Making Music and a Difference

On one hand, Monica Salci is a top administrator of a small nonprofit agency responsible for the housing and care of 29 developmentally disabled adults.

On the other, she fronts a funk-tinged modern-rock band called All Day Wire that’s active on the local grass-roots club scene.

In splicing these two strands of her life, the Huntington Beach resident has come up with a rock benefit concert called the O.C. Help Fest, which will take place Aug. 23 at Aldrich Park, the large, rolling green at the heart of the UC Irvine campus.

For Salci, one social-service career plus one musical avocation equals a nine-hour festival featuring 15 Orange County rock bands, which she hopes will draw at least 1,000 people.

The object is to earn her Santa Ana-based agency, the Sutton Foundation, money for a new van to shuttle clients to doctors’ appointments, recreational trips and the like. One van now serves the three separate group homes run by the Sutton Foundation in residential neighborhoods of Irvine, Fountain Valley and Garden Grove.

Just as important, Salci says, will be the statement O.C. Help Fest makes in mixing the rock community and the developmentally disabled, the current term for mentally retarded people.

“This will be an event where everyone understands there will be integration, and we’ll have disabled individuals with us and beside us,” Salci said. “It’s great for people to understand each other’s needs and differences.”

Salci enlisted Randy Cash, booker of Club 369 in Fullerton, to help recruit established bands willing to donate their performances. As a first-time promoter, she is finding out the hard way the difficulties of engineering a large-scale benefit concert.

“This was a dumb month for me to choose. Everyone’s touring. I’ll learn from this and make it better next time. This is a huge undertaking for an inaugural event.”

None of the brand-name local heavy-hitters will be on the bill--”a lot of [bigger-name] bands I knew were willing to do it, but the scheduling was off,” Cash said--but the lineup does bring together hard-hitting rockers who are proven draws, each accustomed to playing to hundreds in local clubs. Lit, Dial-7, Knockout, My Superhero and Burnin’ Groove are among the leading acts. Also scheduled to appear are Skiptooth, Liquorfish, Skoobadesh, Suction, Rooster (formerly R-Tribe), P-Town Pubsters, Drown, Captain Pants and, of course, the Salci-led All Day Wire.

Given that the audience may include developmentally disabled people, Salci said she has cautioned the bands to rein in the most extreme manifestations of rock ‘n’ roll audacity.

“We serve as role models for these individuals,” so the ground rules include no nudity and “don’t use the F-word.”

“I know what can happen at a big show, and you get excited, and [swear words] come out,” Salci said. “But you can be cool without it, and [the bands] agreed.”

* O.C. Help Fest takes place Aug. 23 at Aldrich Park on the UC Irvine Campus. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. $10. (714) 569-1910 (concert information) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).