Two for the Show : White Lies’ Musicians Are Also Promoting Appearance With Benatar at Irvine Barclay

It’s axiomatic that ambitious, little-known rock acts should forge ties with concert promoters who can give them the good gigs they need to get ahead.

Now comes White Lies, an Orange County rock act that aims to skip the middleman. Starting Sunday, White Lies will jump into the nerve-racking, high-dollar gamble of big-name concert promotion, presenting Pat Benatar at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. It’s the first electric rock show in the history of the 756-seat performing arts hall; White Lies has booked itself as the opening act.

But the band’s co-founders, guitarist Joe Pastorelli and singer Ken Earnest, haven’t risked more than $20,000 of their own money just to get a good gig. The Benatar concert kicks into action the unlikely but intriguing strategy by which these promotional novices aim to take their best shot at becoming nationally famous rockers.

The plan: earn enough money promoting concerts to complete White Lies’ new CD and yield a $75,000 bankroll the band will plunge into a sustained promotional campaign aimed mainly at plugging its music to radio stations across the country.

“You don’t want to have a record out and no way to promote it,” said Pastorelli, a father of two who lives in Rancho Santa Margarita. “It doesn’t make sense to have a record in stores across the nation without a radio and advertising campaign.”

The White Lies story begins 10 years ago, when Pastorelli and Earnest, transplants from New York and Pennsylvania, respectively, started the band in Orange County. They went through the dispiriting grinder of the pay-to-play club circuit in Hollywood, got nowhere and broke up in 1993.

Then, two years ago, a pastor at Pastorelli’s church was looking for a rock band--not a Christian act, just a regular rock band--to play for people attending a 12-step recovery program at the church. “He said, ‘A secular band is exactly what I want. [The people seeking help] come in with their guards up, and I want them to feel at home.’ ”

Pastorelli, and Earnest, who lives in Huntington Beach and has two children, enjoyed the reunion so much that they revived the band, which also includes Jason Toney on drums, Terrence Dalrymple on bass, and backing vocalists Stephanie Bond and Karen Hobbs. Other key members of their team are David Cooper and Brian Clark, who work with White Lies as technical and merchandising aides, and also are the minority partners in Slimbeat Productions, the company Pastorelli and Earnest launched for promoting concerts.

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In 1997, White Lies released a CD that cost the band $3,000, sold 3,000 copies, and netted a $30,000 profit. Pastorelli said he made a point of introducing himself to agents for name acts White Lies opened for at the Coach House and as a pre-concert attraction playing on a satellite stage to early arrivals at Irvine Meadows; he at least wasn’t a complete unknown when he began calling them this year, inquiring about booking big names they represent.

Pastorelli said an agent he knew provided an introduction to Benatar’s representative at one of the major agencies, ICM. The agent liked the idea of booking Benatar into a formal theater in Orange County instead of a club.

The Slimbeat promoters won the confidence of managers at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, who decided to give the novice promoters a chance to bring in the venue’s first full-on rock concert. Rock greats Randy Newman and Ray Davies of the Kinks have played the hall, but in acoustic solo performances; Loreena McKennitt, whose Celtic, New Age and folk-tinged music has links to rock, played a full-band gig there in 1994, and the Barclay last year hosted an amplified blues show that included Booker T. Jones and John Hammond.

“We asked if the sound was going to fit the hall. We were assured it won’t be painful,” said Douglas Rankin, president of the Barclay, who views the Benatar concert as an experiment that could lead to more rock shows by “appropriate matches” who appeal to a sit-down listening crowd and won’t blow out eardrums with excess volume.

Benatar, a tiny woman with a large voice, became an arena attraction while scoring nine gold and platinum albums from 1979 to 1989. Now she is in the veteran-trouper phase of her career, recording for independent labels and selling far fewer records. Her most recent album, “Innamorata,” from 1997, was a strong, intimate, acoustic-flavored rock release marking a mature step beyond the blustery arena-rock of her peak years.

Pastorelli said booking Benatar made sense because she has a loyal following, a 30-and-older crowd that will treat the Barclay with respect. As her opening act, he said, “It’s the cleanest place I’m ever going to play in my life.”

Pastorelli and Earnest, who works for Boeing, are plowing much of that $30,000 take from White Lies’ first CD into concert expenses that Pastorelli estimated at $29,000. A key to giving the show a chance at substantial profit, he said, has been his ability to find corporate sponsors, including a limousine company, two national beer brands, and an Irvine apartment rental firm that wanted to offer discount tickets to its tenants as a special perk.

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Pastorelli, who is in charge of computer services for an apartment management firm, says he was able to use business contacts from his day job to strike the sponsorship deals.

As of Thursday, Pastorelli said, about 600 tickets had been sold for the Benatar show, enough to break even. With a sellout, he said, White Lies might be able to pocket a $6,000 to $10,000 profit.

That would be enough to enable the band to finish the CD on which it is staking its hopes. After that, Pastorelli said, if Barclay officials are willing to go forward, he has a show lined up for Oct. 1 by the ‘70s-vintage progressive-rock band, Kansas, backed by an orchestra.

While keeping up the frantic pace of being a husband and father, a corporate employee, a promoter doing his crucial first show, and a musician preparing for one of his band’s biggest gigs, Pastorelli took a little time this week to dream of how the White Lies scheme might unfold.

Slimbeat Productions already has approached the Freedman Forum in Anaheim about bringing shows to the long-dormant theater, which can hold 1,400 to 2,500 for a concert, depending on whether the staging is in the round or a half-house set up.

George Slinkard, another Orange County promoter, is helping the White Lies team try to line up name talent to play the Freedman Forum, thus far with some interest but no commitments. A series of canceled shows at the Freedman Forum in 1997 under a different independent promoter--the last of which saw Benatar arrive at the venue only to find she wouldn’t be playing--has made agents gun-shy about booking acts there, Pastorelli said.

Thinking even bigger, Pastorelli has his sights set on the 5,000-seat Bren Events Center at UC Irvine, and the 9,000-capacity Anaheim Convention Center. Pull off a couple of successful shows on that scale, he figures, and White Lies will have stocked its $75,000 kitty in no time.

If the scheme works, and radio stations start playing the band’s music and the masses start buying it, White Lies will be headlining shows for other promoters. And if it fails, as the smart money surely would bet?

Then at least the band will have done something innovative, Pastorelli said, while giving its music a decent shot at success. The fantasy of rock stardom would be over, and White Lies would content itself with being a local act. But Pastorelli thinks the buzz of promoting major shows might prove addictive.

“If we can’t crack radio airplay with this album, we’ll kick back and do [concert] promotions on all our favorite rock bands.”

If the White Lies members can make that happen successfully on any kind of sustained basis in competition with such heavy-hitting, full-time, national and regional promoters as Irvine Meadows owner SFX Entertainment, the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim’s booker, Nederlander Concerts, and Gary Folgner, who owns the Coach House and the Galaxy Concert Theatre, that might be an even more unlikely success story than scoring a do-it-yourself national hit.

Pat Benatar and White Lies play Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 7 p.m. $43. (949) 854-4646.

Mike Boehm can be reached at mike.boehm@latimes.com.