Singer Still Hopes for Big Break : Music: Since flirting with success in the mid-1980s, San Diego musician Mark Meadows has found disappointment routine.

For working club musicians, fortune frequently cuts both ways at the same time. Last week, local singer Mark Meadows was to open a Belly Up Tavern concert that featured the gospel group Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Meadows had coveted the gig, essentially an audition for his band, Class Act. A good showing would enhance the band’s chances of being hired at the popular concert venue on a more regular basis.

But two days prior to the gig, Meadows still was looking for a temporary replacement for one musician, who had opted to play a paying job elsewhere on the same night.

Knowing that money speaks louder than ifs--especially in hard times--Meadows, 40, understood the musician’s priorities. Still, instead of giddy anticipation, Meadows felt another twinge of the frustration that had become routine in recent years--a byproduct of the larger disappointment the singer has grown accustomed to since flirting with success in the mid-’80s.

Meadows’ frustrations are kept concealed from his fans by the winning stage persona and soulful singing that has earned him critical kudos from several local publications.

Business, too, seems to pick up at local watering holes that feature Class Act. A recent performance at the B Street Cafe downtown elicited the best audience response the club had seen in months, and Meadows would be similarly well-received by the Belly Up crowd.

But the local buzz about Meadows has, for the most part, remained that--local.

Seated in a coffee shop near his apartment in University City, Meadows updated a story that had seemed so full of promise a decade earlier. His natural ebullience, which somehow had survived a lengthy ordeal of personal and professional struggles, was tempered only by a hacking cough--yet another cause for concern as he prepared for the Belly Up show.

“It’s been a trip, and it’s not over yet,” Meadows said, breaking into his characteristic, staccato laugh. “But it can get really deep,” he added, growing more serious. “Sometimes, it just feels like you’re watching your dreams dry up. I think about leaving San Diego, maybe going to Vegas. Even back to L.A. Then I think of what that whole mess was like. . .,” he said, his voice trailing off.

In 1983, Meadows’ career was on the upswing. After nine years in San Diego--the previous five spent singing professionally--the Cleveland-born vocalist had developed a loyal following on the local club circuit by virtue of his soulful singing and winning stage persona. His repertoire of soul, funk, pop, jazz and rock included several crowd-pleasing, original tunes. That year, with moral and financial support from his then-girlfriend, Meadows released two of those originals--”You and Me” and “I Can Love Again”--as a local single, keeping many copies of the 45 for promotional purposes.

By that time, Meadows also had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance to recording artist Jeffrey Osborne (whose hits include “On the Wings of Love,” “You Should Be Mine (The Woo Woo Song)” and “Love Power,” a duet with Dionne Warwick). The two became friends, and at Osborne’s urging, Meadows, his girlfriend and her four children from a previous marriage moved to L.A., where Osborne felt Meadows’ talents stood a much better chance of bearing fruit.

For a while, things looked promising. Meadows fared well in area talent contests and soon was a regular performer at two popular clubs. But as time went by, he felt trapped by a familiar syndrome of drawing big crowds for club owners reluctant to share the proceeds. And some of the habitues of those joints went beyond bizarre.

“I wasn’t making bunk,” Meadows remembered, using one of his favorite euphemisms. “L.A. is a very expensive place to live, and it got real hard to make rent, pay bills, keep the kids out of trouble, keep my relationship stable and keep my career moving forward. Plus, I was playing Mr. Mom, too. I was the one getting up to cook breakfast and get the kids off to school so my girlfriend could try to get a business started. It was crazy.”

One night, a male high roller caught Meadows’ act and invited him to perform at the club he managed. But there was a catch.

“This guy offered me $3,000 a week to let him perform a certain sexual act on me,” Meadows said. “And some people I knew actually thought I should consider it! That’s when I started wondering what I was doing up there.”

Throughout this period of nonstop hustling, Osborne served as both mentor and cheerleader. Meadows paid frequent visits to Osborne’s fashionable home, where music notables such as Johnny Gill, Kim Carnes and members of Van Halen sometimes hung out. The two would sit in Osborne’s high-tech home recording studio and talk music while Osborne worked on his albums, sometimes all night. When Meadows’ fortunes had not improved three years after his arrival in L.A., Osborne made him a proposition.

