He played the Saenger with Puddles Pity Party opening. Puddles is a clown. I discovered this when walking into the theater. Puddles is extremely tall, white-faced, tiny-hatted, with a white clown outfit with black fuzzies on front. Many people get weirded out by clowns but not me. His set consisted mostly of him singing to backing tracks while silent video clips played behind him. Despite that unpromising description, he was excellent. That clown can sing, and his song selection was fascinating. For example, he sang “Come on Up to the House,” a Tom Waits song, somewhat recently covered by Sarah Jarosz. (That’s how I came to the tune. I do it on gigs, for those keeping score.) As soon as he went into the first line, “Well the moon is broken and the sky is cracked,” I wanted to clutch the arms of my sidecar seatmates. He did it appropriately slow, not dirge-slow, but somber, a resigned-and-pleading slow, as appropriate to the gist of the tune. Are all good pop songs subterraneanly religious? Discuss. 

I am sentimental about live music performance in general, but I found myself almost getting teary during this performance. I love the song, sure. But also the spirit of the song sang through the surreal performance. It made me think, not for the first time, that good songs are themselves trickster figures, shape-shifting through the culture, able and available to wear all kinds of formal outfits, to hum through all kinds of noise and still be heard. Or maybe I was just in a mood. 

He also sang “My Heart Will Go On,” the world-destroying Celine Dion hit from Titanic, a song that I had surgically removed from my brain many years ago. Like a bad part of town, it’s a place I don’t want to go. But yes, even this was effective under the circumstances. During his set, the screen behind Puddles silently played different clips from various Kevin Costner movies. After the third song and third Costner-related movie, a pattern had been established. This culminated with “Heart,” where all the clips were intermingled into an ongoing Costner montage, so that Puddles was singing to Costner. It was such a strange mixing of registers, even if they all flowed from the pop cultural stream of the last thirty years. It felt strange without being deliberately weird, if that makes sense, and funnier because of it. I didn’t realize Costner had been in so many movies. (Bull Durham is still the best movie ever made.) 

And yes, I even found myself moved by “Heart.” The operatic emotional overdoneness of it was still there, obviously, but it was leavened by the Costner bits, and by the fact that it was being sung by a clown. So of course it was ridiculous. Its ridiculousness was painted on its face, as it were, but despite the forefronting of ridiculousness or because of this forefronting, the actual song shone through, shorn of its kitsch trappings. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what we call kitsch is actually buried genius, that it takes a kernel of genius to produce kitsch in the first place, and that the Puddles performance re-kitschified the song, or added so much more deliberate kitsch to the mix that the kernel burst forth, through all the intervening corn stalk irony so that one could feel (or I could feel) the transient genius of the tune before the lights dimmed and we were all enclosed again in our protective layers. 

Then Weird Al came on stage and the ship exploded.