Next Stop: Weird City : Music: The Beat Farmers, Mike Keneally and Buddy Blue encountered their share of strangeness on the road.

Some of San Diego’s more notorious rock ‘n’ roll sonsrecently returned from concert tours, and, although their experiences on the road were varied, a common thread emerges in the telling: It sure can get funky out there.

The Beat Farmers’ recently concluded two-month tour of the States and Canada was a rousing success, fueled in part by the release earlier this year of their album “Glad ‘N’ Greasy.” In fact, drummer-toastmaster Country Dick Montana claims that the band’s gigs were “better than ever, except for a couple of ski resort things.”

Say again?

“We played at some ski resorts. Call it booking-agent humor,” he said last week in a phone interview. “There were no major incidents or anything like that, but it got a little ugly in Aspen. People just sat there perplexed, with these expressions on their faces that said, ‘What do you expect us to do, applaud? ‘ Not only was there no call for an encore, but the deejay started spinning records as soon as we stopped playing. The guy who hired us fired him on the spot.

“Anyway, just the thought of the Beat Farmers in Aspen is in itself rather frightening,” continued Montana, laughing. “The ski resort crowd is not exactly our type of people, and we’re definitely not theirs. That was the worst gig in a long while.”

The Farmers came home in time for guitarist Jerry (Grandma) Raney to injure himself. According to Montana, Raney was “showin’ off by jumping over a fence” a couple of weeks ago when he landed awkwardly and broke his right thumb. Raney has regained enough flexibility in the digit to play guitar, but temporarily relinquished his drumming duties on such songs as “Big Ugly Wheels,” “Baby’s Liquored Up” and “Lucille” to Joel Kmak of the local band Comanche Moon.

That arrangement worked well on four one-nighters the band played after returning home, beginning with a May 30 show at the Belly Up Tavern and ending last week with a tangential diversion to Minneapolis. “They offered us a lot of money,” explained Montana about the trek north. The most intriguing news about the group, however, is that it will perform Friday on “Late Night with David Letterman.”

“Apparently, Letterman’s a Beat Farmers fan,” Montana said. “He had his people contact our people, and he even requested a specific song.” As is customary on the wee-hours program, the Farmers will incorporate Letterman’s house band--the World’s Most Dangerous Band--into their own lineup for the performance of “Hollywood Hills,” from the Farmers’ 1987 album, “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

“I’m curious to find out just how hip Paul Shaffer really is,” Montana said.

Local guitarist Mike Keneally, who now lives in L.A., just returned from a one-month trek through Europe and the States as part of Dweezil (son of Frank) Zappa’s band, which played at the Belly Up Tavern on April 5. The tour began with a May 1 gig in London--where the musicians hung out with members of XTC--and concluded with last Wednesday’s show at the Roxy in West Hollywood.

In a phone interview last week, Keneally claimed that the tour was marked by several personal and collective turning points. As to the latter, the Zappa band’s concert in Paris provided the rite of passage by which a promising group achieves an intangible, identity-stamping cohesiveness. “Something just clicked in Paris,” he said, “and we became a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

On the personal side, Keneally decided to end his avocation as a regular contributor to the San Diego Reader so he can concentrate on being a musician. Before this tour, he had agreed to mesh the roles of performer and music critic by submitting an article to the weekly, chronicling life on the road. “Maybe I’ll write a book instead,” he said last week by phone.

If he does, undoubtedly one rather bizarre passage will be devoted to a young man who attended the Zappa band’s show at the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia.

“This was one of the only places we’d played on the tour that had regular, fixed seats,” recalled Keneally. “Most people were sitting, very attentive and appreciative. But this guy named Gary stood in front throughout the show, shouting and holding his fist in the air. He listened to Dweezil and I playing these frantic, dual guitar parts and he would yell things like, ‘Twin leads! Jimmy Page dreamed it, but you guys are living it!’ ”

For the most part, the band was able to ignore the overzealous fan. But then Zappa called for a volunteer from the audience to sing an extended piece the band calls “The Medley,” which consists of more than 100 snippets of popular songs from the ‘70s strung end to end. Unfortunately, it was Gary who answered the challenge.

