10 Years of Unlikely Success for O.C.’s Top Concert Club

Since it opened 10 years ago today, the Coach House has drawn hundreds of thousands of pop music lovers to a barn-like room tucked behind a tire store in the back of an office park, miles away and worlds apart from the Sunset Strip.

Offering acts on the way up (Hootie and the Blowfish played there before most people ever heard their name) and stars in a relatively intimate setting (including Miles Davis, Willie Nelson and others who normally play theaters at least four times the size), the Coach House has obliterated competitors in every corner of Orange County and beyond.

“They’re tops in the game,” says Dan Einstein, who co-manages John Prine, a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter who plays the Coach House regularly and who recorded most of his 1989 live album there. “It’s a very artist-friendly place. [Owner] Gary Folgner instills in his staff the feeling that the artists should be treated with respect. They do everything possible to make the show come off in a top-notch way.”

And that’s not all Folgner offers. Operating in this affluent suburban market, the Coach House has been able to charge premium ticket prices--sometimes topping $30 and reaching as high as $50, prices that can translate into artist paydays of up to $20,000 per performance.

“They pay substantial guarantees for attractions they really want,” says Guy Richard of the William Morris Agency, who over the years has booked the likes of Al Green and Little Feat onto the Coach House’s red-carpeted stage. Between the money and “the reputation that they treat acts like family,” says Richard, people really want to play there.

Others who have routed their tours to sleepy Capistrano have included the Byrds (Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and Chris Hillman staged a reunion there in 1989, the first time they had played together in 15 years), a cackling Roseanne, a twangy Dwight Yoakam, a bluesy B.B. King and an exuberant Bonnie Raitt.

There have been 2,418 concerts in all, played to three-fourths capacity on the average, Folgner estimates. Ken Phebus--who has been Folgner’s concert director from the start, booking nationally known talent in virtually every pop-related genre--guesses that attendance over the decade has topped a million. Revenue currently tops $3 million annually.

Not bad for a place that was born out of bankruptcy and long-shot desperation.

If central casting sent Folgner and Phebus to a director making a movie about the glitzy world of big-name rock ‘n’ roll, they probably would get one quick, incredulous look-over and be sent back.

Folgner, 54, seems more like an unreconstructed hippie beachcomber than a rock mogul, with his flowing, faded blond hair, his decidedly informal wardrobe and his constant companion, Bear, a 14-year-old golden retriever-German shepherd mix who is even calmer than his master, a man whose voice seldom rises above a murmur.

(Folgner is so matter-of-fact that, Phebus says, he had to be reminded that the club would be 10 years old today. His response, says Phebus, “was ‘Oh, really? Who cares?’ ” The birthday is being observed in empty silence: Tonight will pass without a Coach House show.)

Phebus, 48, is a large, long-haired, full-bearded man who, with an additional touch of gray, would become a prime contender in a Jerry Garcia look-alike contest.

It is left to Nikki Sweet, the Coach House marketing coordinator and assistant booker, to give the team its small quotient of rock ‘n’ roll fashion consciousness, with her tattoos, hair dyes and punker garb. (Other longtime team members include general manager Roger LeBlanc, house manager Tom Meldrum, assistant manager Nick Sener, production manager Jay Munis, hospitality manager Calvin Hardy and Augustine Tapia, who has worked in the kitchen for 14 years, since the days when the place still was called the San Juan Creek Saloon.)

Folgner and Phebus’ outward trappings may not fit stereotypes, but the substance that has made their accomplishments possible is apparent. Folgner’s unpretentiousness--the manner of a man brought up working alongside his father as a plumber from the age of 12--has helped disarm stars who are used to, and perhaps tired of, star-struck treatment.

Phebus, meanwhile, is armed with a deep, resonant voice, a gift for the humorous, pithy turn of phrase and a directness that no doubt stand him in good stead as he works the phones, negotiating deals with agents.

Their collaboration actually began in November 1985 in the San Juan Creek Saloon days. The saloon and other restaurants in a chain that Folgner owned were tottering toward bankruptcy as a result of an uninsured fire loss (the debts finally were discharged in 1994). Phebus, meanwhile, was aching for a switch from his “miserable existence” running Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, which he describes as a “concrete bunker” devoted mainly to punk rock.

