Long Beach resident Dan Regan plays trombone with Reel Big Fish at a show in 2011 at the City National Grove of Anaheim. Above photo by Brittany Woolsey, bottom photo courtesy of Facebook.
Editor’s note: The following is the first in a new ongoing series on notable Long Beach residents.
For Dan Regan, Long Beach was always home, but didn’t always feel that way—until recently.
After spending about 20 years in Orange County ska band Reel Big Fish, known for its perpetual tour schedule, Regan, 37, retired from the band in October 2013 in order to focus his time on his family and his coming craft beer brewery, Liberation Brewing Company (LBC), which he plans to open in Long Beach later this year.
Regan, a resident of Los Altos, said he was born and raised in Long Beach. An alum of Long Beach City College, Regan also attended Gant Elementary School, Hughes Middle School and Long Beach Poly High School, where he played music at each school.
“I have a music and teacher family, so playing music was required,” he said in an interview with the Long Beach Post. “Marching band at Long Beach Poly was great. It’s awesome for an incoming freshmen because you meet up a month before school starts and then you have 100 people backing you up on the first day of school. I am still good friends with the band folks I met at Poly. The jazz band is what got me playing with Reel Big Fish. Ikey Owens started a band called Pocket Lent with a bunch of the guys from jazz band. Travis Werts (trumpet) and I went to see Pocket Lent at a local show and saw Reel Big Fish there. The next weekend, we tried out for Reel Big Fish.”
The band exploded onto the scene in the early 90s, with songs like “Sell Out” filling the airwaves, earning the band a top spot in the burgeoning ska community. From there, the band began essentially touring nonstop across the world as headliners, as well as on bigger tours like the Vans Warped Tour, which they have performed on multiple times.
But being on the road got tiring, Regan said, and he felt a growing sense of distance toward his home.
“I was born here, but after being on the road for so long, each time I came home, I felt like a stranger,” he said. “I had the connection to all my old friends, through my wife and eventually social media, but when I would hang out, the conversation was, ‘When did you get home?’ and ‘When do you leave again?’ It wasn’t until we started The Littlest Man Band, that I felt part of anything around here. It’s a defense mechanism. We stayed friends, but I could not be relied upon to be there for anyone. If I was home, family came first, especially once I had kids. When you don’t have kids and you come home from tour, you can still hang at the bars and party all night. You can sleep in until 3:00PM. So the difference between home and the road isn’t too different. Once kids are in the mix, switching between the two lives was like jumping from the pool to the jacuzzi. Mentally, it became easier to invent two different characters.”
Since retiring, Regan, who now works at a South Bay auto dealership, said he and his family frequent the El Dorado Nature Center and Rancho Los Alamitos at the top of Bixby Hill.
And, he said, the beer scene in Long Beach is also incomparable, citing bars like Beachwood BBQ and Alex’s Bar as examples.
While on the road with Reel Big Fish, a band that tends to bring up brewskies in their songs, the band would visit breweries all over the world.
That’s when he came up with the idea for LBC.
“We were visiting breweries on our downtime and eventually playing breweries and beer fests,” he said. “I had been homebrewing for a while and after chatting up the folks at some great breweries, I realized what I wanted to do next. We will be opening doors in 2015. I’d like it to be spring, so it will probably be the end of summer. We are about two-thirds of the way through funding, most of which has been funded by family and friends. We’re still taking meeting with folks and securing the last bits. Liberation Brewing Co. will be a five-barrel production brewery with a tasting room. Our goal is to supply all our friends’ bars with awesome beer. The LBC initials were totally on purpose. We had another name in the early stages of planning and I was sitting there one night throwing out names. At one point, I said Liberation but passed over it. I then said something about how nobody had gone with an LBC name, in Long Beach, yet. My wife, who I assumed had tuned me out, looked over and said Liberation Brewing Co.”
As a celebrity in his own right, Regan said Long Beach has advantages over the hustle and bustle of Hollywood.
“There’s relatively cheap rent without the cliche of ‘moving to LA to be famous,'” he said. “Artists come here to work on their art. When it’s time to get famous, LA is right up the highway. Until then, one must put in countless hours, honing their skill. All these artists from different mediums live so close together and hang at the same bars and coffee shops. Sprinkle in the beach air, add a one-fourth cup of Urban lifestyle and bake it all together in the most diverse population in America.”
He said Long Beach has an identity all its own, and it’s one that can’t be replaced, at least in his book.
“I always wanted to get out of here,” he recalled. “Once I did, I loved coming back. After experiencing Russia in the winter and Australia in the summer, my mind was made up about settling down here. I also don’t trust places that aren’t racially diverse. When you grow up somewhere that is, you notice when you are somewhere that isn’t. The city has a strong identity. When traveling, if I said I was from Long Beach, people’s eyes would light up. It’s a good feeling. We’re not from LA, we’re from Long Beach. It’s kind of like NYC and Brooklyn. My good friend Tyler, who lived in Brooklyn, pointed that ‘Long Beach identity’ thing out to me when he came to visit. I took him to Alex’s Bar. A young lady broke a bottle on his head. He turned to me and said, ‘Just like home!'”