Of the 20-odd solo performers on the 2010 Capital Fringe roster, several of them have white-collar back-up plans.

Ed Hamell is the other kind.

At 55, he’s been touring in one guise or another since the mid-seventies, and peddling his “conceptually Tom Waits-esque” public-service-announcement-with-guitar act — solo acoustic, but aggressive and loud — under the name Hamell on Trial for something like 15 years.

His show The Terrorism of Everyday Life won the Herald Angel Award at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Here in DC, Capital Fringe Festival brass Julianne Brienza and Scot McKenzie honored him last year with their Director’s Award, given in recognition of an artist’s tolerance for risk, personal and creative integrity, and overall excellence. His entry in this year’s festival is a lighter piece called This Is Your Brain on Rock and Roll.

Hamell scrapes together a living playing around 200 gigs per year, selling his original artwork to his hardest-core fans, and opening for bigger touring acts. A YouTube trailer for an in-progress documentary about him features admiring on-camera remarks from Henry Rollins and Ani DiFranco. (Hamell’s sizeable discography includes three albums released by DiFranco’s label, Righteous Babe.)

Hamell takes my call as he’s driving to a Saturday-night gig in Asbury Park, asking for a receipt every time he stops to pay a toll. He’d never heard of the Edinburgh Fringe until a few years ago, when he told his manager he wanted to take his act into theaters, maybe off-Broadway. His manager had once worked with the pioneering satirist Bill Hicks — whom Hamell considers a kindred spirit — and who’d broken out in the U.K. after playing Edinburgh in 1990.

Hoping his career could blow up the same way, Hamell spent “six months or a year” getting his 60-minute show in shape for the Scottish festival. All that practice got him the prize, but he says it may actually have hurt him closer to home — he lives in Ossining, New York, 20 miles north of Manhattan — where repeat customers who had come to expect a more extemporaneous style of performance now found him sticking to a script.

“My kid, who’s eight years old, was like, ‘You’re not going to do that show again’,” Hamell says.

So, once again, just to make sure we all understand: This is a different show from the one he played here last year.

And DC is the only fringe he’s playing in 2010, mostly because it fits his schedule and because he had a happy experience dealing with Brienza and McKenzie, and with audiences, last summer. He’ll spend half of August taking his son on tour with him, 16 days on the road, playing every night. But he admits he’s nearing a point where if he could earn a steady paycheck teaching performance or songwriting, he’d take it. “I write a new song every day,” he says. “My creative muscles are pretty tuned.”

Meanwhile, he’s still trying to figure out how to make that move up to theaters from clubs, where it’s sometimes painfully evident to him that not every audience is interested in the subtler, more satirical elements of his act.

“I have definitely done enough punk clubs in my life,” he says. “It’s romantic. But on my best days, it’s Crazy Heart. On my worst days, it’s The Wrestler.”

He swears it’s an extemporaneous line.

Ed Hamell performs This Is Your Brain on Rock and Roll at the Baldacchino Gypsy tent this afternoon at 5:30 and tomorrow at 3:15 p.m. Look here for a complete schedule of his CapFringe dates.

Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 18th, 11:30p.m.
Sunday, July 19th, 6:00p.m.
Saturday, July 25th, 9:00p.m.
Sunday, July 26th, 3:00p.m.

They say: Winner of the presitigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ed Hamell combines storytelling, comedy and songs into a brilliantly outrageous theatrical event covering the Beatles, odd jobs, his son’s birth and the shocking death of his parents.

Brett’s take: Phew. Wow. Okay: When, at the end of the show, Mr. Hamell says, “It ain’t for everybody,” he ain’t kidding. It was for me; I think it should be for you; but there is definitely a demographic or two for whom this ain’t. Political conservatives are one. Neat-clean-PC liberals are another.

“But wait,” you say; “then who’s left?” My friends, in this day and age we can sometimes forget there are more than just those two groups. Hamell is a representative of an oft-forgot type: the vulgar, in-yer-face, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll liberal. An original glam rocker from the early 70′s, Hamell has not yuppie-ized or lost his edge whatsoever. He looks and dresses like a snazzy jazz man, or a Beatnik, or your cool uncle who can drop references to the Lovin’ Spoonful as quickly as to Wilco. He plays one heckuva mean amped-to-11, beat-up ’37 Gibson acoustic punkabilly guitar and sings and talks in an unexpectedly high-pitched, fluid voice which somehow makes him seem much more honest than if he sported the gravelly thirty-years-of-booze voice you might expect.

There’s little plot: Hamell races back and forth like a jackrabbit on speed from tongue-twisting observational spoken blues song to racy jokes to unapologetic politicking to surprisingly honest confessions. Although Hamell has a script, he constantly deviates from it, even cutting himself off mid-song to tell us something he was just reminded of; invariably, his extemporaneous aside is hilarious or insightful or both. He informs us that Martin Scorsese is more rock n’ roll than Maroon 5. He sings a song about his love for part of the female anatomy, in which the chorus sounds like a play for the attention of a cat. He lets us know the show was originally based largely on anti-Bush diatribes (which is why the title no longer has much signficance), but now that the Presidency’s changed hands we’ll have to do with a dirty-yet-somehow-flattering Michelle Obama joke. He cuts immediately from his most hilariously off-color song to a blunt and shocking account (and it truly is) of the death of his parents—before going into a second song that almost celebrates it.

How often do you get the chance to absorb the wisdom of a guy who’s seen it all (crack bars, John Lennon, a happy marriage and parenthood) and still retained both his anarchistic political convictions and his raunchy sense of humor? Judging by the award he received from the extremly picky Edinburgh Fringe—not so often indeed.

See it if: You need to get yourself shocked, thought-provoked, enlightened, entertained, challenged, or tickled pink. Or  you’d like to shout “Fuck it!” in chorus with an audience full of young and old.

Skip it if: When Hamell says, “I know my demographic,” he’s not talking about you—i.e., you can’t deal your sensibilities towards Bush, euthanasia, feminism, casual drug use, Obama or music being offended.