the nightlife issue

ORANG E COU NTY
THE
NIGHTLIFE
ISSUE
’08!
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JUNE
2008 $5.95
THE
RADAR
NIGHTLIFE
BY JIM WASHBURN
LET’S GO TRIPPIN’: Dick Dale at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, 1961.
GLORY DAYS Sex! Surf! Rock! The history of Orange County’s vintage nightlife—it’s so last century!
You think you know swing? You think you know swank? You think
nothing ever swam until you hit the tank? Wrong, wrong, ever so wrong.
Let us tell you about some real dinosaur nightlife. Sex! Cocktails!
Cigarettes! Swanksters swapping swanky sobriquets! It was all here, and
let’s not forget Pop Tarts! (more on them later.)
Suppose it’s the 1940s and you’re headed down from Hollywood to
your sailboat in Newport Harbor, you, Bogie and Spencer Tracy. Maybe
you’d pause for a steak at Huntington Beach’s Golden Bear, a requisite
PCH pit stop from the 1920s onward. Once in Newport, you’d likely
seek liquid provision at the Arches.
“What, the Arches was around back then?”
Buddy, it was here when the conquistadors arrived, right where the
new A is now. Or maybe you’d have cocktails at Balboa Island’s White’s
Pub (now the Village Inn). You’d have a few drinks, dinner and then
maybe escort some local talent upstairs, where four rooms could be
rented by the hour.
Salacious? You should have seen HB in the 1920s, when it was the
oilfield boomtown that inspired Upton Sinclair’s Oil, which in turn inspired
There Will Be Blood. There was indeed blood in the largely lawless town, as
wildcatters fought, drank and whored their way to oily oblivion.
Things were more quiescent in O.C.’s other coastal towns. You could
get a bite at Laguna’s White House Café, but not much else. The biggest
noise in Newport was the Rendezvous Ballroom. Built in 1928, in the
1930s it was a frequent home to the swing bands of Benny Goodman,
Artie Shaw and others. Fed a steady stream of revelers by the Pacific
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> JUNE 2008
Electric Red Line—which terminated at the Balboa Pavilion—the
Rendezvous was such a jumpin’ spot that when it was leveled by fire in
1935, demand caused it to be rebuilt in three months. It was in the ’30s
that Bal Week began, with thousands of liquored-up youths converging
on Balboa over the Easter recess. In 1941 Stan Kenton and his new sounds
took up residence at the Rendezvous.
By the late ’30s, HB was almost civilized, and in 1938 the Pavalon
Ballroom—a WPA project nicknamed “the poor man’s Rendezvous”—
opened next to the pier. World War II put a damper on things, when a
fear of Japanese submarines caused much of the coast to go dark. When
the troops returned home, though, they made up for lost time—1946 is
remembered by many as “the party year,” and the party never quite let up.
Things were hopping by the 1950s. One popular coastal spot was
the peninsula’s Beach Roamer with its indoor fire pit. Corona del Mar’s
Hurley Bell—where everything from the breadsticks on up was first
class—was where you’d go to impress a date. The building was lovingly
designed to resemble an 1135 English inn. If you lacked a date, maybe
you’d pop upstairs, where, like it was a Newport tradition or something,
there were rooms with hookers. That trade ceased sometime before the
Hurley became the Five Crowns, but not before the mayor of NB got
arrested there one night.
The most swinging place along the coast was the Castaways
restaurant, a very Vegas-like, non-family-oriented place reputed to run
gambling on the side. It burned down in 1956; today a drably expensive
CONTINUED ...
housing community on the site bears its name.
“I had a whole wall covered
with confiscated fake IDs.
We would catch people behind
the curtains smoking dope,
or having a little oral love-in in
a corner or a restroom.”
SUMMER OF LOVE From left: The king of
O.C. nightlife, Greg Topper; concert posters
from shows at San Clemente High and
Anaheim Convention Center.
