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In Fred we trust

Fred Eaglesmith plays a home near Sisters

By Ben Salmon / The Bulletin

Published: May 29. 2009 4:00AM PST

The beauty of a house concert, for those who’ve never experienced one, is the intimacy. Seeing a talented artist perform in someone’s living room will bring out things you otherwise might’ve missed in their playing, their songs, their personality.

It can be a real treat.

One of the risks of a house concert is the same as at any small and/or quiet show: You never know when the performer’s interaction with the crowd will take an awkward turn, forcing everyone else to sit and squirm.

With Fred Eaglesmith, though, you get a boatload of the former, and almost none of the latter. Or at least that’s what about 100 people got Monday afternoon at the Biggers home east of Sisters, where Eaglesmith played as part of the Harmony House Concert Series.

That’s because Eaglesmith, who’s been doing this for more than three decades, can control a room like few other musicians I’ve seen.

He uses his razor-sharp wit to do it. When one audience member got chatty after his first song, Eaglesmith pointedly reminded him that between-song banter is a monologue, emphasis on the “mono.” When another did the same after song number two, Eaglesmith told him to pipe down and compared him to a Winnebago he followed up a hill on the way to Sisters: “He never turns off!”

Two songs in, Eaglesmith had nipped the gabbing in the bud. And in a good-natured way, no less.

For the rest of a two-hour show, he had the whole house eating out of the palm of his hand.

Now, a two-hour Fred Eaglesmith concert contains an hour or less of actual music. The rest of the time, the man does a full-blown comedy routine.

I’m not talking about witty banter tossed in to fill space between songs. I’m talking about long, involved stories, and genuine, guy-walks-into-a-whatever jokes.

The tales veer toward the political and the provincial. Occasionally, they get a bit dirty. And very little, it seems, is off-limits. On Monday, Eaglesmith joked about left-wingers and right-wingers, Sarah Palin and Arnold Schwarzenegger, vegan restaurants and hot dogs, hippies and rednecks, dogs and horses, Californians and Texans and, of course, Oregonians.

He feigned disgust when told the property he was on wasn’t a ranch but a “ranchette.” And he worried that his sweating water bottle would leave a ring on — “in a house like this” — a table worth several thousand dollars.

And that was just the first hour.

As for the music, the first hour was also reserved for Eaglesmith’s funnier songs. He did “I Like Trains,” “I Shot Your Dog,” and “Time To Get A Gun,” three upbeat numbers that pretty much spell out the point in the title. And he ended his first set with “Lucille,” a hilarious story song about a 19-year-old man dating a 50-year-old woman that had most of the Biggers’ living room — many of whom were Lucille’s age or older — in stitches.

But he snuck some more sober material in there, too, including “Alcohol & Pills,” a chronicle of the troubled lives of country and rock stars past. When a silent moment in that song revealed the tap, tap, tap of someone’s foot keeping beat on the hardwood floor, it was a split-second of magic.

In the second set, Eaglesmith turned his focus to slightly more serious tunes, even while continuing the stand-up act in between. He did “White Rose,” a song about the death of a one-horse town that Toby Keith recently covered. He played a heartbreaking song about missing his dad that made me miss my dad. And he played a couple of love songs — “Wilder Than Her” and “Crowds” — that were devastatingly gorgeous, and for me, the highlights of the night.

Of course, for the artist, they were also the set-up for a joke. “Enough of that!” he half-screamed, the implication being that no one wanted to hear any more sappy stuff.

And therein lies the genius of Fred Eaglesmith. When he’s strumming his guitar and using that extra-coarse sandpaper voice, it’s hard not to be awed by his exquisite songcraft.

Every song tells a good story, and every line’s important. The words fit snugly together like a puzzle. It’s lean, efficient musicianship, and it’s fun to watch.

But between the songs, Eaglesmith is an equal-opportunity fun-poker, poking fun at any and every thing that comes to mind. And the guy has some serious knee-slappers, often delivered through a sort of faux-dumb-guy persona. He strikes me as something akin to Steve Earle and Tom Waits blended with comedians Chris Farley and Jim Gaffigan.

Before you know it, though, that faux-dumb-guy has very cleverly made the points he wants to make, about political divisiveness, or how we treat our fellow humans (and animals), or individual liberty in the shadow of a government that seems intent on empire building.

And after you spend two hours listening to jaw-dropping songs and grinning ear to ear at his jokes, you’ll find that just about anything Eaglesmith says makes perfect sense, whether you’re of a red-state mind or a blue-state mind.

Right then, though, you’re neither. You’re in a Fred state.

Ben Salmon can be reached at 541-383-0377 or bsalmon@bendbulletin.com.

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