Jeff Daniels, yes, the actor, is a wry story teller and songwriter. He sits before us in an ersatz fedora playing fine guitar and singing. Vocal is sandpapery and tinted by the south – contractions few and far between. Rhymes are clever; thoughts economically expressed, but uncompromised. Hands dance on strings, yet the artist’s performance is unfussy.
During a run of Fifth of July, its playwright Lanford Wilson heard 23 year-old Daniels noodling in a dressing room. “Lemme help,” he said, returning with a narrative poem. “See what you can do with this.” The result was “Roadside,” impressions of passengers on a Greyhound bus journey. It’s cinematic.”My, my my, my my, my,” he sings. “You wanna be a writer, keep your eyes and ears open,” Wilson advised.
Daniels did exactly that. An anecdote about being asked to play during an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show introduces a love song to his guitar. “All musicians have one.” No one told her. She was terrified. This was an actor! “When my fingers find your strings…” then “I ain’t holdin’ you, my friend/It’s you who’s holdin’ me…” he sang. The host cried.
A wistful ode to “his” grandfather’s hat sounds cozy and familiar, as if it’s been around for decades. (Alas, the one he’s wearing has no heritage.) “If everything they say is true/I guess I’m a lot like you…” Pauses are as much a part of the lyric as words. Timing is marvelous.
“Lord have mercy on the man whose woman is reading 50 Shades of Gray,” rose from the discovery his wife was reading the book. “She pushed me on the bed/You be Anastasia’s all she said…” “Some of you have read it,” Daniels notes responding to audience laughter.
Passing Ryan Reynolds in the narrow hallway of a film set meant one or both had to move. “Why don’t we take our pants off and relax,” Reynolds reflexively quipped. In his song, Daniels attributed the suggestion to an attempted bar pick-up. “So if you believe as I believe/That opposites attract/How ’bout we take our pants off and relax.” An eyebrow arches. “Here’s the obligatory sing-along.” The club joins in chorus. “Now just the men. Now just the girls.” “It never fails,” the artist tells me later.
“I do not have a star on the Walk of Frame…Really, it’s ok. ‘Om over it… David Hasselhoff has a star, Vanna White, Woody Woodpecker…It’s ok…I’ve spent some time on red carpets…The stench of ambition- you try not to get any on ya…” prefaces talkin’ blues about a Hollywood performer who has it ALL, even clothing and fragrance lines.
“Are you as excited about me as I am?” he sings. (Daniels has a talent for hooks.) The protagonist’s career dies “…all I know/Is yesterday’s a long time ago” his agent responds. Liquor, pills and The Betty Ford Clinic follow with regret and fatigue. A last “Are you as excited about me…” arrives in stage whisper. We see the character, before and after, he’s conjured.
Noting the prevailing marijuana scent of New York, Daniels tells us, grass “goes all the way back to Biblical times when it was called hemp. Hemp is all over the Bible.” “The immaculate conception/Gets easy to believe/If Jesus was a stoner/Divinin’ on the Devil’s weed…” Pretty much nothing’s off limits. And really, who knows?
“He saddled up smooth/Like a man on the make…” begins another barroom scenario. “She was the rhythm to his blues/The rock to his roll…” This one was inspired by overhearing a declaration. The hero longs for “a world where miracles happen/And dreams come true/Where a man like me/Can love a woman like you.”
Daniels is thinking man’s folksy, a musical Mark Twain chronicling his fellows with sensitivity and humor.
A charming evening.
There IS a CD, though not of this show. Jeff Daniels Live and Unplugged – To benefit The Purple Rose Theatre in his home town in Michigan. (After Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo in which the actor starred.)
Photo by Alix Cohen
