Photo credit: Peter Lee
Charlie Parr may be the first to cop to having "negative stage presence." He admitted as much about himself Thursday night at Linneman's Riverwest Inn for a performance that nearly packed the back room of the intimate tavern on the corner of Locust and Weil. But he sells himself short.
Not only is Parr an unassumingly compelling, hilarious raconteur when speaking between songs about life at home and on the road. But put a guitar or dobro in his hands, and he becomes a Piedmont-style picking phenomenon. While he may be a bigger deal in Ireland and Australia, the latter of which has featured his music in TV ads for cellphones, he seems as much in his element performing his often piquant originals and country blues from the era of 78rpm records in small venues as he would be anywhere.
Funny as his tales can be—whether about sleeping at highway rest stops as he drives himself from gig to gig, the battle of dueling lawn mowers between Parr and his neighbor in Duluth, or the gift of a top hat that straightens his posture and elicits smiles from children when he wears it—they contrast with the sadness of some of his best work. A nearly casual combination of disdain and pity reminiscent of John Prine informs a song about old ladies and homeless drunkards both buying cheap wine. A song recalling a childhood memory of his father staying up at night shoot a bothersome badger comes off both as random and sorrowfully disturbing in so far as its depiction of a certain loss of innocence when it comes to the order of the world.
Yet, Parr's not all about melancholy. The line in his "Motorcycle Blues" about wanting to drive a non-functioning Batmobile at a Las Vegas car show alone might be worth the price of one of his CDs, and the righteously stomping "Jubilee" straddles the line between worldly concerns and the sacred repertoire for which he has a fondness. Even some of the public domain death-themed numbers he assayed, three of which he plied with a friend from the Martin Drive neighborhood on his own guitar and one harmony vocal, possessed a lightness of spirit belying the heaviness of the subject matter. A new song about The Falcon writer John Tanner's 18th century childhood abduction by Ojibwes and subsequent inability to adjust to life indoors matched a hoot of prologue by Parr with a successful try at historical balladry.
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Musical history tidbits germane to long gone blues men Hambone Willie Newbern and Willie Brown were helpful in establishing context before Parr before launched into their songs. His drawing of distinctions between the continuation of folk and blues traditions proved helpful in appreciating a few of the tunes he covered as well.
He gave no such prelude, however to the last of his two encores, an audience request for Brother Claude Ely's gospel shouter "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." Parr bound into it as a keen a capella, evidencing that his vocals can very much stand on their own apart from his astounding fretwork and picking. Not much later, he was near Linneman's front door shaking handing and posing for pictures with appreciative fans, in that top hat of his.
