He's country but he jumps genres with irreverence

Robbie Fulks has released a live album called "Revenge!" (Jim Herrington)

Robbie Fulks was 8 years old when he got his first taste of performing. His father was a part-time musician, playing bluegrass and traditional folk music around small-town Virginia. On occasion his young son sat in with the band. One of the songs little Robbie performed was Oscar the Grouch's "I Love Trash."

Thirty-five years later, the wry country singer still has a thing for trash. The song that's probably gotten the most attention on his latest release, the double-disc live collection "Revenge!," is a straight-face cover of Cher's shlocky 1998 hit, "Believe." He's done the same with ABBA's "Dancing Queen," and there's said to be a full-length tribute to Michael Jackson stashed away somewhere.

Fulks, who plays a duo show with his friend Robbie Gjersoe at Club Passim tomorrow night, says that hearing Chet Atkins do Blondie's "Heart of Glass" on "A Prairie Home Companion" gave him validation for his obsessive urge to demolish musical barriers.

Curiously, he's both country to the core and an incorrigible iconoclast. "I feel it's an ongoing tension in my life," says the singer, who parlayed the considerable buzz of his mid-'90s arrival into a steady, if largely under-the-radar, career as an "alt-country" mainstay.

The tension, he says from his Chicago home, isn't between country music and everything else as much as it is between "genre and experiment." Given the choice, he'll jump the wall every time.

And so he has produced a tribute album to Johnny Paycheck, one of country music's least compromising practitioners, recorded an album of affectionate country remakes ("13 Hillbilly Giants"), and written his own songs in the vein of Porter Wagoner and dozens more American masters. Yet he has also made some twisted children's music and an omnivorous, Elvis Costello-ish album called "Couples in Trouble." He has gleefully bashed some of his own potential fans for their narrowmindedness ("Roots Rock Weirdoes"), and he kissed off the very heart of country music when he recorded one of his signature tunes, "[Expletive] This Town."

Such irreverence doesn't always have a long shelf life, he admits. "That kind of thing might be funny the first 200 times you sing it," says Fulks, "but you can get sick of the monotony of it."

Still, he says, he can never resist an opportunity to wedge his tongue firmly into his cheek. "Revenge!" opens with "We're on the Road," a slice of musical comedy worthy of Monty Python, a deliriously cornball barbershop-with-Wurlitzer number about the unglamorous life of a workaday band.

Fulks, who was signed ever so briefly to Geffen Records during the heady 1990s heyday of major labels craving indie content, says he has only recently grown comfortable acknowledging that he and his bandmates take occasional wedding gigs to make ends meet.

"We did one last weekend that might have been the most fun show we've ever done," he says. "Everyone is ready to dance. They don't have to be persuaded. In a club, people give you the once-over - there's a hipster element. There's not so much of that when it's a sea of grandmas, best friends, and cousins."

Fulks's own family had a chance to celebrate recently when his 24-year-old son, Nick, competed with his grandfather Don (Fulks's father-in-law) on season 12 of "The Amazing Race." His father-in-law drew plenty of attention for his near-naked pole-vault over a creek in Amsterdam.

"There was a mining challenge, and he whipped out these mining abilities nobody in the family knew about," says the singer. "I enjoyed the hell out of it."

After a slew of releases on Bloodshot Records, Chicago's home of "insurgent country," and a brief post-Geffen detour during which he started his own label, Fulks has found a new home at Yep Roc, the North Carolina indie label.

"I think that was a strong selling point for me," says Fulks. "Nick [Lowe], Dave Alvin, John Doe - if all those guys are going over there, they must be doing something right."

Fulks says he has had the good fortune of becoming friendly with a true hero, the pop-country songwriting machine Al Anderson. Anderson's former band, NRBQ, has long been a favorite.

"Those guys are made out of music," he marvels. Some might say the same about him.