Name Alone Won’t Do It for Club : Peppers Golden Bear, to open Sunday in Huntington Beach, will need more than just a resurrected marquee to find success.

After a minor stumble into the starting gate, Peppers Golden Bear is slated to open Sunday in Huntington Beach, and if you’ve been reading the ads, a legend will be reborn when the rock and pop nightclub throws wide its doors (albeit a few days later than originally planned).

I sincerely wish the club luck, because it’s an ongoing source of embarrassment that a county of more than 2 million people--one with two professional sports franchises, two of the top amusement parks in the nation and a $73-million Performing Arts Center--has only one nightclub that regularly books major pop, rock and jazz performers.

In that respect, any addition to the local music scene, if it can be called a scene, is welcome. But I fear that Peppers Golden Bear is trying too hard to milk fond memories of a bygone era in Orange County pop music.

Have you seen the ads? First there was the teaser series of “Bear” tracks, with a succession of names and dates of acts that played the original Golden Bear, Orange County’s folk and rock music haven that presented the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt and other Hall of Fame-worthy names.

Then there was the recent full-page ad with an open letter from John Tiernan, chairman of Peppers Inc., in which he wrote effusively about the old Golden Bear as Orange County’s “great icon of entertainment” and of the new association between Peppers and “the founder of the original Golden Bear, Rick Babiracki.”

I’m sure Rick Babiracki, who has signed on as entertainment director, would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the founder of the original Golden Bear, an error that probably can be traced to an overzealous, under-informed ad writer.

Actually, the Golden Bear was built in the 1920s as a restaurant and nightclub--it was a popular watering hole for Angelenos making the long, hard freeway-less drive to San Diego--and the operation changed hands numerous times over the decades. It was George Nikos and Robert Seaborn who bought it in the 1960s and developed it into the folk and rock club out of which grew the legends Tiernan refers to.

Rick Babiracki and his brother, Chuck, didn’t enter the picture until the mid-’70s, long after the Bear’s golden ‘60s glow--and its house lights--had faded into blackness. The Babirackis reopened the club and reinvigorated it by booking many veteran as well as emerging performers along the way. (It’s disputable, though, how “instrumental” the club was in launching the already rising careers of Huey Lewis & the News, Oingo Boingo, Steve Martin and others cited in Tiernan’s letter.)

There are two things more bothersome than the historical inaccuracies and puffery: the fact that Peppers appears to be most interested in exploiting the Golden Bear name for whatever promotional value it may still carry; and that its lineup to date largely consists of acts that have been around long enough to have played the original Golden Bear.

It reminds me a bit of what happened with “Jeopardy!” The old show, as hosted by Art Fleming and announced by the inimitable Don Pardo, was my favorite TV game show because it actually tested contestants’ knowledge, rather than simply their memories for trivia.

Then, years after having carved out its niche as the class of the field, “Jeopardy!” was canceled to make room for newcomers. In much the same way, the old Golden Bear was leveled in 1986 to make way for the splashy new redevelopment project that is, ironically, bringing Peppers Golden Bear to life.

Sure enough, “Jeopardy!” returned to the air, but Fleming and Pardo were gone, replaced by an unctuous Alex Trebek and, worse, mindlessly simplified questions (or answers, to you “Jeopardy!”-maniacs).

The only thing that remained was the format and the name--obviously the producers were hoping to pander to the loyalties of the old show’s fans with a product that was only a shadow of what they once knew. The show has survived, though, because not long after returning to the air, producers went back to the character of the original show and reinstated its sense intelligence. (I can only hope it was Fleming who gave Trebek his much-needed dignity transplant.)

In the same vein, the Golden Bear of the ‘60s didn’t earn its legendary status by specializing in the music of 10, 20 and 30 years earlier, as Peppers Golden Bear is doing. The initial lineup includes Eric Burdon and Robbie Krieger, John Kay & Steppenwolf, Edgar Winter & Rick Derringer, Ronnie Montrose, Pat Travers and Hawaii’s answer to Steve and Eydie, Cecilio and Kapono.

When Nikos and Seaborn were running the Golden Bear in the ‘60s, they booked acts that were at the forefront of the contemporary music scene. To their credit, Peppers Golden Bear at least has included a couple of relatively contemporary acts, such as the Bonedaddys show on Wednesday.

Rick Babiracki argues quite earnestly that the heavily nostalgic content of the first month or so of shows simply reflects the fact that the new Bear is just getting its feet wet. Once they are back in the game full-speed, he promises the Bear will aim for a similarly eclectic blend of talent that now distinguishes its chief competitor, San Juan Capistrano’s Coach House, which stepped into the concert-club void left when the old Bear closed four years ago.

Still, it injects a bitter taste into the opening-night bubbly to hear so much made of a club, a building and an era to which the new operators have absolutely no connection, except for a resurrected name.

In the long run, the best thing Peppers can do for the Orange County pop music fan is not to reminisce about the good old days, but to do its best to deliver some of its own good new days.