1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW : The Year in Rock: A Mixture of Triumph, Frustration : There Were More Bands and Hits but Fewer Places to Hear Them

Forget triumph and clarity and the larger-than-life spectacle that some folks want out of their rock ‘n’ roll.

In 1995, the Orange County rock scene was a lot like life itself: promising yet frustrating, a muddled, jumbled, compromised, hard-to-fathom ball of uncertainties and contradictions.

But, like life itself, O.C. pop was irrepressible. Performers in all genres found nooks and crannies for live shows within the county’s perpetually inadequate venue infrastructure, and they churned out recordings so industriously that, for the first time, it became impossible for one harried observer (namely your humble scribe) to keep track of all the local releases that deserved attention.

Quality was not hard to find, starting with “You Came Screaming,” the memorably tuneful, passionately philosophical debut album by folk-rocker Mark Davis.

Thanks to the Offspring, the year began with O.C. in the vanguard of the great punk-rock gold rush of 1994. The Offspring stayed hot in ‘95, touring for much of the year and pushing sales totals for its “Smash” album past the 8-million mark worldwide.

Perhaps predictably, given the long odds against any pop act gaining gold or platinum sales and a place in the national spotlight, no other local band was able to break through to star-magnitude popularity.

On the other hand (as was only fitting in this year of “yes, buts”), ’95 found more O.C. bands than ever before getting a chance to take a fair shot.

Success stories included Huntington Beach band Korn, which took its wrathful punkish metal on tour and came home with the year’s top-selling local album other than the Offspring’s. “Korn” peaked at No. 99 on the Billboard’s pop-album chart and sold 300,000 copies in ‘95; an upcoming arena tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne figures to propel the band further.

As the year closed, two veteran O.C. bands, No Doubt and Mr. Mirainga, were making headway on the modern-rock radio charts with cuts from solid new albums.

Social Distortion, the artistic and sentimental favorite to follow the Offspring to household-name status (at least in households where punk rock is played), held off the big push until next year as it slaved away in the studio for much of 1995. Important, long-missing pieces of S.D.’s past were excavated from the vaults with the reissue of two CDs of out-of-print material from 1981-83, as well as a previously unavailable documentary video from the same period.

A long list of O.C. alternative rockers released records on or signed deals with major labels or respected independents.

On the other hand, landing a record deal is like getting admitted to college in hopes of one day becoming a brain surgeon: It entitles you to take all the freshman pre-med courses, but the chances are slim that you’ll ever get to saw through a cranium. The ambitious melodic-rock band Water was an all-too-typical example as its strong debut album for MCA failed to find a niche in the marketplace.

While O.C. advanced its reputation as a hotbed of punk rock, the scene’s estimable contingent of roots-rockers and country singers had a productive 1995 that yielded a good chunk of the year’s best local music.

Chris Gaffney, O.C.’s king of (broadly defined) country music, released his third album, “Loser’s Paradise,” and toured nationally for the first time, bringing his distinctive songwriting and eclectic style to a small but growing audience.

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Our country queen, Jann Browne, finally got her fabulous 1994 album, “Count Me In,” released in the United States. Rick Shea came through with a splendid debut CD, “The Buffalo Show,” and Big Sandy & his Fly-Rite Boys toured far and wide after putting out “Swingin’ West,” another vibrant, lighthearted album that mined the past (in this case western swing) with fresh-sounding results.

Good new records by the James Harman Band, the Walter Trout Band, Lee Rocker’s Big Blue and David “Kid” Ramos made it a notable year on the O.C. blues scene. Ramos landed a high-profile gig as guitarist for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and another local veteran, Robert Lucas, joined the national act Canned Heat, which already had an O.C. flavor thanks to the nimble guitarist Junior Watson.

The punk/alternative bands and the roots contingent found their point of intersection at Linda’s Doll Hut, the county’s smallest grass-roots venue, but by far its best.

These basement shows were played by some of the finest local musicians--including the Offspring, which gigged at the Doll Hut in its scuffling days and returned in December to play a secret performance to kick off the venue’s annual round of Christmas benefits for abused children.

On that inevitable other hand, the Doll Hut was far too small to fill the great void in the O.C. scene: a club to replace the now two-years-defunct Bogart’s as a focal point able to serve both as an incubator for local talent and as a shrewdly programmed showcase for prime attractions in the nationally touring vanguard of (broadly defined) alternative music.

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As always, the local grass-roots club scene was scattered. Club 369 in Fullerton offered relative stability, a good stage and some attractive bookings; others, such as the Empire Ballroom, the Tiki Bar, Music City and the Lava Room, offered some good gigs, but lacked the in-house booking and promotion needed to make a club a true force. These clubs were off-limits to the underage kids who make up a big slice of the audience for alternative rock.

Again, as always, punk promoters played a game of cat and mouse with police and municipalities. This year, the cats won decisively. By year’s end, every significant all-ages punk/alternative venue in the county was gone, the Ice House in Fullerton, Viva Las Vegas in Orange and Old World in Huntington Beach each having run afoul of officialdom.

In an ironic, but somehow fittingly emblematic, summation of local punk history, the promoters of Board in O.C., the biggest-ever showcase for local punk and alternative rockers, wound up having to move the May event out of Orange County. UC Irvine officials balked at hosting the show, as originally planned, and it played instead at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles County, with two or three violent incidents reported among an overwhelmingly well-behaved crowd of about 11,000.

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It became apparent, though, that O.C. officials and their devotion to quiet and calm uber alles weren’t the whole problem. Ugly incidents involving racist skinheads contributed to the downfall of each above-named all-ages hall.

