POP MUSIC / THOMAS K. ARNOLD : Avid Bob Dylan Fan Flies at the Chance to Meet Singer

Paul Wultz took time out last week from his job as a commercial decorator to decorate the city with fliers advertising tonight’s Bob Dylan concert at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park.

The 46-year-old San Diegan is so enamored with Dylan that he’d do almost anything for a backstage pass--and the possible chance to meet his idol. And that’s what he’s been promised by promoter Bill Silva in exchange for his volunteer work.

“I’ve seen him in concert nearly 20 times, but I could never even get close to the guy,” Wultz said. “Hopefully, this time I finally will get to meet him and thank him for all the great music he’s put out, the tremendous impact he’s had on pop music and on my own life.”

Ever since he first saw Dylan in concert in 1964--in San Diego at Peterson Gym on what was then the San Diego State College campus--Wultz has been hooked. His Dylan record collection, which he keeps in storage in an undisclosed location, includes about 200 albums, all domestic releases as well as imports from more than two dozen foreign countries, ranging from England and Germany to Greece and Argentina, and as many singles.

Through trading with other Dylan fans-cum-collectors around the world, Wultz has also acquired upwards of 150 live “bootlegs,” dozens of concert posters and books, a box of old ticket stubs and backstage passes, and vintage promotional material and publicity photographs.

His prize possessions: a pair of Dylan autographs, a “biscuit” copy of “Blood on the Tracks” (which Wultz describes as “a gob of wax with the label on both sides, but before the record was stamped”) and a matchbook from the Dylan Club in Majorca, Spain.

“I guess I’m just a big fan, and anything that’s connected to Dylan, I want,” Wultz said with a laugh.

Speaking of hard-core fans, a bunch of “true believers” similarly obsessed with a particular rock star or group are profiled in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

Among them is Dominic Priore, a 29-year-old Carlsbad resident whose adulation is directed toward Brian Wilson, the creative genius behind the Beach Boys.

Priore is not just a super fan, he’s a super researcher. And for the last eight years, the focus of his study has been the Beach Boys’ legendary “Smile” LP, perhaps the most famous, and controversial, unreleased album in rock ‘n’ roll history.

It has been said that Wilson considered “Smile” his masterpiece but destroyed the tapes in a fit of paranoia after a mysterious studio fire in late 1966, on the eve of the album’s completion.

But Priore insists this isn’t true. And to prove it, he’s got copies of those supposedly “lost” studio tracks, including the original seven-minute version of “Good Vibrations” and the unreleased “Do You Like Worms?” and “Child is Father to the Man.”

They’re part of Priore’s impressive collection of “Smile” memorabilia, along with rare video clips, promotional material, newspaper and magazine articles, candid studio shots of Wilson and songwriting partner Van Dyke Parks, recording-session work sheets and even the intended album cover artwork.

Last December, Priore published a book about the “Smile” debacle, titled “Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!”

Sunday night, starting at 7, Priore’s “Smile” collection will be on display at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach. Admission is free.

LINER NOTES: It’s been a bad week for Ratt, the expatriate San Diego heavy-metal band now based in Los Angeles. First, lead singer Stephen Pearcy was hospitalized with torn muscles and a fractured left leg after the motorcycle he was working on in his garage fell on him. Then, a few days later, drummer Bobby Blotzer suffered an appendicitis attack and was rushed to the same hospital.

Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. for Andreas Vollenweider’s Oct. 7 show at Symphony Hall downtown; Friday at 3 p.m., tickets go on sale for the Fine Young Cannibals’s Oct. 4 appearance, with Neneh Cherry and the Mint Juleps, at the Starlight Bowl, and for k.d. laing and the reclines’ Oct. 6 concert at the California Theater downtown. . . . Opening for The Cure on Sept. 12 at San Diego State University’s Open Air Theater will be “new music” upstart Shelleyan Orphan.

Best concert bets for the coming week: Natalie Cole, Thursday at Humphrey’s on Shelter Island; Elvis Costello and the Rude 5, Friday at the Open Air Theater; Reggae Fest ‘89, featuring Dennis Brown, Freddie MacGregor, Lieutenant Stitchie, Lloyd Parks and We the People, and Natalie Waterhouse, also Friday, at Iguanas in Tijuana; Phoebe Snow, Sunday at Humphrey’s; and Burning Spear, Sept. 12 at the Belly Up Tavern.