Other ’50s coat-and-tie joints on Goat Hill included the
Black Knight (where Pierce St. Annex is now) and Forrest Smith’s El
Pescador, famous for its lobster thermador and its piano bar, the red vinyl
confines of which remained a county staple into the ‘80s.
For much of the 1950s, the inland hotspot for dancing and music was
Anaheim’s Harmony Park ballroom. Originally a German beer hall with
oom-pah band entertainment, Western swing was now more in vogue,
with Cliffie Stone’s band of red-hot pickers such as Jimmy Bryant and
Speedy West working out on their new Fender electric instruments.
Harmony Park is also where rock and roll first got a foothold in the
county, with Santa Ana’s Rillera Brothers plying their mix of rock, R&B
and Latin rhythm. One 1955 night there, Los Angeles R&B singer Richard
Berry added lyrics to a Cuban instrumental the Rilleras played and the
immortal garage rocker “Louie Louie” was born.
If you didn’t mind doing your drinking out of a hip flask, Disneyland
was a swinging nightspot. It only cost $1 to get in the park (ride coupons
ran from 10-cents to 35-cents) and that covered seeing acts like Louis
Armstrong or Count Basie, and, increasingly, folk and rock and roll. In
the years ahead, names like Josh White, the Nigerian drummer Olatungi
and Creedence Clearwater Revival played the park, which also gave
employment to young local talents like Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Steve
Martin and Chris Hillman.
As we head into the 1960s, it’s time to meet Greg Topper, the king of
Orange County nightlife. Topper’s performed and caroused through more
than four and a half decades of O.C. after dark, isn’t done yet, and was our
go-to guy for much of the info that follows.
In 1961, he was freshly arrived from Montego Bay, Jamaica, where
his mother had built the Half Moon Hotel on 400 acres of coastline. For
Topper, it had been pretty much his personal Pleasure Island.
“I was 12 when my brother arranged my first sexual encounter with
a woman, under the boughs of a seagrape tree,” he recalls now. “Things
were pretty loose there, and by age 13 I was doing the whole package:
cigarettes, rum & Coke, sexual intercourse, driving my own car, while
having room service at the biggest hotel around. Then the business failed
and I came back from all of that… to Fullerton?”
... CONTINUED
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> JUNE 2008
He tried to make the place
swing: his first O.C. gig was in ’61
with a surf/covers band called the
Crescents at Anaheim’s Tamasha
Club, “sort of a private country club, minus the golf course.” He also
gigged at the hopping north county La Palma Drive-In, aka the Bean Hut,
where the Street Sweepers car club hung out.
With such a marvelously dissolute young life behind him, the Bean Hut
and rival Hillcrest Drive-In just didn’t cut it, so Topper lied about his age and
joined the Marines. Much of his time in uniform was spent lowering morals
in Subic Bay, and, on Okinawa, as the only white guy in an 18-piece R&B
band called the Downbeats. He mustered out in ’65, enrolled at Cal State
Fullerton, and resumed gigging around the county, which was swinging
more with every passing day.
Clubs and nightspots of all stripes popped up. In 1958, O.C. got its
first folk music club, Laguna’s Café Frankenstein, followed by Sid’s Blue
Beet, in Laguna only briefly before moving to the Balboa Peninsula. Owner
Sid Soffer hosted everyone from Mississippi bluesman Son House to
hipster raconteur Lord Buckley to jazz saxman Art Pepper, who got busted
for heroin right outside the place. He should have stuck with Sid’s $2 Beef
Stroganoff. Ask for salt, though, and Sid threw you out. Sid bought his
glassware at thrift shops, so your beer might come in a glass half the size of
your tablemate’s. Complain, and Sid threw CONTINUED ON PAGE 126...
... THE
RADAR NIGHTLIFE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 80
you out.
