Orange County is the Orange Curtain, the wags say, a gulag of strip malls far from the vibrant cultural currents of Los Angeles. Fox's sexy soap "The O.C." hasn't burnished the rep either, what with all of those sexed-up young things and a middle-aged patriarch who likes to surf in his spare time.
Which is why the Fullerton Museum Center's exhibition "The Orange Groove: Orange County's Rock 'n' Roll History," is a necessary corrective to the cultural misperceptions about this maligned region. The display, a sweeping survey of the county's musical heritage that features rare memorabilia, handbills, musical gear and other ephemera, places Orange Country in its proper historical context as the home of some important rock musicians and a breeding ground for surf music, a genre that's synonymous with Southern California -- but, alas, not necessarily Orange County.
Perhaps it's because Orange County is regarded by many as the state's capital of conservatism, a place where the apotheosis of artistic expression is Disneyland. But according to the show's curator, Jim Washburn, Orange County's conservative philosophy actually gave a leg up to the nascent music scene.
"For a while, the conservative mind-set worked to the scene's advantage," says Washburn, a veteran music journalist and a contributing editor for the OC Weekly. "There was this whole notion of letting the market determine everything, of eliminating Big Brother. If someone wanted to rent a hall for a concert, so be it."
As the exhibition makes clear, the region's most important musical figure was a free-market entrepreneur: Leo Fender, who invented the solid-body electric guitar out of his Fullerton shop. In the 1950s Fender began shilling his Stratocaster guitar to local musicians to advertise his product, and one of them, Dick Dale, became O.C.'s first local rock hero. The Balboa resident, who bashed out his jittery surf guitar hits "Let's Go Trippin' " and "Miserlou" on a custom-made, left-handed Fender Strat, launched an O.C. surf movement.
Suddenly, everyone was saving up to buy a Fender guitar so they could start a band. Fifteen-minute O.C. surf groups such as the Blazers, the Rhythm Rockers and Santa Ana's the Chantays played key venues such as the Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa peninsula and the Pavalon in Huntington Beach. The Chantays' "Pipeline" became the first O.C.-bred national hit, selling more than a million copies in 1963. "We had a big fan base in Orange County," says the Chantays' Bob Spikard, a Santa Ana native. "We played the Rendezvous Ballroom for two years straight."