After some preliminary concerts late in ‘85, Folgner hired Phebus full-time. The two reckoned that they could wrest some concerts away from, or at least co-exist with, the Golden Bear, a club in Huntington Beach that had been Orange County’s dominant pop and rock hall since the ‘60s.

By the time the Coach House opened on Feb. 7, 1986, with a show by English blues-rocker Robin Trower, the historic Golden Bear was, indeed, history. The club had lost its lease suddenly in late January and had been doomed to downtown redevelopers’ demolition schemes.

Granted an instant monopoly, the 380-seat Coach House (expanded to 480 in 1992) was an immediate financial success with profits of $30,546 in 1986 and $128,603 in 1987, according to Folgner’s bankruptcy court files.

A succession of competitors soon arose, trying to prove that a county of 2.5 million people could support more than one all-purpose concert club. Michael’s Supper Club, Club Postnuclear, Peppers Golden Bear and Hamptons all tried; all had closed or abandoned big-name concerts within nine months.

Even so, the Coach House’s plot was growing more complex, due to Folgner’s ambition. In 1988, he launched the Ventura Theatre in Ventura with the same dinner-and-concert formula as the Coach House. He loves the venue and believes in its potential, but the smaller Ventura market has proven a tough sell: He estimates that so far he has lost $500,000 there.

An attempt in 1990-91 to revive the 1,900-seat Raymond Theatre, a 1920s-vintage vaudeville hall in Pasadena, proved disastrous when fire officials ruled that the seat covers Folgner installed hadn’t been properly treated with fire-retardant, and effectively shut the house down. Losses from that episode eventually landed Folgner back in Bankruptcy Court.

In 1992, he nearly lost his right-hand man when the attractively appointed Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana tried to lure Phebus away. But the cafe didn’t offer Phebus the ownership interest he coveted, and he backed away from the deal. Staying in Folgner’s camp, his dander up after what he perceived as broken promises, Phebus retaliated by stepping up his booking pace; he helped defeat the well-financed cafe in five months.

Folgner also played hardball, telling acts that if they played the Rhythm Cafe instead of the Coach House, they could forget about any Ventura bookings.

“I’m not Joe Nice Guy,” he said at the time. A year and a half after driving out the Rhythm Cafe, he leased the building, renamed it the Galaxy Concert Theatre and preempted any future challenges from the 550-capacity hall. Now it is the Coach House’s sister club.

But it is the Coach House on which he counts most heavily to preserve his small-concert empire and to serve as the cornerstone of its enlargement.

His court-approved plan to pull himself out of the bankruptcy stemming from his Pasadena misadventure calls for paying creditors $880,000 over the next five years. Key to that is his annual Coach House revenue.

His plan predicts continued income growth and Coach House profits ranging beyond $400,000 per year, for an annual return of 11.4%. While predictions in this volatile business have to be taken with a grain of salt, he says “we’re pretty much on target right now.”

Associates say he is one of the least materialistic people they know and that his satisfaction comes not from owning things but from putting on shows.

“He doesn’t do the phony ego stuff,” says Jeffrey Benice, a longtime friend who is an attorney in Newport Beach. “Most club owners get in it to [meet] young women and drink and hang out with stars. I don’t see any of that. I think he takes personal satisfaction that he’s created this thing with a lot of hard work, and it works on a very high level.”

Folgner still is looking to take his operation to a higher level--his goals for year 11 are profitability for Ventura and the Galaxy and the opening of a new Coach House-like franchise in Sacramento or Colorado Springs. He also continues to look longingly at the still-vacant Raymond Theatre, which he feels was the victim of bureaucratic infanticide and still could succeed if given a proper chance.

“There’s always a plan to do something [new] here,” Phebus says. “I’m always waiting for the surprise, when Gary walks in the door and tells me where I’ve got a new club to book.”

“I enjoy the business,” says Folgner with typical simplicity. “It’s the best job I could ever have.”

* REMEMBER THE TIME . . . Tales and tidbits from the first decade at the Coach House. F1