OXFORD TOWN
October 19-26, 2006

Performance Preview
By Chase Farmer

ANDY FRIEDMAN'S "ART-COUNTRY"

"Honesty has a way of seducing a soul into existence, and an existing soul has a way of lighting the world." --Andy Friedman, "Future Blues"

There's a picture of Andy Friedman in the liner notes of his first record, Live at the Bowery Poetry Club, that has him standing in front of the New York center for rhyme and verse. Tall, dark, and unshaven, he wears a trucker cap and a black western shirt with pearl snaps that's either unbuttoned or missing a few, and over his head is a sign that boldly proclaims, "EVERYTHING IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE." It's the sign that makes the picture. It's profound to say the least.

But that should come as no surprise to those who know Andy Friedman and as a bit of a warning for those about to. Profundity has a way of following Andy Friedman. Profundity, or at the very least, unpredictability. It's who Andy Friedman is at his very core.

Sure, you can call him many things. He's part New Yorker cartoonist, part Polaroid Van Gogh. He is Brooklyn's only tried and true arm-wrestling redneck. He's an art school grad who thinks both Chris Isaak's Forever Blue and a snapshot of two grocery carts is, in fact, art.

And here's the real kicker – he's spent the better part of the last half decade traveling the country, playing all the honkytonks and dive bars possible as a country blues artist with no guitar, no harmonica – and without even singing. With only slides of his drawings, pictures, and a slide projector to defend himself, Friedman faced drunken hecklers from Columbia, SC to Starkville, MS to Bellingham, WA.

Here's a guy who's crazy enough to challenge every known conception of music and call his slideshow presentation -- the clinking glasses, the mutterings, the coughs and throat clearing of the room – music. If that's not profound, then what is?

Now, Friedman has morphed again. He's taking his pics, sketches, poetry and prose, shaping them up a little, sharing a little rhyme and meter, and setting them to melodies written on his guitar and playing them for folks. He's calling it "Art Country." Now he's a bona-fide musician.

Of course, from his way of thinking, it's been that way all along.

"I always saw myself as an artist putting forth a collection of songs," Friedman says via email from his place in Brooklyn. "Once I learned guitar, I became more interested in writing more conventional songs, but before that I saw my painting and drawing as music and projected them onstage with the lyrics, which were mostly spoken."

Now armed with a grand total of seven – count'em, seven – guitar chords, Friedman, who has once again forgone the conventional wisdom that says you may need more than a handful of guitar chords and a working knowledge of music to make this thing go, counts himself ready to tackle the dog-eat-dog singer/songwriter world.

"The first time I picked up a guitar was in high school," he recalls. "My guitar teacher taught me the two cool chords from Jane's Addiciton's "Three Days."

"The second time I picked up a guitar was on a West Coast tour in March, 2005. I used those same two chords to write a song called ‘Middletown.' I learned a few more, and know I know the G, D, A, E, C, A-minor 7 and C-sharp 9 chords," he boasts.

But that didn't stop him from heading out into the studio to cut his first studio album, Taken Man. With the guitar knowledge of a student picker and the help of his longtime partner-in-crime Paul Curreri, Friedman took a mere two-and-a-half days to put down the album's 10 songs.

"Paul has produced a few records of mine in the past, actually," Friedman says of some mythological recording sessions that never saw the light of day. "We had a project called Andy Friedman & The Nasty Neighbors. We'd get together every night, drink a jug of Carlo Rossi and hit record on Paul's eight-track tape machine. He'd play guitar, and I'd make up the lyrics as it was rolling. It really wasn't all that different from the process that went into Taken Man, except that I played guitar and the lyrics were already written."

The resulting record is exactly what Friedman calls it – Art Country. It's not country in the Willie Nelson/Johnny Cash vein, but it's no less country music. It's poetic with long, winding narratives. It's unrefined and unrestricted by any number of rules or preconceptions. And it's honest.

It should go a long way toward keeping Friedman free from pigeonholing his music. He seems to be taking a lead from one of his own tunes, the jaunty "I Don't Want To Die Like Andy Kaufman."

"I was thinking about it one day," Friedman says, "and I don't, The last line of the song says, ‘he knew he was more / than a network comedy whore / and he gave himself a cancer, yes he did.'

"Kaufman had a real, true, brilliant vision for his comedy, and he really took it to heart that most people knew him as Latka Gravas from Taxi, and that's what most people expected from his comedy. I think it stressed him out so much that he broke himself down to death."

Friedman has done two things that should keep him from dying like Kaufman. First of all, he's never really cared what folks have said about him. He's never been concerned with labels. He's not concerned at all with the medium, only that folks are paying attention. And he's kept things honest and interesting.

"It's ridiculous to think about that stuff," he says. "I just put it all out there and people will respond they way they want to, and I have no control over it. The only thing I can control is what I do."

What he does, and hopefully will continue to do, is be honest, profound, and to challenge people to be honest with themselves and thus come alive. As Friedman himself said best, and honest soul is a live soul, and a live soul lights the world. Let it shine, brother.