Other folk clubs included the resurrected Golden Bear, Seal Beach’s
Rouge et Noir, the peninsula’s Prison of Socrates—where clean-cut Tim
Morgon reigned—the Mon Ami (soon renamed the Paradox) in Orange,
the Mecca in Buena Park and the Four Muses in San Clemente. All
presented folk in a bohemian—though usually alcohol-free—
atmosphere. On any given night, you might sip your hot apple cider to
the sounds of local talents like Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, Jennifer
Warnes, Steve Gillette or Jose Feliciano.
By 1961 the county had its own indigenous music, which wasn’t
scratched out on some old banjo, but was blasted by Dick Dale through
Fender gear made especially for his elemental attack. Dick played surf
music, not songs about surfing, but music that replicated the sensation of
shooting the curl, with reverb-soaked, palpable waves of sound that
washed over his audiences. Goodbye big bands: Dale, the Chantays and
other surf bands now filled the Rendezvous, Harmony Park and the
Pavalon with teens doing the surfer stomp. Guys wore gray Levi cords,
unbuttoned Pendleton shirts over white tees, and Jack Purcell tennis
shoes. Girls wore something less dorky.
O.C.’s other early-‘60s musical powerhouse was the Righteous
Brothers. The county’s black population at the time probably could have
fit in a snapshot, but the local Marine base was more integrated. Bobby
Hatfield and Bill Medley’s initial audiences were the black Marines who
frequented John’s Brown Derby in Santa Ana, as well as the Club Gardens
and Tustin’s Barn restaurant.
By the mid-’60s, youth-oriented nightclubs were flourishing. Garden
Grove Blvd. had Harvey’s Gold Street—owned by Harvey Belisle of
Belisle’s Restaurant—where there was dancing seven nights a week to the
Fifth Calvary or Brit Invasion-inspired bands like the Sundowners or
Jamie and the Jury. The boulevard was also home to the Chatterbox, and
east of that at Harbor Blvd. was the Playgirl club, later a topless joint and
still later owned by Dick Dale.
Other mid-county clubs included the Plush Teen Beat Club, the
Cinnamon Cinder and the Dance Mod. You’d even find rock nights, with
light shows, at the Orange YMCA.
Former doo-wop singer Ross Malodia owned Daisy May nightclubs in
Santa Ana, Westminster and Orange. These were big rooms where he
hosted the likes of Bo Diddley and Ike & Tina Turner. The clubs were named
for the scantily clad Li’l Abner character, and waitresses dressed accordingly.
Malodia recalls his mid-’60s clientele as being a slacks, sport coat
and dresses crowd, which only changed as things headed into the hippie
years. “Everyone looked sharp, and everyone was dancing. It was a
young crowd, there to meet each other. The times were pretty wild,
though, and we really had to police our places or the police themselves
would. I had a whole wall covered with confiscated fake IDs. We would
catch people behind the curtains smoking dope, or having a little oral
love-in in a corner or a restroom.”
If that’s not reason enough to invent a time machine, in Huntington
Beach there was a block of nightlife to rival the Sunset Strip. For starts, the
Golden Bear wasn’t just for folkies anymore. You could see Buffalo
Springfield with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, the Doors, the Byrds, the
Lovin’ Spoonful, Lenny Bruce or Janis Joplin’s acne up real close.
Across the street, the Pavalon Ballroom was still rockin’, while next
to the Bear were the Syndicate 9000 and Salty Cellar clubs. The
Syndicate hosted the Iron Butterfly, Them and a young Meatloaf, while
the house band was an early version of War. In a basement directly below
was the Salty Cellar—which literally had seawater seeping through its
mildewed walls. The big attraction there was watching local bands get
shocked whenever they touched anything.
Up PCH in Seal Beach, a double-Quonset hut housed the Marina
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> JUNE 2008
Palace, where Van Morrison, John Lee Hooker, Alice Cooper and others
played. Heading south, Newport Beach was rock-resistant in the hippie
days, though one club, the Bacchus, had a short life on the Mariner’s Mile.
