However you spent your Monday night on April 7, there’s a 95% likelihood that you would’ve had more fun watching Tim Fite at Mississippi Studios. But that’s sort of a given—Fite puts on one of the strangest and most enjoyable live shows you’re ever likely to see.

Fite is somewhat hard to sum up. His music, as typified by his 2005 Anti Records debut Gone Ain’t Gone, blends Americana, hip-hop and pop, sung and rapped through a Deep South drawl (even though Fite’s actually from Brooklyn). His songs have lyrics like, “I think I should play more shows/ So I can buy more clothes/ So I can look like them folks who buy clothes.” But listening to Fite’s album doesn’t give you any idea of his onstage antics (as a pair of his fans who just happened to be passing through Portland and saw he was playing pointed out to him after the show).

But Fite sequences most of his songs live, freeing himself up for various other activities — as his Mississippi Studios show ably demonstrated. Sometimes Fite accompanied his recordings on guitar, but most of the time he just cantered and capered around the stage instead. Live, Fite is backed by his brother Greg (aka “Dr. Leisure”), who sat behind a laptop controlling the live show and singing backup vocals. (Greg also spent most of the show talking to the audience, just quietly enough that we could never tell just what he was murmuring at us.)

Meanwhile, on a projector screen at the back of the stage, there was another Tim Fite. The projected Tim Fite sat in a wheelchair and played other instruments (traveling guitars, keyboard) and generally looked totally spaced out. Sometimes he was joined by two additional Tim Fites, who flanked him like bodyguards until they finally loosened up enough to start dancing and singing. And between actual songs, Fite performed short stores and strange poetry with titles like “Jo Jo and Bobby Stab a Motherfucker” (in which Jo Jo and Bobby—a bird and a cat—share a sandwich and never get around to stabbing any such motherfucker), which were illustrated on the screen. And throughout all of this, Fite was referring to himself in the third person as “The Gentleman with Itchy Legs.”

The distilled, essence-of-Tim-Fite number in his set is always an audience sing-along called “Burn It Down: An incendiary walk with the Gentleman with Itchy Legs.” Fite shows various locations—a barn, a chicken coop, a police station—on the screen, and when the inhabitants piss him off, he has the audience sing “Burrrrrn! Burn it down-down-down! Burn it down-down-down! Let’s burn it down!” Mississippi Studios is usually a rather restrained, contemplative venue, but for that song it was still full of bellowing.

Unfortunately, Fite doesn’t tour much—he says it’s just too expensive to make the cross-continental trek from Brooklyn. Which is a damn shame. Because he’s really the most fun you can expect to have on a Monday night.

Bonus: YouTube user MopperEntertainment took this very poor quality video at the show.

Links:
Tim Fite dot com (where you can download his albums 2 Minute Blues and Over the Counter Culture for free)
FiteSpace

Photo courtesy of Tim Fite