Sound and Fury

Stuff you’ll need for a visit to Club 369: earplugs, clothes that won’t retain cigarette fumes for more than a week, earplugs, a thumb ring, more of a desire to watch and listen than to dance, a pierced eyebrow, earplugs.

Yep, 369 is known for its painfully superior 10,000-watt sound system. Amplification conspires with physical intimacy to produce an auricular impact par excellence.

The venue’s reputation as one of Orange County’s strongest grass-roots forums for local and emerging touring acts, however, has more to do with bookings than wattage. The club consistently presents four or five bands a night.

For the past four years, purveyors of punk, power pop, hip-hop, trip-hop, et al. have drawn devotees especially happy to get so much closer to the acts onstage than even front-row ticket-holders at Irvine Meadows.

An admission: I don’t like rage-spewing, earsplitting, lyric-screamed alternative rock, which sounds unmelodic and hardly rhythmic to my ringing, baby-boomer ears. What’s more, I find the music undanceable.

Evidently, I just have an outdated definition of dancing. But if so, I’m not alone. The nice young waitress best described what really goes on here: “There’s not really dancing,” she said, her jet-black tray a fine match for her outfit, “but people run around, or whatever they do.”

I don’t dislike everything about this kind of music. I love the band names: Pigs in Space, Something Meaningless, Stain, Prong--all have played 369.

And lots of other people do love the sounds these bands make. Some songs or acts bring the dance floor to overflow, and I’m told there’s occasional moshing.

Nobody moshed the other night, when John Wayne Transplant did auricular destruction to the delight of baggy-pantsed patrons enjoying jumbo plastic mugs of beer. But at one point, an especially enthusiastic youth wearing a large gothic-style cross leaped onto the roomy dance floor just below the large, elevated stage and began to run in circles (like the waitress said!).

He then skipped some, picked up a piece of paper, wadded it and threw it at the band--all while skipping--after which he ran up a 6-foot-high carpeted wall surrounding the floor. It reminded me of something Fred Astaire once did in a movie, only less angrily.

The man then rested his chin on a speaker on the stage, his face just inches from Transplant’s lead singer, whose spiky, white-blond hair showered droplets of liquid with every deep, diving crouch and convulsion. The singer had earlier doused himself with cooling beer, according to spectators.

Speaking of spectators, though, what really got me was the people sitting stick-still on stools and tables all around the club.

I guess this was one of those less danceable nights, even for regulars. And, to be fair, a few people were bobbing rigidly and violently.

The club (which also sometimes books disco bands) takes its name from the number of people it can hold. It occupies the former site of the all-ages NYC and, before that, the heavy-metal venue Goodies, which operated as far back as the late ‘70s with varying music formats.

An inexpensive nosh menu offers standard bar fare of burgers and such. The club’s best bargain is a 34-ounce domestic beer for $4.50.

BE THERE

Club 369, 1641 Placentia Ave., Fullerton. (714) 572-1816. Doors open at 8 p.m., music 9 p.m.-2 a.m. Tue.-Sun. Cover: $5-$15.