The man behind the scene

Paul Saitowitz

In the past year, deceased singer-songwriter and Grammy nominee

Elliott Smith played one his final shows there, the Breeders played

there, as did the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the legendary Melvins and L.A.

buzz band The 88 played there every Monday for a month.

Believe it or not, they were playing right here in Costa Mesa.

The place is Detroit Bar on West 19th Street, and the person

behind the shows is the club’s booking agent, sound engineer and

all-around utility man Chris Fahey.

The club’s Westside location -- in a strip mall with a doughnut

shop, Mexican market and a taco stand -- is not the place you’d

expect to find a burgeoning music scene, but Fahey doesn’t see it

that way.

“The ‘City of the Arts’ [Costa Mesa] was afraid of the arts, but

now they’re loosening up,” he said. “They started allowing culture

and arts in this area ... it was either embrace it or lose it. This

city, and especially the Westside, really has the potential to be a

real arts center.”

Fahey, 32, started booking shows in Costa Mesa at small

restaurants and community centers when he was 17. He has since gone

out on the road as a tour manager with bands like Stereolab, Medeski,

Martin & Wood, Broadcast, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Money

Mark. Detroit Bar, replete with an orange bar, olive green walls and

ultra-hip furniture that would look more at home in a Greenwich

Village apartment, offers live music between two and five nights a

week.

“We like to keep our acts varied,” Fahey said. “Sometimes we’ll

have a really good DJ along with a band, and a lot of times we’ll

have a band that is on tour stopping through, and then have a local

band open for them.” Fahey prides the scene at Detroit on being

driven by the music rather than the amount of people a particular

group is able to draw. He said he gets about 20 demos a week from

bands trying to play there.

“Honestly, I want to book shows that I want to see,” he said. “I’m

sure we could book a lot of the pop-punk bands around here and get

bigger turnouts, but that’s not really what we’re looking to do.”

One of the biggest draws has been the advent of residencies on

Monday nights, where bands will play every Monday for a month.

“It’s really been great for us and for the bands too,” Fahey said.

“If you take a band like The 88, they were already pretty well-known

in L.A., but they were unknown in Orange County and we gave them a

chance to build a fan base down here.”

The only other place in the county that attracts the kind of acts

Detroit does is the House of Blues, which has more resources to put

on bigger shows.

“We’re a small club so we can only offer so much money,” Fahey

said. “We had Mudhoney set to play here, but the House of Blues was

able to offer them double the money we could, so we lost out to

them.”

Fahey said Detroit has big things on tap for 2004, including

hosting the Melvins on their 20th anniversary tour.