by KATIE HAEGELE (khaegele@philadelphiaweekly.com)

Andy Friedman stopped in Philadelphia last June on his way across the country with his strange little traveling show, and he called to tell PW about it. Back then, we were still just trying to get our heads around what, exactly, he was trying to do.

See, even though Friedman's a painter, this wasn't a gallery exhibit. And although he'd put out a book called Drawings and Other Failures--a collection of his writing, sketches and Polaroids--it wasn't a book tour either.

"If it's 3 o'clock in the morning, and I can't sleep 'cause I'm depressed, what am I gonna do? Go to an art gallery? No. I put on a record."

That's what he told us then, and we sort of skritched our heads and let it sink in. He was going from town to town, showing and talking about his paintings, and afterward, his friend, Paul Curreri, would take the stage and play his music. We knew this had something to do with inspiration.

After starting out from Minneapolis last March, the two are still on the road. We checked in with them again recently to see if their work had gotten any easier to explain.

But before we attempt a translation, you should know where Friedman's coming from. The 27-year-old was trained as a painter at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he met Curreri, a film student. The two bonded over their mutual restlessness with college life and an obsession with old country blues records.

Friedman spent his undergraduate career studying the old masters and working on the same painting for three and a half years. But when his masterpiece was almost finished, he somehow flubbed the crazy chemistry that is oil painting and wrecked the whole thing.

After graduation he moved to Brooklyn and worked as an assistant cartoonist at the New Yorker for two years. All this time Curreri was toiling away near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Charlottesville, Va., carving out a career playing blues guitar. ("I lived in New York with Andy for a while," he says, "but I'm not quite sure if humans should live that way.") In October 2001 Friedman started City Salvage Records, which put out his book and Curreri's record. But to Andy's way of thinking, they're both records. Because somewhere between Friedman's oil painting mishap, his disappointment with the "sterile and literal" gallery scene and his idol worship of old blues musicians, everything shifted and chunked into place.

If his love of art could be at least partially traced back to his dad's book of record covers; if the cover art on Wings' Red Rose Speedway could seep into his dreams before he even knew how to play a record, might not all this creation just be different shades of the same hue?

"I wanted to bring that logic to visual art," Friedman says. He wanted to be a musician with his painting.

Now he and Curreri are on the road, trying to make it real. Curreri's charge is pretty straightforward: He plays his songs for the crowd. Friedman, who had never been onstage before, had to learn on the fly, making jokes and showing pictures and trying to put the spark in his soul into someone else's.

It took a while to get things straightened out. There were the booking agents who didn't, didn't, didn't get it. There was the passel of art writers who couldn't understand how this project could be as legit as a Chelsea installation. There was the show at a bowling alley, during which, without a slide projector, poor Friedman held a slide of a painting up to the light and succeeded in creating "a slide-shaped shadow on the floor," as Curreri recalls.

But there was, inevitably, that one show in which everything came together.

After they left Philly in June, the two performed at a gas station in Chester, S.C., called Campbell's Music Hall and Truck Stop. The stage stood above the oil pit, and cut logs and card tables were the only seating.

"Everyone brought moonshine, and when I asked where they got the stuff, a man told me, 'Well, if you have a shotgun I'll tell you who you can trade it with,'" Friedman remembers. Chelsea this wasn't.

The community filed in. Old people, big ladies with decks of cards. Friedman started getting scared. These country music lovers would get what Curreri was doing. But what were they gonna make of this goofball with a slide projector? And what about their shotguns?

"They were making gumbo out back, so I had a cup of gumbo and I said to myself, 'If what I'm doing is something really genuine, like these musicians who I love and have devoted my life to doing them justice, I have to tap into that country blues spirit. I can't give them a lecture. I'm just gonna get up and spill my soul."

He did, and they loved it, showing their appreciation with hoots and hollers.

"For the first time ever I felt like I knew what it felt like to be a musician."

Get it? It's all music. It's all poetry. It's all the art of being alive.

It's telling that there are so many "it's likes" in Friedman's descriptions of what he's doing. To him, lots of things are like other things, and the boundaries between genres don't make much sense.

But it's important that you understand something. Friedman's aversion to boundaries isn't some smarty-pants paradigm-shifting RISD-speak. It's just that, well, some days his pencil makes a drawing, and sometimes it makes a poem.

"Country blues music saved my life for that reason. You don't aspire to what other people are doing. You gotta use what you got, when you got it."

Andy Friedman and Paul Curreri perform Thurs., Jan. 23, 9:30pm. Free. Mermaid Inn, 7673 Winston Rd., Chestnut Hill. 215.247.9797