“The deal was, if I could come up with $15,000, Jeffrey would not only produce three singles for me in his studio, but he’d also shop them” to get a record deal with a major label, Meadows said. “Of course, this was a bargain, and Jeffrey’s wife had a fit, because he’d been offered $80,000 to produce Aretha Franklin, and here he was thinking of giving a discount to this unknown. But he knew that was a lot of money to me. He wanted to be sure I was serious and wasn’t looking for a free ride.”

Osborne’s offer gave Meadows new hope, but investors were hard to come by.

“I just couldn’t find anyone who had that much belief in me,” Meadows said. “I had friends who considered putting up the money--people for whom $15,000 was nothing at all. But there’s something about the music industry that scares people off. They don’t look on it as a business, the way they look at the stock market. So, they backed out.

“One guy talked to Jeffrey for two hours, just to make sure he was on the level, and still decided not to go through with it. I had to keep telling myself, ‘It’s their money, and they have a right to spend it, or not spend it, any way they want,’ ” Meadows said.

By late 1986, Meadows was working a 9-to-5 job, and he found himself becoming further removed from music. Although he’d been in L.A. almost three years, it seemed less, because once a month he drove to San Diego to perform at either the Bahia or the Catamaran hotels. He was averaging four hours of sleep per night, and the strain was taking its toll on Meadows’ domestic life, which was under siege from a new source.

To cut expenses, Meadows and his extended family had moved into a smaller apartment. His girlfriend--by then his fiancee--had signed the rental agreement while Meadows was occupied elsewhere. Not until they moved in did the landlord realize he had rented the unit to an interracial couple. He didn’t like it.

“I tried everything to convince this guy that we were good people,” Meadows recalled. “I was friendly, I kept the place looking nice, paid the rent on time, everything. But he didn’t want me there. Finally, two weeks before Christmas, he kicked us out, claiming that my girlfriend had falsified her application by not mentioning me.”

Suddenly unable to come up with enough money to pay first and last months’ rent, plus deposit, on a new apartment, and not being destitute enough to qualify for temporary quarters at a shelter, the Meadows troupe faced a bleak holiday season. Only an emergency loan wired from a friend in San Diego got them off the streets. But, by then, their situation was spiraling out of control.

“One day, I went somewhere to sing,” Meadows related, “and I came back to find the whole apartment cleaned out, like I’d never lived there. My girlfriend was gone, the kids--who I loved--were gone. All my clothes were gone, all my musical stuff, my CDs, everything. It broke my heart. I said, ‘bunk it,’ and came back to San Diego with no job, no money, no place to stay.

“All I had left were two pairs of white pants and two white coats,” he said, suddenly laughing at the memory. “That’s when I hooked up with (keyboardist) Rick Bezold, and we started playing as a duo at the Reuben E. Lee. For three months, I sang in one of those white outfits. One night at the Reuben, one of the coats was stolen, and it cut my wardrobe in half.”

The Reuben E. Lee gig lasted until 1988, after which Meadows put together the first in a series of bands. Today, he splits his time between working with Bezold at Anthony’s in La Jolla and with Class Act. And, in spite of a recession that Meadows claims is making club owners even more penurious, he persists in his ultimate pursuit.

“With what you have to go through just to get to the microphone, you’ve got to be crazy to put yourself through this,” he declared. “I mean, if this is just a test, I hope the beep ends soon so I can get back to regular programming!” He laughs long and hard before continuing.

“But it’s my life--I’ve been singing since I was three, and when I don’t sing, I go crazy, I start gettin’ evil. Trying to make it in this business has kept me from committing to marriage, from having children, from buying a home, from all those things normal people do. But Jeffrey once told me, ‘Mark, the only difference between you and me is that I got my chance, and yours is yet to come.’ So, I keep doing it. And even if that chance never comes, I can honestly say I’ve been blessed to be able to live in San Diego and do what I love to do.”

Mark Meadows and Rick Bezold perform Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. to midnight, at Anthony’s La Jolla, 4120 La Jolla Village Drive. For information, call 457-5008.