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His dark hair has just a few scattered strands of gray, and he appears boyishly shy and quiet. But there is definitely a tiger in Bruce Labadie's tank, or maybe it's Miracle-Gro. He's a creative, make-things-happen kind of guy who grows small programs into big ones.
In the 1980s Labadie grew the four-concert series at Paul Masson Winery into a 100-concert series that included names like Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Stan Getz.
As director of the San Jose America Festival, he turned a $50,000 loss one year into a $50,000 profit the next with a successful multicultural concert that brought 200,000 people into downtown San Jose. As the director of the San Jose Jazz Festival, he developed an annual event that last year boasted 90 jazz performers from all over the world playing nine San Jose stages for an audience of 130,000--the largest free jazz festival in the world.
Now that Labadie's part-time position as performing-arts director at Villa Montalvo is full time as of last October, he's in the perfect place to take his skills as an event planner to a new level.
"We thought of Bruce when the position opened here because of his positive and creative energy and his commitment," Elizabeth Challener, executive director of Villa Montalvo, says of Labadie, who once competed with Montalvo to attract performers to the Mountain Winery. But that was before the Mountain Winery concert series hit a bumpy road, and before Labadie and Challener put their heads together to bring the Mountain Winery back to its former glory under the auspices of Montalvo.
Labadie first noticed his penchant for event-planning way back when he was a student at Woodside Priory College Preparatory, but it wasn't until he became student body social vice president at Santa Clara University that his talent for making big things happen really blossomed.
"We did some weird things," Labadie recalls. When the university's art director was in New York at a birthday party for John Lennon, Labadie arranged a simultaneous party in the art gallery at SCU. He hooked up a telephone line to a speaker, and "John Lennon talked to us in the gallery." Labadie arranged for celebrities such as Buckminister Fuller, Rod Serling and Joan Baez to come to the campus. He got professors to give talks about their unusual outside activities, such as the president, who was also a winemaker, and an anthropology professor who spent summers with the circus.
Labadie received an award as the most outstanding graduating student. "Not for academic reasons," he cautions. The university hired him as assistant to the dean of students; however, one month later, he was swept out with the rest of the administration in a dispute with the new president.
Labadie found himself not knowing what to do next. He had no goals or specific dreams. He'd chosen sociology as his major only because it interested him, not because of any professional aspirations.
His brother, who was selling flowers on a corner in San Francisco, gave him $100 and told him to go sell flowers. He did, sold all he bought in one day in Stanford's White Plaza and made $100 profit. He paid his brother back and continued with the flower stand for two years until the two brothers opened flower stores in San Jose and Palo Alto.
This particular part of Labadie's journey is not surprising, since his father has written several books on native plants and founded the horticulture department at Merritt College in Oakland. To this day, when Labadie is not growing events, his fingers dig in the soil around the half-acre of land where he, his wife Gerry and two children live in Santa Cruz. There he grows flowers and trees--native plants and an amazing 2,000 bulbs. "I plant things that don't take a lot of care and maintenance," Labadie says, explaining how he has the time for his gardening.
After about five years in retail flowers, Labadie left and landed a position with San Jose's Tapestry in Talent festival in 1976. After two successful years there, he became the public relations director for San Pedro Square in San Jose. "That was when they put the arch up," Labadie says. "It was difficult working for small merchants then because downtown San Jose was a depressed area."
In 1979, his wife made him buy a suit and brush his fingernails to apply for a job as assistant to the public relations director of Paul Masson Winery in Saratoga. That turned out to be a turning point.
At Paul Masson, he learned how to scramble, how to be persistent and how to build a program.
At that time the Seagrams-owned winery sponsored ski tournaments, marathons and the world's largest chess tournament. The 20-year-old music series consisted of just four events per year and was a very small part of the overall program. Then Seagrams went through major growth in the early '80s, and Labadie was suddenly reporting to a new boss in the marketing department in New York. And marketing did not support the old activities. "After a few years, everything went away," Labadie says, "except the music series, and marketing kept threatening to end that."
