Peter Tork and James Lee Stanley began playing music together as high-school friends, and even though the two have since gained fame for their roles in landmark TV shows, they still find playing music together the most enjoyable form of expression. Tork, of course, was the bassist in The Monkees, and he played the wide-eyed, innocent absurdist on the group’s TV show. Stanley has a recurring role on Deep Space Nine, where his ability to look like a middle-aged alien has found him donning the characteristics of a Romulan, a Klingon, and a Vulcan.

But the duo isn’t coming to Nashville as The Monkee and the Alien. Instead, they arrive Tuesday at the Bluebird Cafe as two whimsical songwriters with a knack for stripped-down, melodic songs that look at life with wit and poignancy. The two have a new duet album, Two Man Band, and both have recently released solo albums—and Tork, for one, believes he’s doing the best work of his life.

“I just think that, as a musician, I’m vastly better,” he says. “I don’t know how that relates to the marketplace, but my understanding of music and the skills I have as a performer are a dozen-fold better than they used to be. I’ve sort of lost that, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing’ quality, but I still think I have a lot of spontaneity and passion for the music. And I have just started playing lead guitar for the first time in my life, and I do have a real gee-whiz attitude about that.”

Stanley has been making records as long as Tork has; the singer-songwriter has released 13 solo albums since the ’60s. “I’ve never really had that big hit,” he says, “but I’ve made a pretty good living and have been able to keep doing it, which I’m real thankful for. I get to do what I love.”

For Tork, who has continued to take occasional guest roles on TV sitcoms through the years, his current tour of small clubs is a huge counterpoint to the arena shows the regrouped Monkees have played in recent years. He says he cherishes the chance to communicate with audiences on a more intimate level. “I feel like I am...at the frontier of my life all the time,” he says. “Paying attention has left me in awe of the process of life. I’ve managed to experience what I’ve been presented without getting too jaded, and that’s a huge blessing, I think.”—Michael McCall

Next Wednesday’s 2 Foot Flame show at Victor/Victoria’s will bring to Nashville a couple of near-legendary indie music-makers, one from the far side of the continent and the other from the far side of the globe. On their own, vocalist/guitarist Jean Smith and drummer/pianist Peter Jefferies have been making angular, uncompromising music long before Sebadoh or Pavement became household names. Together with part-time member Michael Morley (himself a member of bona fide cult outfits Dead C. and Gate), the pair formed 2 Foot Flame as an outlet for spontaneous collaboration.

Smith and Jefferies are certainly busy enough on their own. Smith is a member of Mecca Normal, a Vancouver duo that combines the singer’s uncommon vocals with the shredding guitar work of David Lester. Together since the late ’80s, the group has released a handful of singles and LPs, each of which contains a few sparkling gems in the midst of some compelling, if rough-hewn, compositions. New Zealander Jefferies, meanwhile, has amassed his own impressive legacy of recordings. Originally a member of Kiwi group This Kind of Punishment, he has since gone on to record several collections of his own darkly appealing piano- and guitar-based songs for American indie labels Ajax Records and Trance Syndicate.

2 Foot Flame’s second LP for Matador Records, Ultra Drowning, mixes Jefferies’ clattering rhythms and brooding piano with Smith’s elastic, guttural vocals, uniquely observed lyrics, and scraping guitar licks. Morley contributes his own guitar skronks and squeeks along with washes of synthesizer. It’s a heady, atmospheric mix, although it generally lacks the pleasingly unpredictable melodic turns of Smith’s and Jefferies’ other work. It should be interesting to see how the whole affair comes off live, particularly given the group’s stripped-down touring lineup. Whatever the case, the show should be worth checking out, if only to witness the work of two musicians who rarely make it to these parts.—Jonathan Marx

A few thoughts after last week’s Tin Pan South “Muscle Shoals Night” at Henry’s Coffeehouse:

♦ Coffeehouses were once great places for music. That was before the espresso machine. At Henry’s Coffeehouse, song after song was disrupted by the loud, phlegmatic gargle of steaming milk, which lent a jarring, percussive effect to even the most pedestrian material—of which there was unfortunately more than a little, whenever Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham weren’t polishing off “A Woman Left Lonely” and other gems. Of course, 10 mucus-clogged bums backwashing a tub of Listerine couldn’t have drowned out the music bizzers yakking at the bar. “Holy shit, that fella in the yella shirt can sing!” bellowed a grizzled 16th Avenue refugee in the middle of a Walt Aldredge number. “He looks like a young Roy Acuff!” Really? Would you have yammered through his set too?

