The Herald-Palladium, 9/16/2010

Laid-back charmer

Jeff Daniels woos his audiences with spontaneous one-man shows

By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO
H-P Features Writer

BENTON HARBOR — Jeff Daniels bought his first guitar when he left for New York City.

“I just had a feeling I’d be sitting around my apartment waiting for the phone to ring,” the stage and screen actor says by telephone from his home in Chelsea, Mich. “In order to stay sane amidst all that uncertainty and rejection, I thought I would need a creative outlet. I kept seeing those pictures of (Bob) Dylan walking down the road with a guitar case, and that looked mobile enough for me.”

While waiting for the calls that would bring news about such films roles as P.C. O’Donnell in “Ragtime,” Flap Horton in “Terms of Endearment,” and Tom Baxter and Gil Shepherd in “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Daniels immersed himself into Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Tablature Books and began to play.

He would go to The Bottom Line on West Fourth Street and watch Doc Watson and Steve Goodman and John Prine, then sit in his apartment writing songs in a private notebook.

“I never had an inkling that anyone would hear these things,” Daniels says. “It was more just for me.”

Three decades later, Daniels’ diversion has since gone public, but he’s not just another actor turned singer/songwriter.

Daniels has released four well-received albums – “Live & Unplugged,” “Grandfather’s Hat” (2006), “Together Again” (2007) and “Live at the Purple Rose” (2009) – and his spontaneous one-man sets have showcased an uncanny ability to woo an audience with his laid-back charm.

“I never lose sight of the fact that I want to make sure people have a good time,” says Daniels, who performs Sunday at Lake Michigan College to open the 2010-2011 Mendel Center Mainstage season. “I want them to see something they’ve never seen before. That’s the goal every time out.”

Daniels – whose film credits include “Gettysburg,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “The Squid and the Whale” and “State of Play” – grew up in Chelsea, Mich., and returned to his hometown in 1986, following the success of the Woody Allen film, “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” It’s also where, in 1991, he founded the nonprofit equity Purple Rose Theatre, which still produces four mainstage shows a year, many of which are original works written by Michigan playwrights. Daniels’ devotion to the Purple Rose and its mission became reason enough to take his private hobby public. In 2000, he decided that Christmas and New Year’s weeks, when the theater was dark, would be an ideal time to do a fundraising performance.

“I thought, ‘What could we do that’s cheap?’” Daniels says. “And the theater people said, ‘Why don’t you take your guitar and go out and sing your little songs?’ I said, ‘Well, because most of them are horrible.’ They said, ‘Well, we don’t care; we’ll raise money.’ So I went to work trying to at least make them presentable. Some ended up being good; some were just disasters.”

Daniels has since weeded out the disasters, for public consumption anyway, and has concentrated on the stories and songs that have endeared him to audiences. There’s “The Dirty Harry Blues,” which he wrote about his work playing the villain in Clint Eastwood’s film “Blood Work,” where he often gushes, “You don’t know what an honor it is for an actor to get killed by Clint.”

There’s “Recreational Vehicle” about a disastrous trip Daniels took with his family, and the tender “Grandfather’s Hat,” about missing someone who’s no longer there. Michigan also is a focus of his music, whether it’s “The Ballard of the Buckless Yooper” or his baseball tribute “The Lifelong Tiger Blues, Revisited.”

Although Daniels now seems at ease playing his guitar on stage, surprisingly it took some getting used to.

“I’ve been on stage since the ’70s, so I walked into this sort of blindly thinking, ‘How hard can this be?’” Daniels says. “What you find out immediately is there’s no filter, there’s no character to hide behind. There’s a nakedness to it whether you’re singing personal songs or just singing period. It’s you. And that’s a shocker. You learn how to be you in a really good mood who really loves playing and you find that person who’s a side of yourself, but it took me three years I think to find that guy.”

Daniels spent much of 2009 and part of this year in the Tony Award-winning play “God of Carnage” on Broadway, originally opposite James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis. Since the show closed in June, Daniels has scheduled 50 concert dates, which will take him into much of the fall. It’s a role he’s come to relish.

“With the music show you’re the writer, you’re the director, the performer, the actor,” Daniels says. “You have complete creative control. So the discipline of doing eight shows a week on Broadway for seven months feeds that we’ve got a gig every night. The spontaneity of going from Take 3 to Take 4 and doing something completely different on a movie helps you sing a song a different way the next night and still make it enjoyable for the audience. I’ve found that those things inform the music.”

Proceeds from Daniels’ CD sales still support his Purple Rose Theatre, which is entering its 20th season. He’s also helped make Michigan a film destination and continues to tout the role the arts can play in the state.

“Emotionally I never left,” Daniels says. “After 10 years of living in New York I said, ‘I think I’m going to move back to Michigan,’ and I had a friend who said, ‘You never left.’ He was right. It’s always been home, and I want to leave it better than I found it.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com