The Impresario
Rick Bartalini, director of programming at Wells Fargo Center, talks with singer Olivia Newton-John backstage following her performance Thursday before taking her out to meet fans and contest winners. A show by Newton-John was the first concert Bartalini attended in the early 1980s
Rick Bartalini is a major reason the Wells Fargo Center, Sonoma County’s largest concert venue, has raised its profile
From the back row of the Wells Fargo Center, Rick Bartalini watches Donna Summer pace through afternoon sound check. When she’s not reminding her band to work on their solos, she’s concerned about lights missing above the stage. Actually, it’s hard to recognize the ’70s disco siren. In wide black sunglasses, a black baseball cap and matching shirt and pants, she looks more like a secret shopper.
In three hours she will rise up through an elevator and shoot out of a piano for an entrance befitting a diva. But, by afternoon, it’s already been a long day. When Summer’s crew arrived in the morning, Bartalini was waiting with Starbucks coffee. The massive two-story stage production has been crammed onto a stage half its size. Even the symbolic disco ball had to go for fear Summer might bang her head while popping out of the piano. Then there was the linen crisis. Although it wasn’t specified in the contract, everything in her dressing room had to be covered in linen sheets. The floor. The walls. The table.
It’s a far cry from the wheeling and dealing that took place several months ago when the show was booked. As Wells Fargo’s director of programming for the past five years, Bartalini, 36, is a major reason the center has raised its profile. Negotiating artist fees well beyond $100,000 , he is responsible for luring a diverse lineup that ranges in taste and talent from Jewel, Pink and Sevendust to Jose Carreras, Larry the Cable Guy and Ellen DeGeneres.
But booking the largest venue in Sonoma County involves far more than name-dropping and playing hardball with agents and managers. It means scouring the hills for a philanthropist willing to donate a private jet to fly in Carol Burnett (whose contract demands such royal treatment). Or driving comic Wayne Brady (and the brand-new TV he needs to play video games) to three different hotels before he agrees to spend the night. Or steam-cleaning the backstage carpet at 2 a.m. after Enrique Iglesias and his crew said “vaya con dios” with a raging food fight. (Proof: Mustard stains still remain on framed photos on the walls.)
To his staff of more than a dozen, Bartalini is incredibly demanding. He freely admits it: “I require total dedication.”To the performers, he is a godsend. But to himself, he’s still looking for the acceptance he never found as a kid. Raised a Jehovah’s Witness while grappling with his own sexuality, he left home at 15 and never returned. To this day, he has no contact with his family.
His parents split when he was young, and he went to live with his mother, whom he remembers as often absent or, when she was around, often drinking. They never broached his homosexuality. School life was even worse. What started at Rincon Valley Junior High escalated by the time he got to Montgomery High School.
“I would wake up on the ground with a bloody face after some guy I didn’t even know ran up and hit me in the head and knocked me out,” he remembers. “At the time, I didn’t really know what being gay was. Everybody else knew I was different before I knew.”
Several weeks after the sold-out Donna Summer concert, Bartalini picks a quiet Saturday to take a trip back to Montgomery and sit and reflect in the empty quad. “I think I walked through here maybe once or twice the whole time I was in school,” he says. “Most of the time I was hiding in the library at lunch.”
He was the kid in the Boy George T-shirt. The kid who tried to hide during recess. Cheryl Cardoza, his physical education teacher, remembers how “he was taunted by many of the kids, and there was no way he wanted to go out and play and mingle. So I had him on the sidelines keeping score or keeping stats for me.”
By 15, Bartalini was sleeping on a friend’s floor and working at the Record Factory on Mendocino Avenue. His favorite bands were Adam Ant, Pat Benatar, Hall and Oates, Culture Club and Siouxsie and the Banshees. His friend’s mother took him to one of his first concerts: Corey Hart at the Oakland Arena in 1984. And like a scene out of a Bruce Springsteen video, he was invited onstage and handed a pair of tortoiseshell Ray-Bans to sing “Sunglasses at Night.” His voice was “so horrible,” he remembers, that fans in the crowd taunted him. Later that night - thanks to his friend’s mother, who was a savvy survivor of the ’70s music scene - he ran into the Canadian pop star in an Oakland hotel bar. After telling his story, they would exchange letters, and Bartalini eventually flew on a whim to Canada to see Hart play - alone, at the age of 16.
“There I am at the (airport) with my birth certificate and they’re asking me, ‘Where are your parents?’ It finally got down to, ‘Are you going to let me in or not?’” To him, it made perfect sense. In music, he found something to embrace. It was one of the only places he felt safe. So any chance he got, he followed bands.
