Beatles in a Classical Case of ‘Mystery’ Numbers

The first Orange County-bred rock star to sing and play on the stage of the Orange County Performing Arts Center will be . . . George Harrison.

At least that’s the alias Jim Owen will be singing and playing under Saturday. Since his teens, this 30-year-old Westminster resident has been earning his living impersonating the quiet Beatle as a cast member in “Beatlemania” and other touring tributes to the Fab Four.

Now Owen is taking Beatles replication to a grand new scale as the impresario behind “Classical Mystery Tour: A Tribute to the Beatles.” Owen, as George, and three other veteran impersonators well-schooled in the cloning of John, Paul and Ringo, will be joined by a 48-piece local orchestra.

Their aim is to replicate each note of 18 Beatles recordings that use strings, horns or full orchestras--among them “Got to Get You Into My Life,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Yesterday,” “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life.”

Owen is producing and bankrolling the show. He views its $50,000 budget as “an investment” in what he hopes will become a touring attraction playing to Beatlemaniacs worldwide.

Owen caught the Beatles bug as an 8-year-old in Huntington Beach when his aunt moved in with his family and brought her record collection. He was rocking with informal Beatles tribute bands by his early teens and went professional 12 years ago, during his first semester at USC.

He soon abandoned his plan of becoming an orthodontist and has since been Harrison on four continents. He’s made 12 trips to Japan and typically plays about 100 shows a year.

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The world of Beatles tribute-paying is tightly knit, Owen says, and for “Classical Mystery Tour” he has recruited some old associates he says are among the best. David Leon, as John Lennon, and Tony Kishman, as Paul McCartney, both started out as cast members of “Beatlemania” in the late ‘70s; Rolo Sandoval is a similarly experienced Ringo Starr.

Owen wears his hair in a ’65 Beatles mop and sports custom Beatle boots around town even when not in character (he says they’re more comfortable than regular dress shoes).

The idea for an orchestral Beatles show came to him last year when his agent was contacted by an orchestra in Buffalo, N.Y., about a possible tribute program of Beatles songs. It never took place, Owen said, but “a lightbulb went off.”

“We could do that and make [the songs] exactly like they were on record. Not a pops show with strings [playing tame orchestral versions], but ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ the way they were originally done.”

When not touring as George, Owen likes to take music courses at Cal State Long Beach and Golden West College in Huntington Beach. Because the written orchestrations the Beatles used in the studio were not available, he enlisted two of his professors at Long Beach State, Bruce Miller and Martin Herman, to transcribe the parts and arrangements from the Beatles’ albums.

Backing the fabricated four at the OCPAC show will be the Four Seasons Orchestra, an O.C. ensemble led by a third Long Beach State music professor, Roger Hickman.

“The audience will know the material better than anything we’ve played before,” said Hickman, whose orchestra performs annual concert series of 19th and 20th century symphonic music at the Irvine Barclay Theatre and at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. “As far as keeping the group together [rhythmically], that will be the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Once that rock beat gets going, I can just wave my arms around.”

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Hickman said he is taking authentic reproduction of the music as seriously as are the Beatles impersonators themselves. Instrumental techniques have changed since the ‘60s, he says, and his group will have to adjust.

“I’m just learning this: ‘Boy, they played this differently [on the Beatles’ records] than we would.’ It’s gotten more round and rich in tone quality [today]. To get back to the ‘60s takes a little more raw sound. I sent tapes around to people [in the orchestra]. They just have to get it in their ears.”

“Classical Mystery Tour” continues a somewhat ironic tradition at OCPAC of presenting rock greats in replication rather than in the flesh. The center has hosted theatrical productions paying tribute to Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, as well as a run of “The Who’s Tommy” done as a Broadway road show. OCPAC officials did reserve a seat for Paul McCartney in 1992 when the center staged the West Coast premiere of his classical piece, “Liverpool Oratorio,” but he was a no-show.

Now they’re getting the next best thing.

Owen acknowledges that premiering his ambitious and expensive production on the year’s busiest shopping and travel weekend won’t make it easy to sell the 2,000-plus tickets he says he needs to break even. But he has faith in the enduring appeal of the Beatles.

“I was thinking, ‘Well, there’s probably a good reason why there’s nothing booked that weekend at the Performing Arts Center,’ ” the novice promoter said. (Center officials say they can’t regularly program real pop acts because there aren’t enough free nights in the schedule.) “A lot of people are out of town, but a lot are here with nothing to do. It’s family oriented, and kids are out of school. But if I lose money, it’s [still] an investment.”

He is confident that his idea of playing Beatles music live the way it was recorded--with real strings and horns, rather than the modern synthesizer technology heretofore employed by Beatles tribute bands--will prove to be a winner that he can take around the nation and the globe, using pickup orchestras in every hall.

“In South America, or wherever, people just love the Beatles so much. We have this built-in audience wherever we go.”

Owen will admit to a brief flirtation playing guitar behind an Elvis Presley impersonator who hired him after catching his act at a Beatles festival in Los Angeles when he was 14 or 15. Otherwise, playing music for pay has been strictly a matter of replicating George Harrison’s parts. It’s a career that Owen says has assured longevity.

“I don’t see how it could stop,” said the rocker, who has bought a house in Westminster with the spoils of being George. “It’s like Mozart or Beethoven. It’s classical music at this point. It’s never going to go away. And we wouldn’t want it to.”

* “Classical Mystery Tour: A Tribute to the Beatles” takes place Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $15-$45. (714) 740-7878 (Ticketmaster) or (714) 556-2787.