NEW YORK NEWSDAY

By Rafer Guzman
May 26, 2005

Wearing a trucker cap and dirty jeans and sporting a thick beard, Andy Friedman looks like a hardscrabble Midwesterner or maybe a grease monkey at a NASCAR track. On a recent Monday night at Hank's, a dark little bar in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood, Friedman also sounds like a good ol' boy, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing about small-town bar brawls.

But Friedman also wields another "instrument" of sorts: a remote control that operates a nearby slide projector, which in turn throws up images on a screen behind him. Nearly all of these images-faces, places, colors-are paintings, drawings and photographs by Friedman.

What is this? Some kind of performance art? No, but it's a question Friedman gets all the time. "It's like Hank Williams," he explains, but with visuals."

Friedman, an East Meadow native who lives in Brooklyn, has been hauling his guitar and slide projector to dive bars around the country for the past three years. On stage, he enhances his songs with carefully chosen visuals or, just as often, he enhances the visuals with tailor-made songs. His wry country tune "Cheat With The Highway," for example, is accompanied by images of lonely mailboxes, a seedy motel and a postcard that says, "Sorry! Too damn busy to write!"

It ain't easy being a country-singer-conceptualist, says Friedman, who plays tonight and every Thursday through July 7 at Manhattan's Bowery Poetry Club. The farther Friedman gets from New York City, the tougher it becomes to convince club-owners to book him. "I downplay any sort of avante-garde angle," he says. "I have a contract that tells the clubs what to tell people when they call. It says, if you want anyone to show up, don't say 'spoken word,' don't say 'poetry,' don't say 'storyteller.'"

Friedman, 30, says he grew up painting and drawing but always loved music. The problem was how to combine the two. "I was always more excited to see Billy Joel at the Coliseum than to go to the Met and see Matisse," he says.

In some ways, Friedman lived a fine artist's dream. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and met a professor who helped him get a job in the mail room of The New Yorker magazine. Eventually, he became a regular illustrator and even drew the occasional cartoon (under the pseudonym Larry Hat.)

Around the same time, he began experimenting with "live" shows of his artwork, writing and playing songs to accompany his pictures. But in March 2002, convinced he needed to hit the road full-time, Friedman quit his job. (Cue the sound of a million cartoonists gasping.) He still free-lances for the magazine.

Friedman likes to cover Johnny Paycheck, Hank Williams and others in between his original country-folk tunes. He recently added a band, The Other Failures, that includes an upright bass player and a pedal steel. And if the whole affair seems too artsy for you, feel free to speak up.

"I like a noisy crowd. It's not a reading," Friedman says. "I arm-wrestled someone on stage recently because they were heckling. I won."