Bill Foltz is the right age to remember how Southern California clubs were the jumpstart for so many bands to take off to national stardom.

As a teenager, he crowded into the Sweetwater Cafe – a local music venue in a Redondo Beach strip mall with wood-paneled walls – where everyone was crammed close together, and close to the artist.

He was seeing The Knack, who were on their way to fame with their one-hit wonder and debut rock single, “My Sharona.”

“Everybody remembers their first concert that they saw,” Foltz said.

Those club days of the Southern California music scene that consistently surged acts to popularity are all but over. The Sweetwater Cafe is now a hotel and parking garage.

But Foltz, CEO of OCVibe, is heading a massive shakeup of OC’s entertainment landscape – pulling on some of those collective memories to influence concertgoing in the future.

Since the moment it was announced four years ago, OCVibe has been compared to L.A. Live, the popular entertainment district in downtown Los Angeles built around the Crypto.com Arena that brought new life into the area.

Like L.A. Live with the Crypto Arena, OCVibe is making use of the parking lots around Anaheim’s Honda Center and ARTIC station and dozens more acres entities of Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli have amassed for the more than 100-acre development that Foltz is steering to fruition.

Foltz, 63, said the ambitions for OCVibe go beyond L.A. Live. It’s a whole neighborhood being built this decade for what the developers are calling OC’s new downtown.

OCVibe is more than two-and-a-half times larger and will be home to 2,000 new apartments. It’s adding two mid-size performance venues, reviving OC’s iconic Golden Bear nightclub and will have more than two dozen restaurants that will pull from the cuisines found throughout the county.

The ambitious $4 billion endeavor broke ground this year and will begin welcoming its first guests to a new 5,700-person performance venue and restaurants in 2026.

Foltz said part of OCVibe’s entertainment vision is targeting a gap in venue size not necessarily already served in the county.

Foltz’s mind for the last six years has been centered on getting the new concert-going experience for OC right, getting rid of all the friction and making it about an unforgettable evening.

Gone, he wants, will be the hassle of getting to a parking spot (and it’s going to be free). Servers at restaurants will know that you have a concert to get to and need to bring your check out before the show starts.

The unassuming CEO of OCVibe is synchronizing all the small parts that add up to make seeing an artist you love just that extra bit special.

Standing on stage at a glitzy launch party in September, Foltz promised that OCVibe’s developers were going to resurrect more of that experience for concertgoers in OC.

Reaching back to the past, Foltz and his team are also tapping the nostalgia of the Golden Bear nightclub, where music fans were crowding the stage in Huntington Beach about the same time he was having his goosebumps moment with The Knack.

The Golden Bear closed in 1986, but during its heyday it was where big acts honed their craft.

The intimate 300-seat nightclub with an edge will produce a connection between the artist and crowds that isn’t necessarily captured at large arenas like the Honda Center, he said, much like the Sweetwater Cafe when it hosted artists such as Vince Gill, Willie Nelson and Levon Helm.

Foltz said after his team lifted the secret on the Golden Bear’s comeback, people started to come up to him with stories of who they saw perform there – the vision of how OCVibe could be a destination not only for large headlining acts, but up-and-coming artists of today was coming into focus.

“I’ve had more people come up to me saying, I remember going there to see, so and so, Jerry Garcia, or something like that,” Foltz said. “And the thing that they get the biggest kick out of is most of them say, ‘I snuck in there when I was 17 years old.’ So, there’s a kind of a story there that takes us back to the 1970s when you could get away with that. So there’s a little nostalgia to that.”

But the promise for what Foltz has been overseeing with OCVibe is far more than nostalgia. He wants it to be the cultural center for the county.

The mantra for Foltz is to “get it right.”

Foltz became CEO of OCVibe two years ago, and before that was the chief operating officer.

He’s been the chief finance guy for several companies, including the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1990s, and he joined the Samueli’s sports and entertainment company 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, his executive assistant Lydia Alemania said, as his calendar fills with disparate stakeholders counting on OCVibe getting it right.

He’s earning the trust of not only the owners, the billionaire Samueli family, but the musical artists, the workers laying down concrete and steel and the attendees they need to want to keep coming back.

He’s calmer than most businesspeople you run into, and said the opportunity of getting to work with others and influence the entertainment in OC for decades to come makes him the “most blessed CEO in the country.”

“Getting it right” means becoming a place that will bring in people whether they are there to spend hundreds to see a show or spend nothing and just walk around the plaza during a festival.

“Getting it right” means being the place people go on New Year’s Eve to celebrate.

“We’d love for you to come and have a beer, have some dinner and see a show,” Foltz said. “But if you want to come and just walk on our paths, fabulous.”

Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said she has gotten to know Foltz well through him being at community events and getting approvals from the city to move forward on OCVibe’s plans.

“I’ve always found him to be approachable and really easy to get along with,” Aitken said. “He is extremely down to earth and not only a successful businessperson, but a community leader. Sometimes you don’t get both.”

Aitken said this is the largest investment in Anaheim since the resort expansion in the 1990s and “it’s really going to change the landscape.”

“The fact that he is the steward of it is a really exciting time,” she said.

Seeing a band start at the reincarnated Golden Bear, grow its fan base and move onto the mid-size venue nearby and then ultimately perform at the Honda Center is the aspirational story of OCVibe, Foltz said.

“There’s something genetic where we get goosebumps as human beings, right? Where the hair on the back of your neck goes up and that’s enhanced by being part of a crowd,” he said.

The excitement around the Golden Bear’s return proves fans’ memories of those “goosebump raising” moments from Southern California’s earlier music scene days haven’t faded and Foltz wants to give people more chances like that.

“You can watch live music alone, it wouldn’t be the same experience as if you watched it with 16,000 other people there,” he said. “That’s that sensation that you want to try and create deep down inside of our humanity, to recreate over and over again.”

Originally Published: December 27, 2024 at 6:45 AM PST