But Labadie was too committed to the music series to let it be brushed aside. To outsmart marketing, he would book the shows early. Then he worked hard to get them confirmed because he knew that, the first week in January, the person he reported to in New York would call to say the company wasn't sure it wanted to have a music series that year. "It's too late; it's already booked," Labadie would tell them.
"We knew we had to grow even more and get bigger names," Labadie says, "not an easy task in this competitive Bay Area."
His persistence paid off, though. "I tried for three years to get Ray Charles' agent to just return a call." After Ray Charles performed at the winery, Labadie got Ramsey Lewis. But he had difficulty getting other big names till he asked for help from Lewis, who talked his friend Grover Washington Jr. into performing at the winery.
"It snowballed after that," Labadie says. Once the artists performed at the winery, they liked it and wanted to return and also told their friends. Movies and TV specials were filmed at the winery, and artists such as George Shearing recorded albums there.
"This business is hard work," Labadie says. To keep up, he reads a lot, listens to lots of music and attends presenters' conferences. There he listens to performers, talks to agents and other event planners and learns the latest about how to manage crowds, parking, cash flow and concessions, as well as revised liquor laws and workman's compensation regulations. "In this environment, you need to keep fresh," he explains.
In the late 1980s, the winery was bought by Vintner's International, and Labadie became the public relations director for the company's entire West Coast operation. With only a box office manager and some facilities staff, Labadie grew the program to 100 shows.
When Vintner's International sold the winery to Ray Collishaw, Labadie could see the handwriting on the wall. Things weren't going in the direction he wanted to go, so he left, taking with him a wealth of knowledge about the business of directing and promoting music festivals.
With his skills in music productions, he joined forces in 1991 with his wife, Gerry, whose strength was in advertising and sales.
He became director of the San Jose Jazz Festival and, in 1993, of the America Festival, San Jose's Fourth of July celebration that gave Labadie the opportunity to create a festival that reflects music from all the cultures of this area, as well as the various musical genres. Soon he was booking talent for Music in the Park in downtown San Jose and was handling the production for A Taste of Orange County.
His work at Villa Montalvo began slowly in 1996, with Labadie working just a couple days a week.
"Life tells its own story," Montalvo's Challener says with a laugh, referring to the late '80s, when Labadie was at the winery competing with Villa Montalvo for some of the same performers. Even though they were competing, Challener says, "Labadie recognized the value of working together." For example, when Labadie arranged to have jazz pianist Dave Brubeck play at the winery in the late '80s, he helped Villa Montalvo set up an outreach program for Brubeck to work with students at Villa Montalvo.
Ironically, Labadie has come full circle and now, as the performance planner for Villa Montalvo, is helping the winery. "It was just a little idea at first," Labadie says, but in January 1996 he and Challener successfully negotiated with the current owner of the Mountain Winery, Ravi Kumra, for Villa Montalvo to resurrect and manage the Mountain Winery's music series. Labadie scrambled and put together 25 successful shows last year that included the Doobie Brothers and Chris Isaak, and he's working on 60 shows for this year.
With its recently renovated Garden and Carriage theaters and its front lawn area, and now with the Mountain Winery, Villa Montalvo is ready to grow its performance program to a new level. In October of 1997, Montalvo hired Labadie full time to do the job. Between these four venues, he can bring in everything from ballet to blues.
"I think we are pretty much unmatched in the country for the beauty of our venues and the fact that we bring in big-name artists to very small facilities," Labadie says. Compared to the current trend toward spectacular shows with big sound and flashy lights, these facilities are unique. "Actually, performers like the smaller facilities because of the intimacy with the audience," Labadie explains, "and the music comes through." The drawback is that performers cannot make the same money as they can doing bigger shows. "It's the more established performers who are interested in the smaller venues," Labadie says. For upcoming shows he is contracting with rhythm and blues singer Smokey Robinson, country & western singer Vince Gill and classical artists such as pianist Emmanuel Ax, violinist Nigel Kennedy, flutist James Galway and opera singer Fredericka Von Stade, among many others.
Labadie works to get as much variety in good music as he can in order to reach a broad audience. Maybe that's why his programs grow. "If I can just get into people's heads and find out what they want, that's sure success," Labadie explains.
By Sandy Sims
Saratoga News
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