One would expect a Tiny Tim concert to be weird, but last night's Bank One-sponsored Lonesome Pine Special was stranger than that -- downright surreal. And it was very good entertainment.
From Brave Combo's opening set -- a global pillage of dance music -- to Tiny Tim's crowd-mandated encores, the Macauley Theatre was witness to music spanning time, space, taste and sensibility. Perhaps an appreciation for eccentricity was indeed necessary, but please don't think last night's shenanigans were weirdness for weirdness' sake. Tiny Tim made good on his promise to be a musical time machine, and Brave Combo did as advertised and pasted a smile on everyone's face and a beat in their feet.
Undoubtedly, last night saw a series of firsts. Has Louisville ever heard a salsa tune played with its distinctive, rolling piano figure roaring from an electric guitar, and a sax part stolen from a Ventures song? Has anyone ever introduced the rousing Jewish dance song "Hava Nagila" with the shout, "It's time to do the Twist!" -- and meant it? Did anyone ever successfully end their set with a brilliant Tex-Mex treatment of "Must Be Santa" via Mitch Miller's arrangement? I don't think so. Those were just a few of the surprises that Brave Combo sprung on the audience during their 75-minute reign.
The only thing Brave Combo seemed to respect and revere was fun, which they insisted on threading through every samba, salsa, polka, cha-cha and tango that they twisted into fascinating, bizarre shapes.
In contrast, Tiny Tim's goal was to imbue the audience with the same love for early American pop music that he holds in his sweet-natured heart. Accompanied by pianist Bob French and Tim's own electric ukelele, the '60s celebrity warbled through "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," "In the Good Old Summertime," "School Days" and a medley of more than a dozen tunes, including "It's a Grand Old Flag," "Wabash Cannonball" and "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain." At one particularly odd moment, Tiny Tim was a tangle of microphone cord, shaking tennis shoes, clothing he'd shed and Memphis blues as he fell to the ground for the climax of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel." His biggest hit, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," found his falsetto in fine form, but he mostly stuck to his vibrato-drenched baritone.
A peculiar version of "Beer Barrel Polka" wrapped things up -- but only after several reprises. Brave Combo then joined him for several songs from their collaborative album "Girl," then played the only song that would manage to shock an audience that heard a cool, smoothly swinging version of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven": another numbingly mundane reprise of "Beer Barrel Polka." It was so wrong, it was right.