♦ An event that focuses attention on the songwriter and the craft of writing is swell—but when isn’t attention focused on the songwriter in Nashville? From licensing organizations to publishing companies all the way down to writer’s nights in local clubs, the city’s music industry is built on the backs of songwriters. And while hundreds of hopefuls, talented or otherwise, fail to board the gravy train every year, it is nonetheless possible to make a living here as a songwriter.

It is, however, virtually impossible to make a living in Nashville if you’re in a band. The venues are limited. Labels don’t seem to sign too many groups. Low turnouts, P.A. fees, the difficulty of finding rehearsal space—an uphill struggle faces any four or five musicians who’d prefer to perform as a unit rather than in the round. Songwriters have their troubles too, but they’re respected and nurtured in ways that even successful local bands are not. People pay lip service to the need for songwriters all the time; bands don’t even get that false piety.

Maybe all this explains why Nashville has dozens of great songwriters, but only a handful of great bands. Tin Band South, anyone?—Jim Ridley

Brian Henneman is arguably the finest blue-collar songwriter this side of Merle Haggard. Even so, Henneman didn’t find Bob Wolf, proprietor of Wolfy’s—Haggard’s favorite Lower Broad haunt—terribly appreciative when the Bottle Rockets’ frontman played there last week as part of Tin Pan South. Appearing with unreconstructed boogieman Dan Baird in an ad-hoc band called Montesaurus Rocks, Henneman and Baird could very well have had the plug pulled on them if they hadn’t changed their tune.

Shortly after Baird charged into “Cumberland River,” his vituperative send-up of Music City, Wolf telephoned from an upstairs apartment instructing management to ask the band to turn down their amps. Surprised and disgusted, Henneman nodded to his teensy 12-inch-by-12-inch amplifier, saying, “My dad took bigger lunch boxes to work with him than that.” Then Baird chimed in, inviting any offended parties to “break into discussion groups—or get the fuck out of here.”

Henneman, Baird, and company regrouped after an impromptu band meeting and made the best of Wolfy’s poor show of hospitality. They performed a dissonant version of the closing song from The Carol Burnett Show (“I’m so glad we had this time together”), and fragments of Michael Murphey’s “Wildfire” and America’s “Horse With No Name” followed. Better still was a set-closing rendition of the Bottle Rockets’ “Kerosene.” As his bandmates played with unapologetic anger, Henneman delivered the lines, “It’s a pure-perfect world, tells no lies/Burn you down you try to improvise,” with such relish that Bob Wolf should thank his stars no one had a can of gasoline handy.

And hats off to the sound guy for playing Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” once the dust had settled. Rock scribe-cum-critical theorist Greil Marcus couldn’t have summed up the connections implied in the Henneman-Haggard-Wolf conundrum any better, nor as succinctly.—Bill Friskics-Warren

The turnout sucked last week for one of the best shows in months: a rare local appearance at Zanies by The Holmes Brothers. The trio of Wendell and Sherman Holmes and drummer Popsy Dixon romped through country, funk, classic R&B, and the most soul-stirring gospel harmonies this side of the Fairfield Four. The evening’s highlight came when Dixon took the microphone for a spine-tingling reading of Tom Waits’ “Train Song.” Those who missed the show have no right to complain about how few national blues acts ever come to town.

Irish tenor Jimmy Rockwell headlines a benefit for the Base Camp veteran’s center Friday night at Nashville Nightlife, 2620 Music Valley Dr. The show is sponsored by WAMB Radio and Nashville Nightlife, and it lasts from 7 to 10 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door.—Jim Ridley