Eager to leave Sonoma County after high school, he moved to San Francisco and landed a job with Winterland, the artist merchandising company that oversees everything from concert T-shirts to dolls. He moved up the ladder from accounts receivable to artist relations, which meant he was flying off to meetings with Madonna in Los Angeles to have her sign off on the merchandising line for the ‘93 Girlie Show tour, or checking in with MC Hammer to see if he liked the latest purle and gold lamé dolls. Other clients included Mariah Carey, New Kids on the Block and Janet Jackson.
If anyone asked about his family, he would say they were dead. “If they started asking questions, I would say they died in a plane crash or a head-on collision.”
By 26, burned out and coping with a sexual harassment suit he brought against Winterland, he returned to the last place he thought he’d ever call home again: Santa Rosa.
In the Wells Fargo Center he found a family of sorts. The nonprofit, grass-roots collective relies on the ingenuity of its staff and a never-ending fund-raising campaign. Over the past five years, together with Director David Fischer and production whiz Jeremy French, Bartalini has remade the 25-year-old performing arts center. They’ve bolstered the lecture series with brilliant minds such as playwright Tony Kushner and novelist John Irving. Latin acts, once relegated to the fairgrounds, have found a new home. Playing the venue for the first time, Juan Gabriel and Pepe Aguilar were both landmark events last year.
“It used to be,’Where on Earth is Santa Rosa?’ I used to call agents when I first started and they wouldn’t take my call or (they would) reply with one-word e-mails,” Bartalini says. “And now they want to do business. We’re on the map.”
It shows at the box office. The top five highest-grossing shows of 2005 were Juan Gabriel ($223,000), Van Morrison ($222,937), Crosby, Stills & Nash ($196,623), Dolly Parton ($161,019) and Carole King ($147,911). But not every gig is a hit. Some shows never get off the ground. They lose money or, at best, break even. “Promoting is a roll of the dice, and you never know how it’s going to go,” Bartalini says.
There was no money to be made on Pink, who insisted no ticket eclipse $35, but he booked her anyway because, at the time, the name alone catapulted the venue into another arena. To attract a younger crowd, he’s tried to jump on the “American Idol” train with Carrie Underwood, Kelly Clarkson or Clay Aiken. “But they go from one single to fees in excess of $100,000 overnight. I can’t do that. (Underwood’s) fans aren’t going to pay that in our building because the tickets are going to be $150.”
With other acts, it’s all about timing. When it came to country singer Keith Urban, “I said, ‘OK, let’s roll the dice.’ He was out there playing mostly bars and fairs. But by the time he got here he was a huge superstar, and three months later he’s at San Jose Arena.”
On the flip side, he passed on Michael Bublé just before the torch singer exploded. Now he’s unattainable. Other times, Bartalini is lucky to convince 700 people to show up to see India.Arie. “She had an armful of Grammys, and it meant nothing in this community,” he says of the R&B artist. But he had to try because “it hadn’t been done, and I wanted to test the market.”
His talent relies on instinct and knowing what will sell at any given moment. But it also comes down to a drive and a passion that fuel 12- to 15-hour days.
“If rust never sleeps, then neither does Rick,” says Fischer, who announced Wednesday he’s leaving his Wells Fargo position for a similar one in Tacoma, Wash. No matter who it is, Bartalini treats performers as if they’re staying at his home for the weekend. Just ask Lyle Lovett, who played two nights in a row two weeks ago.
“We always look forward to seeing Rick when we come through,” the Texas singer-songwriter said. “Most of the time when we go places, I don’t even meet the promoter. With Rick, here’s the perfect example: After the show, there was a bottle of wine and a personalized handwritten card for each member of the band. No promoter has ever done that - ever - for us before.”
The payoff comes when Lovett returns over and over. And when the lights go down on a full house.
“It’s about that moment,” Bartalini says, “when Dolly comes down the staircase or Donna comes out of the piano, that 1,500 people share in the room, and what I get out of it is watching them have that experience.
“When Ringo Starr is up there, sweating and wearing a Woodstock shirt that I bought him at 4 in the afternoon, telling the crowd, ‘I love this venue!’ That’s what I get out of it. But what did it mean to everyone in that room? They’re in Santa Rosa. They never thought they’d see a Beatle here. They never thought that Ringo would play this tiny old room that used to be a church and maybe even where they used to go to school.”
Looking back on his past, Bartalini has sense of humor enough to wear a “Jehovah’s Witness Protection” T-shirt. He still laughs at some of the ridiculous outfits he wore in the ’80s. Not quite the fanatic he once was, he’s been known to follow Olivia Newton-John around the country. When the Aussie pop singer played the Wells Fargo in 2003, she surprised him and invited him onstage to sing “Summer Nights” in front of the sold-out crowd.
This time, he swears, his voice held up better than the ’80s duet with Corey Hart. Not that it really mattered. He was at home in front of an adoring crowd.