POP MUSIC / THOMAS K. ARNOLD : Promoter’s Prices for Petty Sparks Doobie of a Debate

The folks at Avalon Attractions feel local promoter Bill Silva, their chief rival in the San Diego pop-concert market, has a little explaining to do.

Back in July, Avalon brought Tom Petty to San Diego State University’s Open Air Theater. The top ticket price was $35--an unprecedented high--and Silva immediately took his Los Angeles-based competitor to task, making public accusations of greed and pointing out that tickets to his shows seldom cost more than $20.

A little more than a month later, Silva has announced that on Oct. 1, he’ll be producing a concert by the recently reunited Doobie Brothers at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park.

And guess what? The best seats in the house cost $30--not much less than what the best seats at Avalon’s Tom Petty show had gone for.

David Swift, Avalon’s San Diego coordinator, is furious.

“After attacking us for Tom Petty, claiming that we were overcharging for tickets, I don’t see how Mr. Silva can justify charging so much for tickets to the Doobie Brothers show,” Swift said.

“Since Mr. Silva obviously didn’t understand why our ticket prices were so high for Tom Petty, I’d be very interested in hearing why his ticket prices are so high for the Doobie Brothers.”

In July, Avalon’s excuse was the extraordinarily high performance fee demanded by Petty. Silva’s excuse is pretty much the same: “We’re paying the Doobie Brothers more than we’ve paid anyone else who’s played the venue,” he said.

Silva added that while the top ticket price to his Doobie Brothers show is $30, other tickets are priced as low as $19--somewhat less than the norm. (The lowest priced tickets for the Petty show were $25; $16 for standing room only).

“So the other reason we decided to have a higher price on the top end,” he said, “was to subsidize the lower price on the bottom end.”

Besides, Silva added, “Our top ticket price for the Doobie Brothers is still five bucks cheaper than Avalon’s top ticket price for Tom Petty.”

The LP version of the Beat Farmers’ new album, “Poor and Famous,” comes with a free gift inside: the latest edition of the Beat Farmers Almanac, a riotous parody published every year since 1983 by Country Dick Montana, the San Diego roots-rock band’s drummer and occasional singer.

Dubious “biographies” of the four band members take up most of the six pages. Montana would have you believe he was “raised in Memphis by his carny father and side-show attraction mom (the ‘Amazing Frog Woman,’ due to her apparently hereditary voice)” and that he “spent most of his wonder years on the road with the colorful Montana Sr., who had taken to the music business like a flea to a dog while road-managing Marty Robbins, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Sugarloaf.”

Lead singer-guitarist Jerry Raney, Montana writes, was “abandoned as an infant” and “discovered and raised by migrant farm workers in and around Imperial County and the San Joaquin Valley.” Singer-guitarist Joey Harris “is the latest in a long line of controversial and artistic family members that (and he swears by this) can be traced all the way back to a scandalous marriage between a druid princess and a one-legged leprechaun.” And “due to the constant ‘barn hoots’ held on the mid-Missouri farm that he was raised on,” bassist Rolle Love “was forced to appreciate jug-band and hillbilly music at an early age.”

Among the other things you’ll find in the Beat Farmers Almanac:

* A whimsical introduction, addressed “Howdy, Duckbutt,” in which Montana writes that when MCA/Curb Records didn’t release “Poor and Famous” last March as originally scheduled, he began hearing “some interesting rumors about ourselves--we got booted off the label, the band broke up, Country Dick is dead, we’ve become house husbands for the Bangles, Pia Zadora is holding us captive, etc. etc.”

Now that the album is finally out, Montana doesn’t really need to dismiss these rumors, but he does anyway: “The ‘Dick is dead’ rumors are understandable, but heck, one of the Bangles flatly refuses to sleep with any of us--and that whole thing with Pia was over with in two days.”

* An “ad” for the 24-hour “Grammy Phone” hot line. Aspiring musicians, call in and “real record company executives will tell you whatever you wanna hear”--for only $10 per minute, five- minute minimum.

LINER NOTES: The Rolling Stones might be coming to San Diego after all. Bill Wilson, manager of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, said there’s “a remote possibility that the Stones will play here sometime in October,” on either of the two dates he’s offered Denver promoter Barry Fey, who’s producing the West Coast leg of the seminal rock ‘n’ roll band’s reunion tour. “But there’s also the possibility that they’ll add another show in Los Angeles,” Wilson said, “and blow us out.” A final decision is expected by the end of this week. . . .

According to the ad in last Thursday’s Reader, the Aug. 26 Outfield concert was moved from Iguanas in Tijuana to the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa “due to immigration problems.” Not really, admits Jeff Gaulton, who books both nightclubs: Ticket sales were slow, he said, and he figured it was because he had overestimated the band’s appeal among the under-21 crowd that frequents Iguanas. “So we moved the show to the Bacchanal, where the crowd is older, and came up with the ‘immigration problems’ explanation in the hopes of stirring up a little more interest,” Gaulton said. The ploy worked; the concert sold out. . . .

Best concert bets for the coming week: the Greg Kihn Band and San Diego’s own Robert Vaughn and the Shadows, Thursday at the Surfside Night Club in Solana Beach; Ronnie Milsap, also Thursday, at the Bacchanal; Santana, Saturday at the Open Air Theater; the Kingston Trio, Saturday and Sunday at the San Diego Wild Animal Park’s Mahala Amphitheater; Little Feat and the Jeff Healey Band, Sunday at the California Theater downtown; and four-fifths of the quintessential Yes lineup--Jon Anderson, Bill Bruford, Rick Wakeman, and Steve Howe--Sept. 4 at the Open Air Theater.