Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers featuring Edie Brickell
When: Monday, 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:30)
Where: The Royal Theatre
Tickets: $100.50 and $132.50 (plus service charges) at the McPherson Box Office (250-386-6121) or online at rmts.bc.ca
Note: Martin and Brickell also perform Sunday at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo
Steve Martin spent the better part of his decade-long stand-up comedy career trying to foist one of his genuine loves — the banjo — upon his audience.
Martin arrived at the decision that the two would never co-exist, despite his best efforts to include the instrument at his concerts and on some of his recordings.
“When I first started, I really decided to be a comedian, so I underplayed the banjo,” Martin said recently from New York.
“I didn’t want it to be a music show, I wanted it to be a comedy show. I subordinated the banjo and the music because I didn’t have anybody to play with. It was just me. And music always sounds better when you’ve got some other people.”
When he finally decided to merge the two for good — with no apologies — he was pleasantly surprised at the results, if not the reception from his fans. Martin is currently on a multi-faceted tour with singer Edie Brickell and bluegrass band the Steep Canyon Rangers, one that crosses music with comedy in a way that suits Martin just fine.
“The fact that the comedy is broken up by music, it really helps keep you from having to stand there for an hour and a half doing comedy, which is not easy,” said Martin, 68. “The fact that we can relax into a nice song, it’s really nice.”
It took the native of Waco, Tex., who was raised in California, a long time to get to this point. There was always a musical bent to his comedy, dating to back to King Tut, his parody hit with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The song broke into the Top 20 on the pop charts in 1978, a reflection of both his reputation at the time and innate ability at finding the perfect balance between music and mayhem. Once feature films became more of a priority for Martin, his musical endeavours began to take a backseat, though he was careful never to let them disappear entirely.
He toyed with the idea of making a banjo record of his own after a collaboration with bluegrass king Earl Scruggs in 2001. The experience sent him back to the drawing board and in 2009 he released his first album of all original musical material, The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo.
Martin said he was surprised to find that modern-day audiences were finally ready to embrace the sympathetic qualities of country and comedy in a way that older audiences didn’t think twice about in the days of Homer and Jethro, Minnie Pearl and Hee-Haw.
“When I first started playing music, there were all these folk music acts around Orange County that combined comedy with music. In a way, I’m kind of a throwback to what I was raised on and started out doing. You entertain the audience a little bit, play a song and make some jokes.”
Martin has released two bluegrass records since The Crow, both of which feature the Steep Canyon Rangers of North Carolina. Their latest collaboration features words and lyrics by Brickell, whom Martin has known for more than 20 years, thanks to his longtime friendship with her husband, Paul Simon.
Their initial collaboration, Love Has Come for You, netted a Grammy and earned both Brickell and Martin some of their best reviews in years. They are already 23 songs into another project, Martin said, which will likely be fleshed out as a musical.
After making six films in five years, Martin opted to scale back his movie productions in summer 2010. He hasn’t made a feature film since 2011, a break that coincides with an uptick in his musical activity. He is not shutting the door on movies, but he wants to give music a realistic shot at long-term success.
His tour schedule with the Rangers and Brickell is kept reasonable on purpose, in part because of his parental duties (Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield, welcomed their first child, a daughter, in December 2012).
Tour dates are limited to either weekends or three- or four-day runs by design, Martin said.
The measured pace is not, however, dictated by the speed at which the band performs, he added.
“When I first started playing the banjo live on stage, which is five or six years ago, I didn’t know if I’d be able to play a two-hour show, because I hadn’t done it ever. As it turns out, it’s not even a problem.”
For the moment, he is dedicated almost exclusively to music. But for an artist whose range has earned him five Grammy Awards, and honorary Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, there’s no telling when something else will pop up on his radar.
“It’s a big part of my life right now, and I don’t have intent to stop, let’s put it that way,” he said.
“But you never know. I’d hate to stop and then lose all the chops that I’ve earned over the last four or five years.”
