Talent Finds a Familiar Face Waiting : Music: Talent booker Jeff Gaulton is back--this time for the Rhythm Cafe.

For Jeff Gaulton, there has been a strange sense that he’s been there before. “You know, I closed the venue the other night for the first time since I’d left, and it was a weird feeling,” he said.

Throughout much of the 1980s, Gaulton was the talent buyer who made the now-defunct Bacchanal into arguably San Diego’s premier musical showcase club for national acts.

And now, he is back in that room again. It had been close to three years since he’d sat in the office counting out the night’s returns. The club’s name is now the Rhythm Cafe and the surroundings are different from the more spartan Bacchanal, but Jeff Gaulton is once again directing the action at 8022 Clairemont Mesa Blvd.

For San Diego music fans, watching the club deteriorate for the last few years was a sad and frustrating spectacle. From 1983 to 1990, the Bacchanal was a fixture of the local concert scene, playing host to the impressive roster of talent which Gaulton brought to town. Under his stewardship, the Bacchanal presented such diverse acts as Garth Brooks, Kenny G, Tracy Chapman, the Smithereens and Lenny Kravitz--national attractions being the main staple of the club’s entertainment calendar, with a sprinkling of local acts in between.

But in 1990, Gaulton’s contract was terminated by Rinja Inc., the company that had become the primary stockholder in the Bacchanal the year before. Gaulton cited differing views on business practices between himself and Rinja as the reason behind the termination; his competition whispered that his free-spending on acts had lost the club untold revenues.

Following his departure, the club was bought by Que Pasa Entertainment, which renamed the venue Sound FX in September of last year. The club’s decline following the change was swift and drastic--by last summer, Sound FX was functioning primarily as a home to local, second-rate metal bands.

Sound FX seemed to be cursed with problems and disorganization from day one. The club temporarily lost its liquor license shortly after its re-christening because the owners had failed to apply for a new license under the Que Pasa banner. Top-level bookings became a rare commodity at the club, and a number of the relatively few concerts that were booked, such as Peter Case and the Marshall Tucker Band, ended up being canceled.

Asked about the problems faced by Sound FX during its brief existence, Que Pasa president Paul Deutz declined to comment.

In October, Sound FX was purchased from Deutz by MusicSphere Inc. as part of a projected chain of nightclubs operating under the name Rhythm Cafe.

Gaulton, meanwhile, had remained active in the entertainment business following his departure from the Bacchanal. After a brief stint working with local concert promoter Bill Silva, Gaulton started his own music promotion company, Jaguar Productions. Jaguar’s biggest local coup was the presentation of a series of concerts (among them Johnny Winter, Robert Palmer and Mel Torme) at the long underused East County Performing Arts Center in El Cajon. But when approached by MusicSphere to be a talent buyer for the company, Gaulton decided to accept their offer and put Jaguar on the back burner.

“They were interested in reopening the Harlequin Dinner Theatre in Santa Ana, which is an absolutely beautiful room, and what had been the Bacchanal in San Diego,” said Gaulton, 32. “They explained their vision to me, what they’d like to do, and I decided to take them up on it.” Gaulton now books both the San Diego County and Orange County Rhythm Cafes.

According to Gaulton, the company has far-reaching plans for the immediate future.

“We foresee going into three more markets besides Orange County and San Diego before the summer starts,” he said. “We hope to go into Las Vegas, San Jose and we’re still undecided about the third market.” Eventually, MusicSphere plans to operate a nationwide chain of nightclubs under the Rhythm Cafe handle, all with the same premise in mind.

“The vision we have is twofold,” Gaulton said. “First, we want to revitalize what we look upon as a hole in the entertainment world, as far as national acts in an intimate setting go. Second, we want to create rooms that will be palatable to all audiences.”

To that end locally, the Rhythm Cafe has a substantially different feel to it than the Bacchanal or Sound FX. The room has been re-carpeted, repainted and ramps have been built to accommodate wheelchairs. More importantly, new air conditioning and sound systems have been installed. The vibe is now yuppie social club as much as it is rock ‘n’ roll dance hall.

The most dramatic change, however, is that the Rhythm Cafe is a nonsmoking building, with a patio area provided outdoors for nicotine users. One might think that the idea of a nonsmoking nightclub would go over like salt at a snail convention, but “that’s not the view we’re getting from the people who come here,” asserted Gaulton. “And that’s from the people who smoke, too. We’ve made it as comfortable as we possibly can for them.” That comfort consists of three large space heaters and a video monitor to watch the performers from the smoking area.

But the quality of performers featured is what any nightclub will ultimately have to stake its reputation on, and since Gaulton has been back doing booking, the room is once again offering up an impressive array of talent. Ron Wood, B.B. King, Eddie Money, George Carlin, the Neville Brothers and the Brecker Brothers are among the names to have been booked into the Rhythm Cafe since its October debut.

If Gaulton has developed a reputation as one who delivers the goods, he’s not without his share of critics in music circles, either. A self-described “hard-baller,” one of Gaulton’s tactics is to pay the talent he books so much more than rival promoters will offer that he effectively undercuts the competition’s chance of landing any acts he wants for himself. And, according to Malcolm Falk of the competing Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, the fans are the ones who end up paying the inflated bills.

“Jeff takes a view like, ‘I’ve got to get these acts,’ like he’s putting notches on a gun or something,” Falk said. “That’s his attitude, where the attitude of (the Belly Up) and other clubs is to provide a service to their clients. Say I make an offer of $3,000 for X, Y or Z band. That means I can get a fair price of about $10 a ticket. Jeff will come in with an offer of $7,000, which jacks the price up to about $22.50 a ticket. He charges two or three times the amount that we would for the same act. Is that a good thing for consumers? Obviously, time will take its toll on that philosophy of booking.”

Gaulton, for his part, defends himself as “a leader in reasonable ticket prices,” having initiated, while at the helm of the Bacchanal, the lower-priced radio-promoted series of concerts that included 91X Rising Star, KGB Vinyl Frontier, KSON New Faces of Country and KIFM Rising Star. He also believes that the differing financial situations of the two clubs makes the comparison unfair.

“I think Mr. Falk has developed a long-time tradition of paying bands much less than they’re worth versus a percentage of the door in an attempt to keep ticket prices down,” he said. “I have no problem with that, and it’s not my concern how he conducts his business. I’m not going to say anything bad about him.

“But Mr. Falk and Mr. (Belly Up co-owner Dave) Hodges own the building and most of what’s on that whole block they’re on. They also have a food concession which brings them income, they’re just set up much differently than we are. The fact that we do a much greater volume of national acts than they do puts us in a different position, too.”

Falk further speculated that the Rhythm Cafe is already experiencing serious financial difficulties, but Gaulton asserted that the club is doing fairly well, all things considered.

“This place had been run into the ground, with no maintenance upkeep,” he said. “It had been a heavy metal venue, with a void for anything else that was going on. It had gone from a multimillion-dollar venue as the Bacchanal into a losing proposition. Given all that, it’s doing pretty well now. People are starting to come back to this venue that hadn’t been here in the last two and a half years, since I’d been gone. I think we’re building up a strong base again.

“I can’t snap my fingers and pick up where I left off, but in the next few months, you’re going to see the kind of acts coming here that were here when we were doing great business.”