CHARLESTON DAILY MAIL
September 18, 2003

NEW YORK PERFORMER BRINGING HIS ACT TO EMPTY GLASS

By Dan LeRoy
For the Daily Mail

The toughest thing about taking his act on the road, Andy Friedman says, is when club owners bill it as an "art/slide show presentation."

"Who wants to got to that?" asks Friedman incredulously. "I wouldn't want to go to that."

Those who show up soon find the description is a poor one, conveying neither what goes on or how unusual it is.

A visual artist with a musician's soul, Friedman illuminates slides of his paintings and drawings via a mixture of stories, poetry, and lyrics adapted from country blues and folk legends.

It's a concept the 28-year-old New York native insists is no different that the idea of the touring musician.

"Who wouldn't like to witness somebody opening themselves up in an honest and brave way in real time?"

For the past year and a half, Friedman has been putting that theory to the test, taking his art and performance aesthetic to barrooms across the country on the appropriately titled "Make A Living Tour," which will stop in Charleston's Empty Glass at 10PM today.

He's also set his ideas down in a pair of books he describes as "albums": "Drawings & Other Failures," a collection of pencil sketches, Polaroids, and poetry; and 2003's "Future Blues," more Polaroids from the road, linked by evocative, altered lyrics from the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Jesse Fuller.

Friedman's musical backround begins with his earliest childhood memories, when he's accompany his father, a jazz vocalist, to club dates in the Borscht Belt clubs of the Catskill Mountains.

But it was through oil painting that Friedman made his own entry into the arts. He grew up to become assistant to The New Yorker's cartoonist and Cartoon Editor Robert Mankoff, and contributed to the magazine himself, but was still searching for the right way to exhibit his work.

He discovered it after founding his own label, City Salvage Records, in 2001, and releasing "Drawings & Other Failures." Friedman left The New Yorker to embark on a nationwide tour with his friend and labelmate, singer-songwriter Paul Curreri.

Friedman's own act began as a discussion about the links between country blues and art, but that approach got scrapped the night he wound up playing Campbell's Truck Stop and Music Hall in Chester, S.C.

"I was not only nervous, but afraid. It was a gas station with one garage bay that they kept closed all week except for Saturday nights," he remembers.

"I was thinking, 'If I'm what I say I am, then tonight is the night I'm either going to get my head cut off or really reach down inside and do it right.'"

And with the aid of some moonshine, Friedman improvised a metaphor-filled rant to accompany his slides. "They cheered every time I cursed, and they were yelling, "Tell it like it is!' Everything changed after that night."

Although Curreri is a frequent guest, Friedman's shows have become popular enough that he no longer needs a musician on the bill to persuade skeptical club owners. "We travel together now because we enjoy each other's performances," he says. "We're not the Smothers Brothers."