Bill Foltz is the right age to remember how Southern California clubs helped so many bands achieve national stardom.
As a teenager, he would crowd the Sweetwater Cafe — a local music venue in a Redondo Beach strip mall with wood-paneled walls — where everyone was crowded together and close to the artist.
He was seeing The Knack, who were on the verge of stardom with their one-off hit and debut rock single, “My Sharona.”
“Everyone remembers the first concert they saw,” Foltz said.
Those club days of the Southern California music scene that constantly spiked artists’ popularity are almost gone. The Sweetwater Café is now a hotel and parking lot.
But Foltz, CEO of OCVibeis causing a massive shake-up of OC’s entertainment landscape – drawing on some of these collective memories to influence concerts in the future.
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Since its announcement four years ago, OCVibe has been compared to LA Live, the popular downtown Los Angeles entertainment district built around the Crypto.com Arena that has brought new life to the neighborhood.
Like LA Live with the Crypto Arena, OCVibe is using the parking lots around the Honda Center and ARTIC station in Anaheim and dozens of additional acres Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli have accumulated for development of more than 100 acres Foltz is heading towards. realization.
Foltz, 63, said OCVibe’s ambitions extend beyond LA Live. A whole neighborhood was built this decade to what developers call OC’s new downtown.
OCVibe is more than two and a half times larger and will house 2,000 new apartments. It’s adding two mid-sized performance venues, reviving OC’s iconic Golden Bear nightclub and will have more than two dozen restaurants that will draw inspiration from cuisines found throughout the county.
The ambitious A $4 billion project began this year and will begin welcoming its first guests in a new performance hall and restaurants for 5,700 people in 2026.
Foltz said part of OCVibe’s entertainment vision aims to fill a gap in venue sizes that isn’t necessarily already served in the county.
Foltz’s mind over the past six years has been focused on creating a new concert experience for OC, removing all the friction and making it an unforgettable evening.
He hopes that the hassle of parking will be over (and it will be free). Restaurant servers will know you have to go to a concert and will need to bring your check before the show starts.
The modest CEO of OCVibe syncs up all the little elements that add up to make seeing an artist you love even more special.
Standing on stage at a glitzy launch party in September, Foltz promised that the developers at OCVibe would further resurrect this experience for OC viewers.
By reaching back to the past, Foltz and his team also exploit the nostalgia of The Golden Bear Nightclubwhere music fans crowded the stage in Huntington Beach around the same time he had goosebumps with The Knack.
The Golden Bear closed its doors in 1986, but in its heyday, it was where the big bands honed their craft.
The intimate 300-seat nightclub, with a quirky edge, will produce a connection between artist and crowds that isn’t necessarily captured in larger arenas like the Honda Center, he said, much like the Sweetwater Café when it hosted artists such as Vince Gill, Willie. Nelson and Levon Helm.
Foltz said that after his team broke the secret about the Golden Bear’s return, people began telling him stories about who they had seen play there – the vision of how of which OCVibe could be a destination not only for big headlining acts, but also for big bands. -today’s emerging artists were beginning to come into focus.
“More and more people came up to me and said, I remember going there to see so-and-so, Jerry Garcia, or something like that,” Foltz said. “And what amuses them the most is that most of them say, ‘I snuck in there when I was 17.’ So there’s a sort of story there that takes us back to the 1970s, a time when we could get by without any problem. So there’s a bit of nostalgia in there.
But the promise of what Foltz has overseen with OCVibe is much more than nostalgia. He wants it to be the cultural center of the county.
Foltz’s mantra is to “do it right.”
Foltz became CEO of OCVibe two years ago, and before that he was its chief operating officer.
He served as chief financial officer for several companies, including the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1990s, and he joined sports and entertainment company Samueli in 2016.
“I like to say I’m a recovering accountant, but I think I’m more creative than that,” Foltz said.
Hundreds of new homes, dozens of restaurants, thousands of seats to fill — Foltz has to be a sponge, said his executive assistant Lydia Alemania, as his calendar fills with disparate stakeholders counting on OCVibe to get it right .
He gains the trust of not only the owners, the billionaire Samueli family, but also the musical artists, the workers who lay the concrete and steel, and the attendees they need to want to keep coming back.
He’s calmer than most business people you meet and said the opportunity to work with others and influence OC entertainment for decades to come makes him the “most blessed CEO of the country.”
“Doing it right” means becoming a place that will attract people, whether they are there to spend hundreds of dollars to see a show or to spend nothing and just stroll around the square during a festival.
“Doing it right” means being the place where people go to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
“We’d love for you to come have a beer, dinner and see a show,” Foltz said. “But if you want to come and just walk our paths, fabulous.”
Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said she got to know Foltz well through his participation in community events and obtaining city approvals to move forward with OCVibe’s plans.
“I always found him approachable and very easy-going,” Aitken said. “He is extremely down to earth and is not only a successful businessman, but also a community leader. Sometimes you don’t get both.
Aitken said it’s the largest investment in Anaheim since the resort’s expansion in the 1990s and “it’s really going to change the landscape.”
“Him being the steward of it is a really exciting time,” she said.
Seeing a band debut at the reincarnated Golden Bear, expand its fan base and move to a mid-sized venue nearby, then ultimately perform at the Honda Center, is OCVibe’s ambitious story, Foltz said.
“There’s something genetic that gives us goosebumps as human beings, isn’t there? Where the hair on the back of the neck sticks up and that’s reinforced by being part of a crowd,” he said.
The excitement around the return of the Golden Bear proves that fans’ memories of those “goosebumps” moments from the early days of the Southern California music scene have not faded and Foltz wants to give more likely people like that.
“You can watch live music alone, it wouldn’t be the same experience as if you were watching it with 16,000 other people,” he said. “It’s this feeling that we want to try to create deep within our humanity, to recreate again and again.”
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