There’s not a whole lot about the 70′s and the 80′s that I miss. I don’t long for the days of leisure suits, polyester pants or mutton chops. But there is one remnant of that era which I do lament the loss of. A place where one could go to listen to live music and still be able to carry on a conversation.
Yes, such places are few and far between now, but in their heyday three Montecito watering holes, Nipper’s, The Chanticleer and the Olive Mill Bistro, formed what was known as “The Golden Triangle.” These were places where you could enjoy a cocktail or two, dance and mingle with your friends, neighbors and even encounter a celebrity.
Recently I sat down with bass player Hank Allen who along with pianist Wayne Kliman comprised the duo of “Hank & Wayne.”
For 20 years they performed nightly on the Montecito bar circuit. Hank and I reminisced about the days when Montecito was the center of nightlife for the sophisticates of Santa Barbara.
While a younger crowd might head to downtown Santa Barbara to dance to disco music at places like Baudelaire’s and Peppers in the late 70′s and early 80′s, many of the local 30- and 40-somethings would go over to Coast Village Road for their bar hopping, dancing and mating.
Hank & Wayne
It was certainly different than it is now. “Where else would you find a place with three bartenders going until 2 a.m. in the morning on a Wednesday and no rock ‘n’ roll?” Hank had the answer to his own question — The Olive Mill Bistro.
Located in the spot now occupied by the Montecito Cafe, Hank & Wayne played there six nights a week for three years from 1982 to 1985 before moving on to play at the Biltmore.
Even though it has been more than 30 years since I set foot in there, I still remember a few things about the Olive Mill Bistro. The owner Paul Vercammon (father of the former KEYT news director with the same name) was always dressed in a tux. Although seldom that decked out, the customers there were obviously well-heeled. There was no mistaking the Montecito bar-hopping crowd for the folks who stayed at home to watch Hee Haw.
Nor was there anything country about the songs Hank & Wayne played. Elton John melodies, the theme from Cats, Broadway songs, Beatles tunes and the Great American Songbook of George Gershwin and Cole Porter was the meat and potatoes of their repertoire. Hank credits Wayne with having the savvy to know that songs that appealed to women would be the key to the duo’s popularity. He recalls that when the dance floor would get crowded Vercammon would discretely signal the musicians to take a break because if everybody was dancing then nobody was buying drinks.
Next door to the Bistro, in the location that is now Lucky’s, was The Chanticleer. The physical layout of the restaurant and bar isn’t much different than it is today. Hank and Wayne performed there for three and a half years, from mid-1978 through the end of 1981.
$15 champagne
Across the street from the Olive Mill Bistro, where Los Arroyos now calls home, was Nipper’s, the nightclub owned by Arthur von Wiesenberger and his business partner Horatio Lonsdale-Hands.
It wasn’t a venue for live music and Hank & Wayne never played there. Instead Nipper’s was an attempt to be the exclusive private club in the neighborhood. At the time one local wag quipped that Nippers was, “the best place in town to spend $100 and have nothing to show for it.” Hank disputes that assessment of the place. “Sure, you paid $15 for a glass of champagne (an outrageous price at the time) but where else could you hang out and rub elbows with Michael Douglas? They were selling cache.”
Hank notes that the real estate boom that was going on at the time brought a lot of money into town so Nippers didn’t lack for customers.
Back across the street at the Bistro and Chanticleer there was no shortage of customers or celebrities either. Robert Mitchum, Frankie Avalon, Sandy Koufax, John Ireland, Stuart Whitman, Jane Russell and Dick Smothers (half of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo) all dropped in while Hank and Wayne played at those establishments. Hank distinctly remembers how the actor John Carradine would be in the bar constantly holding a Courvoisier in his hand.
Hank came to town in 1969 when he and a musician he was playing with on the Sunset Strip in L.A., the great Al Reese, got a gig at the Old Yankee Clipper on upper State Street. Reese would eventually become the Saturday night performer at the piano bar at the Miramar hotel. Around 1974 Hank, the tall slender string bean, met the shorter Woody Allen-esque Wayne when they were playing a private party at El Paseo restaurant.
The two hit it off as musicians and they joined musical forces. Their first gig as a duo was at the Somerset, another Coast Village Road watering hole that was located where the Bank of America branch is now. They played there for two years until Harvey Miller, owner of the San Ysidro Ranch hired them to play at the hotel’s Plow & Angel bar.
There were two things that were unusual about this pair who spent their evenings entertaining people in bars with their music. They both were married with families and neither one had a day job. They were the rare full-time working musicians. Hank recalls it was a great way to make a living. “My kids would let me sleep late every day, I would have dinner with the family at 5:30 every evening and then I would head to work at 8:30.”
The end of the run
After they left the Biltmore they played briefly at the Refuge Tavern where Cafe del Sol is now located across from the Andree Clark Bird Refuge. Following that they moved over to Fess Parker’s Red Lion Inn hotel at East Beach where they performed for five years and where they played their last gig together on January 1, 1994. Their time playing together as a duo fell just one month short of being a full 20 years. There was no drama surrounding the demise of the combo of Hank & Wayne. Rather, the live music scene in Montecito just kind of dried up.
Hank attributes the disappearance of the Montecito bar and music scene to three things, “502′s (a reference to more aggressive enforcement of drunk driving laws) AIDS and the fitness craze.”
While Wayne no longer performs in public Hank still does, both around town and elsewhere. In 2000, he went to China with pianist Peter Clark for a series of jazz concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Weihei and Qingdao. He also played engagements in 2001 in Northern Italy with guitarist Alberto Negroni. He also has a day job now as the computer instructor at Monroe school not far from where he lives on the Mesa with his wife. They have two grown children.
Many times when I’m out at a bar and they’re playing piped in music or I’m listening to a live band that I can’t hear myself think, let alone talk, over, I drift back to the old bar and nightclub scene on Coast Village Road. If I could only bring those days back. Heck, I’d put on a leisure suit if I thought it would help.
Craig Smith is a blogger and observer of the local scene. He writes a regular column for the Montecito Messenger his work appears at www.craigsmithsblog.com
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