“I don’t think I’ve been in as much personal pain,” said John Pantle, a leading all-ages promoter, recalling a racist bashing in August that he said skinheads inflicted on a concert-goer of Asian-Indian heritage outside Viva Las Vegas, the weekly punk/alternative showcase he promoted. “The problems [posed by racist skinheads] have been a huge setback for live music in Orange County.”

The answer, Pantle said, would be either to avoid booking the hardest-core punk bands that the racist element favors--Pantle and other observers say the faction has never numbered more than 50 at a single show--or to establish a venue where the traditional cat-and-mouse games would end, and operators and promoters would work closely with police and municipal officials to give the overwhelming majority of unmalicious punk fans a place to go without having to trek to all-ages venues in Los Angeles or the Inland Empire.

“It’s not very likely, to be honest,” Pantle said of his hopes that O.C.’s copper cats might one day cooperate with its rocker mice. “I mean, I grew up here.”

After a cautious start, the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, which opened in December 1994, seemed, by year’s end, to be filling part of that all-ages gap. The beautifully appointed club stepped up alternative and punk bookings.

But, said owner Gary Folgner, “I’m still not going to do the real hard-edged stuff; I don’t like the damage that’s done, and the mind-set is the ‘destroy’ attitude.”

Folgner said he turned down a proposed booking by hard-core punk band Pennywise, but he did open the Galaxy, with its splendid layout for alternative music, to a wider range of alternative attractions. The club has both an open floor for the mosh-minded and elevated, tiered seating for more sensible fans.

Running the 480-seat Coach House and the 550-capacity Galaxy in tandem, Folgner and his booking team averaged about 30 concerts per month. But even with a monopoly on the club level, Folgner said it was a tough year financially: the Coach House continued to be a moneymaker, he said, but the Galaxy earned profits in only three months out of 12--not unexpected, he said, in a start-up club. Folgner said losses at the Galaxy and his third club, the Ventura Theatre, weren’t crippling, and that a strong December at all three venues had raised his hopes for 1996.

Folgner scored booking coups by landing a rare Carly Simon date at the Galaxy and Willie Nelson’s first O.C. club appearance at the Coach House, which also marked his first-ever duo concert with old friend Leon Russell.

The county’s big venues, Irvine Meadows and The Pond of Anaheim, had a lackluster ’95. After getting boosts in ’94 from multiple-night stands by the Eagles (at Irvine) and Barbra Streisand (at The Pond), the two combined for just 45 concerts this year--a record low for the period since 1982-83, when Orange County became a major player in the concert market with the opening of two outdoor amphitheaters. The previous low, 48, was set in 1993.

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Irvine Meadows director of operations Matt Curto said that “we held our own pretty good” in a year of slim concert pickings. Irvine staged 30 concerts (including five Pacific Symphony dates) and drew 304,399 fans, Curto said. (In comparison, the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion in San Bernardino County staged 15 shows for the year; Tom Petty, Reba McEntire and Steve Miller were the only highly desirable attractions that Blockbuster wrested away from its two Orange County competitors.)

The annual KROQ Weenie Roast and the return of the Lollapalooza festival after a two-year absence highlighted the Irvine Meadows schedule. Both events featured Hole and its singer, Courtney Love.

The mercurial rock diva was on good behavior each time, turning in focused, powerfully emotional performances. PJ Harvey, the English singer who offers the star-power and intensity of Love without the off-putting soap operatics, haywire temper and addiction to the media spotlight, was also impressive on the Irvine stage.

The Pond staged 15 concerts in all--a dozen pop and rock concerts (counting Saturday night’s ’95 finale by Santana), plus a symphonic evening with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and two concerts with artists from India and Korea.

Like Irvine’s Curto, Pond spokesman John J. Nicoletti took a positive slant on a down year: “Based on the industry as a whole, we had a fantastic year,” he said. The Pond’s concert performance “was competitive with the rest of the arenas in the nation.”

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The Pond’s total draw for the 15 shows was about 202,000, Nicoletti said. An R & B revue topped by Jodeci and Mary J. Blige and The Pond’s inaugural punk concert with Green Day as significant billings proved “the building is not just for everyone over 30. Hopefully we’ll continue to program alternative [rock] and [youth-oriented] R & B,” he said.

One positive upshot of these big-venue doldrums was that, unlike in 1994, nobody had to shell out $100 or more (face value, that is) for a concert ticket in ’95.

The year’s most bizarre development on the local pop-venue scene was a quintessentially O.C. episode, given the recent performance of local government. It happened when the Orange County Fair, the government agency that owns the Pacific Amphitheatre, declared, in effect, that the 8,500-seat concert bowl in Costa Mesa was an unusable white elephant and shut it down.

The Fair’s board, which shelled out $12.5 million for the Pacific in 1993, suddenly discovered before the amphitheater’s scheduled October reopening that it couldn’t stage most shows without exceeding noise regulations.

Concert noise, and the technical data and regulatory actions pertaining thereto, had only been an issue of massive controversy and exhaustive news coverage since the amphitheater’s 1983 opening.

The fair sued the previous operator, the Nederlander Organization, contending that Nederlander (a major national theatrical and concert company that oversees concert operations at The Pond) had hoodwinked fair officials into thinking the existing sound regs would not be unduly restrictive.

It remains to be seen whether the fair--an agency of state government--(a) was making a sharp legal end run that would get the noise restrictions relaxed and allow greater booking latitude, or (b) as it appears on the surface, was owning up to a monumental blunder on the most obvious issue concerning the amphitheater, a mistake akin to buying a used car that one knew had been in a collision and not getting it checked out first by a trusted mechanic.

All of which inspires a wish for the coming year that, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, Orange County might someday soon acquire a government as good (or at least as competent) as its ranking musicians.