“The first thing he did was stick the microphone inside his mouth and scream at the top of his lungs,” Keneally said. “It was the most god-awful thing you’ve ever heard in your life. Dweezil calmly told the guy, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do that again.’ But Gary looks at Dweezil and starts screaming, ‘I love you, man! I gotta meet your dad!’ ”

Backstage after the concert, Gary again accosted the band, and now his spiel turned messianic.

“He was telling us how great we were, and about how he wanted ‘to beat the devil and meet Jesus.’ We couldn’t get rid of the guy. Then he saw Ahmet and yelled, ‘You suck!’ ”

Ahmet Zappa, Dweezil’s 16-year-old brother and the band’s lead vocalist, had sat out most of the show due to illness. Against doctor’s orders, he had taken the stage to sing “The Medley,” and Gary assumed he was just another volunteer from the audience. After insulting the younger Zappa backstage and then discovering his identity, Gary was mortified and bent on atonement.

“He followed us out to the parking lot,” recalled Keneally, “and then he stood in front of our van and wouldn’t move. He poured a can of beer over his head, stood with his arms outstretched as though he were being crucified, and yelled, ‘Kill me! Kill me!’

“Very strange.”

While on hiatus in L.A., Keneally is doing session work on a new album by Solomon Burke, and on a children’s television series, “The Draw Squad,” for which he wrote the musical theme last year. Tentative plans are for the Dweezil Zappa Band to resume touring in August, possibly as the opening act for the band Extreme.

Buddy Blue and the Jacks are back from a two-week tour of the West Coast and Canada. Blue says the trip was 50% great, 25% OK and 25% (expletive deleted).

“We got the best response in our home state, especially from some raging crowds in Northern California,” Blue said Friday. “They knew the words to my songs, and they were singing along, dancing, throwing beer, having a great time. Canada was cool, too, although I found out once I got there that my album (‘Guttersnipes ‘N’ Zealots’) isn’t available in Canada except as an import. Made me wonder what the hell I was doing there.”

According to Blue, the tour hit its low point in Seattle.

“We opened for the Young Fresh Fellows, and the club was filled with these trendy idiots with green hair who couldn’t decide if we were hip or not,” he said. “There were guys shooting heroin in the bathroom, and everything. It was terrible.”

Blue’s name might have caused some confusion in Oregon, where the audience response was mixed. “They kept yelling, ‘Play more blues!’ ” Blue recalled. “They were lukewarm to the stuff from my album, but whenever I played a blues tune, they’d go nuts. I couldn’t figure it out.”

Nuts was the operative word on the tour’s last night. The band had rented an RV for the last leg of the tour, which ended with a gig in San Francisco.

“We had just finished playing our final show,” Blue said, “and I went and sat in the RV by myself. I’d had only four hours of sleep in the previous two nights, and I was just glad it was over. Suddenly, this weird, almost evil-looking girl comes into the RV. She had one eye sort of off-center and lipstick that wasn’t quite on her lips.

“First, she tells me I look like (rock star) Willy DeVille, which, of course, I don’t. Then, she said, ‘I’m a witch, you know. I caused the earthquake here last year.’ She told me her shirt was made from sheep that were still alive, which meant she was wearing ‘living wool.’ She was acting so strange, and the more she talked, the more scared I got, ‘cause I didn’t know if she was going to pull a knife or what.”

When the young woman started to take her clothes off, Blue demured.

“I said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but I’m really tired, and I’d just like to sit here and rest.’ Finally, she left. Weird way to end a tour.”

Tonight, Blue and the Jacks hope to have it a little saner when they open for Johnny Winter at Theatre East in the East County Performing Arts Center.