Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hot, hot summertime in Fayetteville: Fred Armisen’s live show came to town
Comedian, actor, musician, writer and producer Fred Armisen performed his show “Comedy for Musicians But Everyone is Welcome” at George’s Majestic Lounge Sunday night to a sold-out crowd.
This weekend was Armisen’s first time to visit Fayetteville. Local promoter Roger Barrett’s On the Map project brought the show to Northwest Arkansas.
Armisen is best known as co-creator of the sketch comedy series “Portlandia,” a Saturday Night Live alum and more recently co-creator of HBO’s “Los Espookys,” but his previous experience was in music with bands Trenchmouth, Blue Man Group and others.
“Comedy for Musicians But Everyone is Welcome” blends the inside jokes of the music industry with Armisen’s signature impressions and things that musicians and concertgoers find universally funny. The tour, which first began in 2019, is something Armisen has done in brief spurts of a month or a week here and there.
It’s given him the chance to keep working on it and changing it, a work in motion, Armisen said by phone. He’s added things to the show little by little.
“Initially it started as the ‘Stand Up for Drummers’ special for Netflix,” Armisen said. “(The music element was) only going to be a short part of it, but it just took over.”
Since coming out on Netflix in 2018, there have been many versions as Armisen got progressively more material. Having musical instruments while he’s talking on stage gives Armisen something in common with the audience.
“When I talk about music, people want to talk about it too,” Armisen said. “Just like the marketing of instruments or when we hear songs and how we react” to them.
At first, Armisen didn’t expect that the show would still be going a few years later. He only ever thinks a couple of months ahead, he said.
“The more it keeps going, I’m always surprised,” Armisen said. “As the years have gone on, I’ve wished that musicians would turn up for it and it is really happening. It’s great meeting people.”
Armisen said the audiences of “Comedy for Musicians” tell him their observations of being a musician and those observations are “really funny, so I get a mini show,” he said. “I get to be a part of them being funny, which I like. I like the idea of building something new that isn’t doing characters and stuff. I was just used to that from SNL and Portlandia.”
The many music-related Portlandia skits were, however, early opportunities for Armisen to hone that craft of slipping in jokes that only musicians would get or that they might appreciate more than others.
One of many examples was a character who has a home recording studio and brags about his soundboard that the Beach Boys used.
“It’s really an inside reference, not even for a musician, but for sound engineers,” Armisen said. “Then on (Portlandia) we would
have all kinds of guests, guest stars in the music world like Glenn Danzig, we got lucky to get to do a bunch of that stuff.”
Danzig appeared in the episode Weirdo Beach as a visitor from Transylvania, Romania, who convinces Armisen’s character to try traditional beachwear despite their shared affinity for black clothing, trench coats, combat boots, etc.
That Armisen’s Portlandia co-creator is musician Carrie Brownstein of rock trio Sleater-Kinney made it musical from the start, he said.
Fred Armisen’s fascination with all things culture stemmed in part from having parents who were immigrants to the U.S.
“They were into American culture in a way that made me excited,” he said. His mom loved Saturday Night Live, especially Chevy Chase, and she was a big Beatles fan. “I was getting into something through their experience. They had a way of watching TV and listening to music that was new that (made me) into it because they didn’t have that experience” themselves.
Northwest Arkansans may wonder about the Summertime in Fayetteville skit Armisen created, sung by “The Harkin Brothers family band” for Saturday Night Live.
Armisen said he wanted to create a song parodying The Allman Brothers or The Doobie Brothers, in which they sing at length about one particular place and what its people are like. He searched the map for a town that didn’t bring up an immediate cliche and settled on Fayetteville.
Then “I imagined what it would be like, rather than taking a deep dive, then it went from there,” he said.
Whether Armisen’s love for comedy or his love for music came first is hard to say because the two got intertwined so early on.
“The bands I liked had a sensibility to them that was more than just being a band, they had some humor to it,” Armisen said, listing Devo, Talking Heads and David Bowie among them. “Not comedy bands, but that they had elements to them … Not that they were telling a joke, but there’s another observation in it that’s different than a band jamming out — a mantra.”
Films and video also fused the comedy/music connection as young Armisen watched Keith Moon, the drummer for the Who, about whom Fred thought there was something distinctly funny and the Beatles’ transformation in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“It’s not comedy, but a type of persona, (they) changed it up and that had an impact on me,” Armisen said.
Even now it’s the musicrelated jokes, gifs and memes that give Armisen a laugh himself, he said. And in these first few years of his show, even though the response has been good across the board, certain cities’ reactions felt more electric than others, like his first time to perform in London and a return to the Great Amerian Music Hall in San Francisco, where Armisen did the initial recording for Netflix. Whether it was a synergy from the audience alone or a reflection of his own excitement for being there, he’s not sure.
Regardless, doing “Comedy for Musicians” is a bit of a full circle moment for Armisen.
“When I did music, I didn’t get to play venues of this size and tour in the same way or for as long that I get to (now),” Armisen said. “And for a while I thought I would never do again, so it’s nice to have.”