Owned by Jerry Roach, the acts included a solo Bobby Hatfield, the heavy
rock Snake Drive and an East L.A. R&B outfit called Elijah whose lead
singer was none other than future Galactica admiral Edward James Olmos.
That’s where the young crowd went. Their parents headed to the
Lucky Lion to hear J.J. Mack do Johnny Rivers-ish renditions of Creedence
and Chuck Berry songs. “When J.J. Mack hit Newport, he had a Porsche,
an amp and a beautiful head of hair—a magnificent-looking guy,” recalls
Topper. “There’d be a line maybe 150 deep to get into his show, and the
girls were just waiting to pull their pants down.” Mack—real name Victor
Culmoni—was the proverbial big fish in Newport’s small pond for years.
Elsewhere, you’d find Lee Farrell and a Hammond B-3 organ holding
sway at the White Horse (where Smokey Stover’s later was), Lanie Kazan
at the Boondocks (most recently Bistro 201) and Greg Topper in his brief
sensitive folkie phase, strumming Tim Hardin tunes on a stool at
Newport’s Dry Dock (where Joe’s Crab Shack sits today).
Perhaps you’ve read about or seen films with clubs so rough there
was chicken wire in front of the stage to protect the bands from flying
glass. Topper played one: Duane’s Pirate Cavern on Brookhurst, where
bikers wore their colors and mayhem often resulted. Rivaling it for
unnecessary roughness was the Cowboy on Harbor Blvd. near Heil. It
had a dirt floor and, says Topper, “the roughest crowd I ever saw: real
serious kick-your-ass cowboys. You just knew that as a collegiate-looking
guy you had no business there.”
Less bloody bistros for grown-ups in the north county included the
Palms, the Del Rey, the Trappers, the Ranch House, Ciros, and the Brook,
a joint that even in the ’60s was so fast and loose that, as Topper put it,
“Karl Malden could’ve got his nose sucked in there.” The Brook was long
home to O.C.’s first lounge king, singer/pianist/comedian Joe Tatar, who
packed the place with his sing-alongs and skits about Placentia Airlines.
Tatar didn’t go too “blue” in his comedy. If you wanted that, there was the
X-rated DeMarco & Day “The Two Jokers” at the Gaslight on Beach Blvd.
The 1960s-1970s impress-a-date destination was the Chez Cary in
Orange, with its Continental menu and high tufted velvet chairs. Women
got velvet footstools and menus with the prices omitted, so they could order
without regard to what it cost the swells who brought them. Some nights
there, you could hear a young brother-sister duo called the Carpenters.
Other posh dinner spots included the Stuffed Shirt (later Cano’s) on
the water in Newport, Victor Hugo’s in Laguna, the Cellar in Fullerton,
Nieuport 17 in Santa Ana and La Cave in Costa Mesa, then and now a fine
place to get a buzz on. “It’s quiet and dark, like watching a golf game when
you’re hung over,” is how musician Chris Gaffney described it.
On the other end of things were what might be called your “shut up
and drink” bars, which included Newport’s Snug Harbor, Costa Mesa’s the
Fling and Helm, and Fullerton’s venerable Melody Inn, where early
morning drinkers included “burned-out yacht dealers, postal workers and
Harbor Court judges having a couple of snorts of attitude adjustment
before taking the bench,” says Topper.
We’ve scarcely touched on all the hippie fun, such as the love-in at
Hillcrest Park—or, as the Register reported it, “Communist Dupe Negroes
Invade Park”—or the whole Laguna scene of midnight concerts and the
Mystic Arts; or rock festival/mud bath at the O.C. Fairgrounds; or the
copulatin’ couples (allegedly!) on Anaheim Convention Center’s lawn
which led city fathers to ban concerts there for years.
There is much more to tell about 1960s O.C., but we have the 1970s
and 1980s yet to traverse. Please join us in a future issue as we continue
the tale of O.C.’s nightlife, with discos! Streakers! Punkers! Cocaine! And,
yes, be patient, Pop Tarts! R