Owner Stops the Music at Influential Anaheim Club

Linda’s Doll Hut, the Anaheim roadhouse widely regarded by fans and musicians as the spiritual center of Orange County’s original music scene, will close at the end of summer, its owner said Wednesday.

Club owner and chief bartender Linda Jemison has decided to throw in the towel after 12 years because of steadily declining business over the last three years.

“It had become a very expensive hobby,” Jemison said over breakfast at a coffee shop in Orange on Wednesday. “I found I was having to use other ventures to finance the bar, and that’s not the way it should be.”

Besides hosting thousands of bands on the way up, among them the Offspring, Social Distortion, Sublime and Guttermouth, the Doll Hut helped usher in a wave of musician- and fan-friendly clubs that are now more typical of the Orange County music scene.

“In my 23 years of going to clubs in Orange County, that club has been the heart, without question,” said Jim Guerinot, a veteran concert promoter who was a record company executive before managing the Offspring, No Doubt and Social Distortion, among others.

“That all was a reflection of Linda--she had a style of doing business that set the bar in the community for how artists got used to being treated,” Guerinot said. “That’s why Social Distortion, Mike Ness, the Offspring and so many other artists would go back there, because it always felt so nice and so comfortable.”

Jemison attributes the fall-off in business to several factors, but primarily to three years of construction for widening the nearby Santa Ana Freeway as part of Disneyland’s expansion.

“One night I was driving to my club and I could not get there,” Jemison said. “I thought, ‘If I can’t get there, how is anyone else going to?’ ”

As the core audience she built from the time she bought the Doll Hut in 1989 through the mid-1990s got older and moved away or started families and curtailed their club-going, Jemison found it difficult to attract new fans.

“I was out there painting signs and putting them at the freeway exits, and then every Monday the construction crews would tear them down, so it was an every-weekend thing,” she said.

“I had been determined not to let [the freeway construction] stop me, but I have to admit defeat. The state beat me.”