Live at the Belly Up: Tim Flannery and the Lunatic Fringe (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After Death in Paradise on November 1 Charles and I watched the Live at the Belly Up show featuring singer/songwriter Tim Flannery, who in this episode led a band called The Lunatic Fringe. The members of the band are people he’s known for years – as he says on his Web site, “Jeff Berkley, Shawn Rohlf, Chris Grant, and when we can get him, Doug Pettibone" – and on the show he joked that they’d gone through several names, including “That Damn Band.” Flannery said he’d adopted that one when his wife Donna called him out for spending so much time with “that damn band,” and the name stuck for a while until he went through several alternatives and ended up with “The Lunatic Fringe.” Flannery has had careers in both music and professional baseball; he was drafted by the San Diego Padres in 1978 and called up to play major league baseball with the Padres the following year. Flannery spent the next few seasons bouncing back and forth between the Padres and their main minor-league team, but he was on the roster full-time by 1982 and played on the Padres team that got on their one World Series in 1984. He was with the Padres until he retired from active playing in 1989 and subsequently became a broadcaster for the team.

Flannery was born in 1957 and his Web site lists “family, baseball and music” as the three constants in his life and career. Flannery’s Web site lists 15 albums he’s recorded over the years, most recently Waiting on a Dream (2022), inspired by a near-death experience he went through when he was hospitalized for a staph infection in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to his Web site, “After nearly two months in the hospital, where he faced some of his darkest moments, he was released to the care of his ever-loving family who nursed him back to health over the next six months.” Given that he’s no spring chicken, it’s not surprising that his music is redolent with themes of loss, especially the second song on his Live at the Belly Up program, “Last Man Standing,” which is about how it feels when your friends die one by one and leave you alone and bereft. My husband Charles and I have lost enough near and dear friends and family members over the last few years, we could certainly identify with this one! Flannery played 13 songs on his Live at the Belly Up show; as I’ve said in previous posts on this series, I often gauge a Live at the Belly Up episode by the number of songs the solo artist or group perform, and 13 is close to the high end, indicating that Flannery is a highly disciplined performer and a tight song structuralist who doesn’t indulge himself in long jam sessions or the kinds of pre-song announcements and anecdotes the previous week’s performer, Jack Tempchin (whom Flannery singled out for praise in his closing rap), had done.

Flannery also has a better voice than Tempchin’s; while neither one is one of the golden throats of the age, Tempchin’s is a serviceable vehicle for his songs (it’s not surprising he’s had so many hits for other people, including – blessedly – “Peaceful Easy Feeling” for The Eagles) but Flannery’s is more than that. His show opened with “Arkansas Line,” one of many alluding to country origins (though his Web site doesn’t say exactly where he was born, it seems like it must have been somewhere in the South) and then went through a number of songs, most of them relatively quiet and thoughtful but some of which ventured into rock. He did “Arkansas Line,” “Last Man Standing,” “River of Time,” “This Kind of Love,” “Hillbilly Rain,” “Memory of Old Magazine,” “Don’t Let the Devil Take Your Mind” (one of the hardest rockers on his song list), “Working on a Miracle,” “Spanish Town” (an original and not the oldie “In a Little Spanish Town,” which I was kind of expecting), and “I Still Believe in You,” the first song in which he was joined by female singer Eve Salis. Then Flannery played “Last of My Kind” and “Is the Restless Kind” before being rejoined by Salis for his last song, “Hickory Wind” – in which his excellent guitarist, heavy-set Jeff Berkley, also joined in and sang a solo chorus.

Tim Flannery’s appearance on Live at the Belly Up was especially welcome since, like Jack Tempchin’s, his songs sounded different from each other, sometimes dramatically so. All too often this show has featured jam bands that started out with an infectious groove – and then stayed in it all night until they reached a point of no return in which grooves that had started out as “infectious” gradually became boring and annoying. (Most of the dance-music acts that play the Belly Up are of this type, and I figure that’s one sort of entertainment for which “you really have to be there,” live and in the moment, to enjoy it as the musicians intend you to.) Not this time: Tim Flannery sings with an infectious power, drive and sense of drama, and like Jack Tempchin he writes a wide variety of songs so his sets don’t get monotonous.