Groetsch and his wife Lesley operate the new venture.

“It conjures up all kinds of images. You can even smell it and you’ll have the same images.”

I tried smelling, but there was sensory deprivation from the construction aroma. Workers in haphazard ant fashion were on ladders, moving particleboard, painting the walls, and doing whatever was necessary to get the Orange Peel open for business on Oct. 25 (with Louisiana blues meister, Sonny Landreth as the club’s opening performer). However, I could see and feel the roundness — from the arched industrial-like ceiling down to the silver bar with a round aluminum-sided top, and then back dead center to the circular stage.

Greg (my faithful photographer) and I had come into the Orange Peel an hour earlier. My excitement was like a dog whose electric shock collar had been dismantled. The Orange Peel is going to be one of those bonified music clubs that will be whispered in the same breath as New York’s The Knitting Factory or New Orleans’ Tipitina’s.

However, we had stepped in three weeks before its inception. The Orange Peel has yet to shower up and look presentable for its thousand guests a night. Jack had yet to appear, and it seemed to typify the wait that the musically voracious have had to sustain until a big time music club rolled into town. We looked for the inner splendor, but it was hard to see amidst the building inspectors, shrapnel, construction workers who wonder who the hell you are, and an array of smells that may frighten the ozone.

But little tufts of beauty manifested itself. There are maroon walls on the back of the stage with a twist of orange color on both sides. To the left was a silver bar (still being manicured) that will hold 40 beer taps. To the right of the stage is a black mural with a big navel orange and orange lettering with the logo name.

Jack and his wife, Lesley soon appeared, and both have that vibrancy that Asheville needs. I had summoned up all kinds of images of what they would look like. I suspected weathered souls whose voices crackled from too many visits to the smoking room. However, neither one of them fit the image of the club owner my gray matter was searching for (consult Tony Soprano). Both are young, healthy, and look like they just got off the trail. However, both are veterans of the music industry.

Jack arrived a little before Lesley, and he had the grand honor of giving us the nickel tour with a history lesson to boot. Jack started Howling Wolf, a popular nightclub in New Orleans that he ran for 12 years before selling it (the club still exists by the same name).

“We were out in the suburbs for the first two years,” recalled Jack “We couldn’t find a place we wanted, then a friend of mine found a place in the suburbs; it had closed down unexpectedly. And I saw there was need for regional music.”

Jack’s next big move was to the heart of New Orleans in the Warehouse District. The ‘little club that could’ had done well on the outskirt, but now they would have to slingshot against the Goliaths.

“But we took a chance (moving from the suburbs) because I always wanted to be in the Warehouse district,” said Groetsch. “We started all over again, but we kept the variety. We did Indie, Jazz, blues, and various rock with a little edge to it. Then the House of Blues came to town and Tipitina’s was fighting the same ground, and we kept our heads down, doing our own thing and all the sudden we looked up and were doing well and getting a lot of press. Sometimes when you go with your instincts it all works out.”

The intuition paid off big. The Howling Wolf was known for its insistence on variety, and awards from the Crescent City’s press started to crop up.

“We got a couple of awards here and there from the community,” said Jack. “We got best club and another was best club owner, but, hey, I was there everyday [laughs]. Besides it’s hard to tell who the owners of the House of Blues are with these entities like Dan Aykroyd. We just borrowed money and kept one step ahead of the creditors and we built it up from a 300-capacity room to a thousand.”

The music rushed out of the Howling Wolf like a busted reservoir. There was hardly a time for silence.

It was during this tenure that Jack met his future wife, Lesley.

“I worked for Howling Wolf until Jack married me and stopped paying me,” she laughed amidst the buzz of table saws. Her resume actually runs a lot deeper. She was a booking agent for Everit Production Company, and she managed bands while still in college.

Lesley is also spearheading a benefit for the children’s center (there is a Holiday Auction and Concert for the Children’s Center on Dec. 8). The couple used to hold an event every year in New Orleans for the school boards. Their charitable side comes from the old social clubs in New Orleans:

“We’ll do whatever it takes to make it work,” stressed Jack. “We hope to pretty much make it a community center, hence our tag — Social Aid and Pleasure Club. It goes back to the old Mardi Gras Krewes in New Orleans that had community centers for the neighborhood and they did benefits throughout the year.”

