Benefit concert to aid police

Young Chang

Citizen Joe started out as Average Joe. A few years into

performing locally, fans started telling the musicians that they were

anything but. So Kurtiss Lystne, co-founder of the band and a Costa

Mesa police officer, renamed the band Citizen Joe.

On Wednesday, the group will do its part as citizens in paying

tribute to the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11. At a fund-raiser

concert titled “Benefit the Blue” at the Harp Inn, the four-member

Citizen Joe will perform three hours of original music as a police

officer’s hat from the Costa Mesa Police Department gets passed

around the bar for donations. All proceeds will be sent to the World

Trade Center Police Disaster Relief Fund.

“If that disaster happened here, I know the East Coast officers

would also chip in over here,” said Lystne, a 10-year veteran of the

police department. “This is our way of giving back a little to

them... It’s a big family and we want to keep it together.”

Pete Heyward, bassist for the group, has been in contact with a

New York City police officer heading up that fund. In the past year

he has learned that varying degrees of lung damage have been detected

in officers who helped in the recovery efforts at Ground Zero.

“They need lung research and lung testing for up to 10 years to

keep that in check,” Heyward said. “So it’s an ongoing financial

burden for everybody.”

Citizen Joe will also display a 220-pound, 10-by-22 inch steel

beam that was once part of the Towers and has been making its way

around the country for remembrance purposes.

John Lyons, owner of the Harp Inn, said hosting the beam and the

band is his way of doing “a positive thing after the negativity of

the day.”

Lystne added that serving through music really doesn’t feel any

different from what he does all the time as a police officer anyway.

“We constantly give to the community by serving the community and,

of course, in many different ways whether it’s helping, rescuing,

solving problems,” said the 43-year-old guitarist and mandolin player

for Citizen Joe.

The music of the Costa Mesa-based band, founded by Lystne and his

brother Glen in the early ‘90s, has been compared to the sounds of

Toad the Wed Sprocket and Crowded House, Heyward said. The group has

performed at popular venues including the Coach House, the Galaxy and

at the House of Blues in both Anaheim and Los Angeles.

The local attention bandmates have received has been unexpected.

“We had called ourselves Average Joe basically because we weren’t

trying to draw any spotlight on us,” Lystne said. “We wanted to write

music that was suitable for the Average Joe.”

Today the band performs regularly at Orange County venues.

On the program for their Harp engagement is a song titled “William

B. Nolde,” named after and about the last American soldier killed in

the Vietnam War.

“It’s a tribute to him and his family and to our country that we

have people out there fighting for our freedom,” Lystne said.