Andy Friedman and Paul Curreri: Making A Living

By Chase Farmer, Staff writer

Andy Friedman certainly looks the part.

Sitting atop his hulking 28-year-old frame is a disheveled mop of unwashed, road-trip hair, covered ever so slightly by an off-kilter Harley-Davidson baseball cap.

A darkening shadow of a beard graces his face and his arms bust forth from his sleeveless tee.

Friedman has superbly achieved the classic appearance of the touring musician- that fine line between costume and apathetic coolness that clearly sets them apart from the rest of us mere mortals.

By the time he gets deep enough into his set to start keeping time with his foot, the fact that he has no actual musical instrument goes almost unnoticed.

In fact, that Friedman is wielding a slide-projector remote instead of a guitar and just talking instead of singing hardly matters at all.

Everyone in attendance this night in tiny Montevallo, Ala., seems awed by what they are witnessing.

It's like they haven't seen a slide show before.

And truth be told, they haven't seen one like this.

Friedman hesitates to call it a slide show at all.

On this particular night before the show, he finds himself in the far too familiar act of confronting the club owner for running off potential audience members.

"Some folks came up and asked what was up and he told 'em it was a slide show. They left," Friedman says as he hunches over the table. "I told him not to say that. Tell 'em it's a country blues show."

Friedman says that generally the first thing he does when he gets to a club is to tell the bartenders or club owners or whoever may answer the phone what to tell prospective patrons. Slide show doesn't make it on that list.

Country blues performer is what Friedman likes to call himself. And save for the obvious lack of guitars and harmonicas and singing, he's not far off.

He has tapped into the mindset, the ideology, the intensity, and the spirit of what he calls "the art of people who have the courage to use what they've got."

He is able to take what he is quite wonderful at, photography and drawing, and apply the sort of emotion that the blue evokes.

He calls the images songs. He calls his collections, his books, albums. (His latest is designed to look like a record even down the little trademark that rests at the top of the cover and says "Saddle Stitched" where a record would say "Stereo." You half expect there to be that annoying sticker seals that makes getting into CDs impossible.)

Again he's not too far off.

Perhaps the best explanation comes by way of a quote from Big Bill Broonzy found in the front of his first book, Drawings and Other Failures, "I don't care who plays or sings them, if they ding they way or my way."

"Done up my way." Friedman is constantly adding this qualifying statement to his version of more traditional songs. He has made a living taking a traditional or classic lyric and setting one of his sketches or Polaroid's to it. In his latest book, Future Blues, he takes Jesse Fuller's "Morning Blues" and sets it to a snapshot of an open apartment window, the light pouring in the from the outside.

In his first book an inspiring pencil drawing takes on a lyric from John Hurt's "Payday." Think cover songs.

"It just works," Friedman says by way of phone before the show, and he's right. Somehow it all comes together. For Some reason we have come to accept all the intangibles that go along with music. We don't ask any questions I few don't understand it. We fight to make it fit. For Andy Friedman, there is no need. It just works.

Paul Curreri is by most accounts a light man.

He has a small frame, tiny features, and a voice that comes off as shy and inhibited. He is polite and quiet. And when he makes reference to his guitar, a Martin HD-28, saying it's frail and delicate, one can't help but make an immediate association.

But man, oh man, when he sits down behind that microphone with his guitar, everything changes. After starting in on one of his self-penned country blues numbers, the immediate question is this: At what crossroads in rural Virginia did this guy meet the devil?

Curreri gets a big kick out of this twisted compliment as he strongly denies it.

"The only soul I sold is the one that has allowed me to have nay money right now," he says from his front porch in Charlottesville, Va.

But the change, the transformation is so marked as to beg for more explanation.

For starters, Curreri plays the guitar like a man possessed. In a style that is one part finger-style, one part strum, and one part predatory attack, he punishes the instrument. His fingers sail up and down the neck of the six-string infidel, while his right hand works note after precious note from the box. You half expect tears to appear on the face of the blond instrument. It makes it hard to believe the bit about the guitar being soft.

Then there's the voice. Curreri's speaking voice borders on a whisper. Over the phone you have to really listen to catch what it is he's saying. But sometime from the time he starts into the generally amazing first chords to one of his songs and when he opens his mouth for the tunes first lyrics, that change takes place. Seemingly from some other world, this booming, deep breasted, rich tenor bursts forth summoning with it every sweaty blues man and every forgotten field hand.

Curreri ranges at times from distant howl and somber wail, to full throttle growl and moan, more than ably covering a spectrum of emotions. It something that Curreri explains away as focus.

"I take a lot of pride in trying to, during the first bars of a song, trying to remember where I was when I wrote it," he says. "I try to remember what I was feeling, and then trying to relate that to the particular moment of performance. I think that's the only way to explain it."

Whatever Paul, whatever.

For further doubt as to where his 27-year-old soul might lie, there are the songs themselves. Words, and lots of them grace marvelous melodies, like paint thrown not brushed onto a canvas.

Lyrics spew from his lips like a tongue-speaking Pentecostal. There's a rhythm and force behind each song that brings to mind a boxer on speed bag; fast, furious, and somehow efficient. Perhaps Curreri sums up his own style best, saying after a sip of wine: "It's less about being starved to be like some one else, and more about being a lousy editor."

And listeners don't have to be an eyewitness to the idea, either. Curreri has done a wonderful job translating his songs onto two absolutely perfect solo acoustic records, From Long Gone to Hawkmoth and his most recent, Songs for Devon Sproule.

It all makes it awful hard to deny some form of Faustian contract agreement. Without having seen the "doughnut joint and the little bar" Curreri jokes about the deal going down, folks will just have to take his word for it.