The once run-down building on Biltmore Avenue will be the future source for capillaries of music, charities, artist markets (which will run on Saturdays to coincide with the organic tailgate market), a Sunday pig-pickin’ (with a live band), and whatever else the Groetschs can cook up. All this wonderful fare will continue a colorful history that this building has held.

“The building is from the mid-50s,” said Jack. “It was built by the Army as a USO recruiting office, and then it was a rolling rink, bowling alley, and then it became a club. It was the Jade Club, the Emerald Lounge, and then the last one being the Orange Peel. We just love the name; it had a great ring to it.”

The couple was already fond of the Asheville area, and they found the building thanks to an old friend and renowned artist, Suzie Millions.

“She tipped us off on the building. Suzie had worked for us for 12 years in the club down in New Orleans. My wife, Lesley, was very familiar to the area, and she has cousins in Boone. I had a lot of friends out this way. I had relatives who came out here for vacation. We just fell in love with it, and fell in love with the project.”

Jack also realized that the building had many gems hidden in the archaic debris — “We looked at this building and saw the possibilities and I said to myself that I could do a lot of things right with this place. In New Orleans, I had an old 1850s warehouse on the river and it had its limitations. When we first came in here there were drop ceilings. We stuck our head through the openings [which hid the arch of the building] and said, “Whoa, look at this!”

He also realized that the Asheville market was a snug fit for a 1,000-person club — “We’re filling a void between the clubs and the auditorium. Clubs here are great, they have a good niche, and the one thing that attracted us was the good music scene,” said Groetsch. “You need that, you can’t just have one good club. You need serious stepping-stones and you need a vibrant music community. Even for us outsiders, only being here a year and a half, and we saw what was going on downtown with the restaurants, galleries, clubs, and the retail stores, it seemed right.”

The manicuring is going well, and the sight-seeing tour gave me an idea of how a club can be sustainable for both artist and patron. To the side of the stage is an elevator that can haul all of the musicians’ equipment from the large infrastructure underneath. This will be especially fruitful for bands like Little Feat (here on Sunday, Oct. 27) who has an 80-foot tractor-trailer.

The sound system is state of the art (consult their website, www.theorangepeel.net for all the tech info) and promises to be a worthy companion to even the most discriminatory of ears.

“The sound system is horizontal,” Jack beamed. “There’s no hotspots or deadspots, it goes around the room in a hundred-degree radius. However, touring acts can disconnect it and hook up their own gear.”

Forty beer taps should corner most palates, and the food will be brought in from one of Jack’s old New Orleans friends, Chris Jones. Chris and his wife, Ashley Thibodaux, have recently opened up Thibodaux/Jones Creole Kitchen at the Grey Eagle Music Tavern. The couple will have tables set up at the end of the bar in the Orange Peel, and they will be serving Creole fare like jambalaya, gumbo, and etouffe.

In the front of the Orange Peel will be a gallery run by the Groetsch’s old friend, Suzie Millions.

The grand opener of the club will be blues man Sonny Landreth with Tift Merritt as the opener. The two musicians provide a past and future for the Groetschs.

“Tift Merritt is from Chapel Hill and won the Merle Fest songwriter’s competition, and then there’s Sonny Landreth who’s from southern Louisiana. Last time Sonny played in my club, Bonnie Raitt (who thinks he sings the moon) was in my club all night. So on opening night we have someone from North Carolina and someone from Louisiana.”

With all this great music coming, I remembered a quote that Mike, one of Jack’s buddies, told me. Mike is one of a plethora of Jack’s friends who has come up from New Orleans to help build the Orange Peel. When Jack introduced me, Mike said jokingly, “Yeah, he put a black bag over my head, beat me with a stick, and brought me up here.”

Well, they’re going to have to use the same methods to get me out of the club. Hopefully, my mask will be orange.