POP MUSIC : SDSU’s Open Air Concerts Attract a Strong Opener

This year’s 14th annual concert series at San Diego State University’s Open Air Theater gets off to an unusually strong start Friday night with the Cult.

Since the release a year ago of the group’s “Sonic Temple” album, the British trio has become one of the most popular rock groups in the world. Buoyed by the Top 40 success of “Fire Woman,” the album quickly went platinum, and the Cult’s concert draw increased steadily to the point where sold-out shows--even in multithousand-seat arenas--are now the rule rather than the exception.

This recent success can be attributed to the band’s belated decision to blend its original cerebral image with high-voltage, mainstream rock ‘n’ roll, complete with thick chording and hard-biting guitar runs.

The Cult’s roots date to 1982, when singer-guitarist Ian Astbury put together a band, the Southern Death Cult. The group’s intellectual post-punk sound--heavy on atmosphere, texture and internal conflicts--was acclaimed by critics, but pretty much ignored by the public, except in their native England, where they enjoyed sporadic success.

Two years--and various personnel changes--later, the Southern Death Cult’s name was shortened to the Cult, and an album, “Dream Time,” was released by Sire Records. Despite the backing of an internationally distributed record label, the Cult remained, well, a cult band for some time. In the all-important U.S. market, air play was limited to college radio stations, and in 1986 the Cult was presented with the American College Radio Single of the Year award for “She Sells Sanctuary,” from their second album, “Love.”

In 1987, the Cult finally found a way to go commercial without selling out: Combining passion with aggression, emotion with commotion, the eclectic with the electric, to come up with music that not only makes the mind tick and the heart pound, but the feet move and the hips shake.

They defined this mix on their third album, “Electric,” which went gold (for sales of 500,000 or more); they refined it on album four, “Sonic Temple,” which went platinum (for sales in excess of 1 million).

No wonder, then, that the Cult’s Friday night show at the 4,835-seat Open Air Theater is expected to be a sellout.

Last week, Country Dick Montana of the Beat Farmers got out of the hospital after a seven-day stay for surgery to remove five tumors from his throat.

“The medical term is a ‘radical full-neck dissection,’ and that’s pretty much how I feel: like somebody dissected my neck,” Montana said. “Most of my neck and the right side and the back side of my head are completely numb; they must have severed a lot of nerves.

“But they spent a couple of extra hours in surgery to save the voice, and that seems to have worked. My speaking voice is the same, and while I have lost some range in the singing department--the willowy eye-watering tenor is chopped in half, with the high end completely gone--I hope to regain that as time goes on.”

Since his release from the hospital, Montana has been recuperating at home, hoping that his vocal cords will be sufficiently healed in time for the Beat Farmers’ next concert, Sunday night at Park Place in El Cajon.

And while he’s still waiting to get his voice back, he’s already regained his sense of humor.

“It just seems natural for us to be playing April Fool’s Day in a bowling alley in El Cajon,” Montana said with a laugh.

The Beat Farmers, incidentally, are in the process of severing ties with MCA/Curb Records, which has released their last three albums, amid allegations of label indifference. Anticipating a quick settlement, Montana said, the band is currently entertaining offers from several other record companies, including Capitol Records.

The Beat Farmers’ next album is already in the can. Tentatively titled either “Beat Farmacy” or “Loud and Plowed,” the group’s first live album was recorded New Year’s Eve at the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa and mixed in February at the Indigo Ranch recording studio in Malibu.

The album will include “pretty wild versions” of Beat Farmers favorites like “Riverside” and “Happy Boy,” Montana said, as well as covers of the Kinks’ “20th Century Man” and Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille.”

“People have been telling us for years that our albums haven’t been catching the intensity of our live shows,” Montana said, “and I think we’ve got that this time.”

LINER NOTES: Janet Jackson is due in for an April 23 concert at San Diego Sports Arena. It will be her first performance at the arena, but not her first visit. Five years ago, Phil Quinn, the arena’s executive vice president and general manager, recalled, he received a phone call from the then-upstart singer’s manager. “I forgot what the concert was, but she wanted to attend, and she didn’t want to sit down there in the seats on the floor,” Quinn said. “So I invited her to sit up in the owner’s box, and she accepted my invitation.” The April 23 concert, by the way, sold out less than two hours after tickets went on sale. . . .

This Friday, veteran pop crooner Frankie Laine, a San Diego resident since the late 1960s, turns 77. . . .

Tickets go on sale today at 10 a.m. for the May 9 concert by Gun and Heretix at the Bacchanal, and Saturday at noon for shock-comic Andrew Dice Clay’s April 24 appearance at the Sports Arena. . . .

Best concert bets for the coming week: Eric Johnson with Kyle Brock & Tommy Taylor, tonight at the Bacchanal; Bobby Blue Bland, Thursday at Smokey’s in Mission Valley; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins with the Forbidden Pigs, Thursday at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach; the Cult with Dangerous Toys and Tora Tora, Friday at SDSU’s Open Air Theater; the Creatures (featuring Siouxsie and Budgie of Siouxsie and the Banshees), Friday at Iguanas in Tijuana; Robin Trower, Friday and Saturday at the Bacchanal; Odetta, Saturday at the Del Mar Shores Auditorium; the Paladins with the Trebels, Saturday at the Belly Up Tavern; Kenny Rogers with Dolly Parton, Sunday at the Sports Arena; Bobby McFerrin and his 10-piece Voicestra, Sunday at the California Theater downtown; They Might Be Giants, Sunday at the University of California at San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium; the Beat Farmers with Comanche Moon and the Blonde Bruce Band, Sunday at Park Place in El Cajon; the Crazy8s, April 2 at the Belly Up Tavern, and Alpha Blondy, April 3 at the Belly Up Tavern.