especially younger alternative bands, have smirked at (or simply bypassed the club to avoid).

But some are won over: Folgner says Peter Murphy, the theatrical English rocker, threatened not to go on unless the club’s tables were removed. Folgner called his bluff, Murphy played anyway, and according to Folgner, “he came off the stage saying, ‘This is the greatest show I ever did in my life.’ ”

Alternative-rock hero Frank Black once paused during a Coach House performance and asked his fans what they thought of the setup. The fans murmured their displeasure, but Black said he approved: “I think it’s a more civilized way to see a show.”

Folgner says that he is not a Grinch about dancing but that an open-floored house would make it hard to stop underage fans in the all-ages Coach House from getting alcohol.

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You Want Comfort? Go to Santa Ana: When shows run long, those hard and sometimes wobbly legged Coach House seats can test a concert-goer’s backside. Any chance that the second decade will bring something a little more cushy--like, say, the nicely padded seats at the Coach House’s sister club, the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana?

Folgner: “No.”

Phebus: “This is spartan down here.”

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Miles Does the Strip Mall: Miles Davis was not pleased in April 1988 when he arrived for the first time at the Coach House, which Phebus describes accurately as “located between a deli and a lawn mower shop in a strip mall behind a Goodyear tire store.”

Davis “didn’t think it looked like much,” Phebus recalls. “He wanted to call his agent on the phone, wanting to know what the [expletive] he was doing here. He came in and looked around and mumbled a few things . . . and wound up coming back to play twice more.”

“There’s nothing wrong with playing a more intimate place once in a while,” the late jazz great said a year later when an interviewer asked him about his Coach House gigs. Folgner and Phebus say that appearances by Davis and Michael McDonald in ’88 launched the Coach House’s tradition of, whenever possible, landing acts that typically play theaters, not clubs.

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Booking Big Shows Is as Easy as Falling Out of Bed: One of the Coach House’s most historic concerts was the Byrds reunion of Jan. 4, 1989, when Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and Chris Hillman played their first concert together in 15 years.

The booking came up suddenly, when the former Byrds realized that for legal reasons they needed to perform in public in order to safeguard the “Byrds” trademark from drummer Michael Clarke, who had been barnstorming under the Byrds banner with no other original members.

Phebus was on vacation in Wisconsin when he struck the deal.

“I was in my mother-in-law’s basement, taking a nap. A call came and my mother-in-law said it was CPA”--which puzzled Phebus, since he hadn’t engaged the services of any certified public accountants. In fact, it was CAA--the Creative Artists Agency--calling out of the blue to offer him the Byrds reunion.

“I said ‘Byrds? B-Y-R-D-S?’ ” recalls Phebus. “I found out it was the real guys, and I just about lost it right there. My in-laws had no idea what I was talking about. I had to make some calls from Wisconsin to get some acclaim for what I’d accomplished.”

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Persona Non Grata: “Chuck Berry,” says Phebus. “I’ve done him in other places and I’ve had enough of him. It’s ridiculous. If you don’t have the dressing room the proper temperature, you owe Chuck Berry money” because it’s contractually specified, Phebus says.

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Says Folgner: “I Believe That Most People Don’t Know What These Acts Cost.” The answer, as a rule of thumb, is that if you multiply by 400 the face value on your ticket (sans box office or Ticketmaster fees), you’ve got a ballpark figure of what a headliner can earn on a sold-out night. So Willie Nelson and Leon Russell, who hold the Coach House record (not counting New Year’s Eve specials) with their $50 tickets, earned some $20,000 per performance during their December four-show stand as a duo.

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They’ll Never Have to Go Hungry: Phebus says that Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jackson Browne and Jimmy Buffett all have standing offers to play at the Coach House at $100 a ticket, which would translate to a $40,000 payday. “We haven’t followed up on it in two or three years, but the agents are aware that we’ll do things like that,” Phebus says.