Stevie Salas Back on S.D. Scene : Music: His return to the nightclub circuit is a warm-up for an upcoming national tour.

During the first half of the 1980s, Stevie Salas was a regular on the San Diego nightclub scene, playing rock ‘n’ roll clubs like the Rodeo in La Jolla and the Distillery in Solana Beach with his band, This Kid’s.

This fall, after a five-year absence, the singer-guitarist returned to the local nightclub scene for dates at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa with his new band, Stevie Salas Color Code.

Salas’ return, however, is only temporary. Instead of trying to regain his local following, he’s warming up for a major national tour, opening for hard-rock guitar whiz Joe Satriani. The tour starts in January, the same month his first solo album is due out on Island Records.

Salas has come a long way since he left San Diego, and This Kid’s, in January, 1985, to move to Los Angeles.

He’s played on albums by such established stars as George Clinton, Eddie Money and Bootsy Collins. He’s produced sessions for the Tubes, Was (Not Was) and the Pandoras. He scored the sound track to the movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and toured for nine months with Rod Stewart.

“Playing local clubs again, it’s more scary now than before I did all that other stuff,” said Salas, whose next Bacchanal engagement is tonight. “I’m actually more nervous than I was playing in front of 100,000 people in a football stadium with Rod (Stewart), because San Diego is my hometown, and, when everyone knows you, it’s hard to go up there and try to be this rock-star character you portray.”

Salas, who just turned 26, was born and raised in Oceanside. He taught himself to play the guitar when he was 15 and soon formed his first rock band, This Kid’s. After two years of playing high school dances and parties, This Kid’s landed its first nightclub booking in 1980 and for the next five years continued to ply the local bar circuit, with ever-increasing success.

“We played every big rock club in the county and even put out an album, which got quite a bit of local airplay,” Salas recalled.

By January, 1985, however, he had tired of the local bar scene, so he quit This Kid’s and moved to Los Angeles, determined to become a real star.

“I knew that I had gone as far as I could go with This Kid’s, and I was really eager to go on to the next step,” Salas said. “I was no longer content with being a big fish in a little pond; I wanted it all.”

His first year in Los Angeles was “really hard,” Salas said. “I lived in a friend’s walk-in closet because I couldn’t afford my own apartment,” he said. “I was starving to death--I lost 20 pounds--but I kept pumping away, auditioning for session work, writing songs, and, most importantly, making friends.

“I realized, right off, that in L.A., who you know is what counts most. If people like you, you’re going to get ahead, even if you’re not as talented as the person next to you.”

One of the first friends Salas made in Los Angeles owned a recording studio and indirectly gave the aspiring star his big break.

“He let me sleep on the studio’s couch, in return for running the practice room,” Salas said. “One day, George Clinton was in the studio, working on an album, and I went up to him and said I’d played guitar with this guy he uses. He said, ‘Really? Want to come in and play?’--just like that.

“I played on a bunch of cuts on the album over the next month, and the whole time I was pretending to be this big session player, telling everyone I was double scale and working with George Clinton. And George was just so cool that I started getting all these calls for more session work.”

For the next year, Salas had plenty of session work to keep him busy. “Most of the people I played with were unknowns,” he said. “I did whatever I could do to pay the bills.”

He was making money and establishing a reputation, but he was also bored. “In a way, it really sucked, because when you’re doing sessions, you have to play the way they want you to play,” Salas said, “and I wanted to play the way I wanted to play--really wild and crazy, breaking new ground.”

So in early 1987, he accepted an offer from avant-garde producer Zeo--whom he had met through a guitarist-for-hire ad in a local music magazine--to fly to England and work with an experimental band. He stayed there for a month.

His first week back in the United States, Salas received two offers to tour. The first, from Thomas Dolby, he rejected; the second, from Andy Taylor, he accepted--a decision he would soon regret.

“Thomas Dolby is a far superior musician, but Andy was doing a major sports arena tour, opening for the Psychedelic Furs, and that’s something I had always wanted to do,” Salas said.

“I was getting all geared up for the rock-star life, buying walls of Marshall amps and a bunch of new guitars. But right before the tour started, I got fired--I was getting more attention than he (Taylor) was, and he didn’t want that; he had just left Duran Duran and didn’t want to share the spotlight with anyone.

“I was really crushed--I had never been fired from anything in my life--but then my good karma struck back and Andy got kicked off the tour after the first gig.”

Salas subsequently rejoined Zeo in England but by September was back in Los Angeles, working as a staff producer for David Kershenbaum Productions. He produced sessions for the Tubes, Was (Not Was) and the Pandoras; in the meantime, he also assembled his own band, Color Code--a trio with C.J. deVillar on bass and Winston A. Watson Jr. on drums--and began writing songs and cutting demonstration tapes.

“At that point, the thing I wanted most was my own recording contract,” Salas said. “I had done my share of working with other people, and I was ready to do my own project.

“Fortunately, I was getting a lot of press--I was really kicking ass in L.A.--and all of a sudden, all these people wanted to manage me.”

Salas ended up signing a management deal with Bill Graham, and, in early 1988, his group made its official debut on the L.A. club scene.

In April, however, Salas put his solo career on hold when he was invited to tour with Rod Stewart.

“I had exactly eight days to learn all his material before the tour began,” Salas recalled. “It was just mind-blowing; I had to be Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood and five other guitarists, all in one, and our first three gigs were in major football stadiums in front of 50,000 people. I had never really toured before, and now here I was, riding around in a limousine with Rod Stewart, people mobbing us wherever we went.”

While he was on the road, Salas said, Bill Graham shopped his demo tapes around and promptly secured him a solo deal with Island Records.

“That’s why I left the Stewart tour five months early (in February), because my record company was getting (upset), saying, ‘Let’s make a record,’ ” Salas said. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he found working on the album a lot more difficult than he expected.

“When I started to write, I found I was so brainwashed, having played nothing but Rod’s material for the last nine months, that I had lost my real self,” Salas said.

“So I bought a house in L.A., built a studio, and just did everything I could to get back that hungry edge, to get my material back to where it was really me, not corporate-sounding like Rod.”

It took Salas more than four months to write an album’s worth of songs. In June, he flew to New York with his band and recorded the album in 33 days.

Guest performers on the album include Talking Heads keyboard player Bernie Worell, ex-Funkadelic singer Mudbone Cooper and Bootsy Collins.

“It’s very much a rock record, even though I used all those funky guys,” Salas said. “It’s got a real rock top with a real funky bottom.”

Once the album was completed, Salas said, he returned to San Diego for a month of doing nothing. “The pressure of doing the album had been so great that I was basically brain dead,” he said. “I sat around a lot and rode my bicycle on the beach.”

By August, however, he was back in action, doing session work in Los Angeles, New York, Florida and London--where he took part in a recording project benefiting the American Indian. (Salas himself is half Mayan and Apache.)