Traveling music revue is medicine for the ages

The Yard Dogs Road Show evolved from a three-piece jug band to a touring revue.

Their show features bawdy music, dancing girls in garters, and old-time carnival acts such as sword-swallowing and fire-eating. They count among their musical heroes the lowlife connoisseur Tom Waits, the perverted cabaret trio called the Tiger Lillies, and the late, unrepentant envelope-pusher Frank Zappa. Hailing from San Francisco, they trace their lineage to two distinctly libertarian eras in that city's history - the psychedelic 1960s and the lawless Barbary Coast heyday of the Gold Rush.

Yet for all their fringe proclivities, the members of the Yard Dogs Road Show describe their traveling revue as "values-based." It is, they insist, a family entertainment.

If their values don't quite align with the prevailing sentiment - if their "family" consists of a dozen or so misfits, contrarians, and would-be gypsy runaways - well, they're just taking a cockeyed view of the same big midway. In the American circus, there's always room for one more sideshow.

"We're just being ourselves, doing what we feel," says Eddy Joe Cotton, Yard Dogs founder and the author of "Hobo: A Young Man's Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America." "If that comes across as a criticism of where our culture is now, so be it. There are a lot of opinions in the group."

What started as a larky three-piece jug band - just like the Grateful Dead, Cotton notes - has evolved over the past few years into a full-fledged touring operation, with an ever-tightening script, several national tours under the treads, and appearances at Glastonbury and other big overseas festivals. But the Yard Dogs, who perform tonight and tomorrow at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, N.H., still look at their vocation more as a collective lifestyle choice than a business.

"We always want to make the show better, but not at the expense of somebody we care about," says Cotton, whose given name is Zebu Recchia. "When we started, it was all about living an artistic life. We were living life in the streets, playing music, and not really knowing maybe it was a show in the making."

The whole thing was essentially a happy accident, he says. "In the '60s, everyone was having their vaudeville moment, too. We started doing our homework, and we realized a lot of our role models had taken the exact same path. It was a little spooky, but it built our confidence. It felt good to know we were falling into a historical lineage."

The fact that they work in an outdated framework - "saloon vaudeville," as one of their vivid phrases suggests - doesn't mean the Yard Dogs are hopelessly nostalgic. Yet there's no denying they are driven by the kind of bohemian ideals that don't get much microphone time these days. Cotton confesses he was unprepared for the current decade's hard shift toward "ultra-materialism," after the underground's mid-1990s obsession with authenticity.

"When we travel," he says, "it feels like the 1950s again."

By contrast, the Jim Rose Circus - the tattooed freak show that helped foster a renewed appreciation for traveling showmanship - could only have come out of the Lollapalooza years. Rose and company, with their regurgitation tricks and body-pierced weightlifting stunts, had a single aim in mind: to shock.

"What fueled Jim Rose is much different than what fuels us," says Cotton. "We're looking at longevity, sustainability. I'm not so sure that was his motivation."

Now, Cotton says, there is an extended community of revivalist stage rats. "Every city we go through has a little cabaret troupe, a burlesque act, or a variety show. And it's all through Europe." The Yard Dogs are good friends with the members of Lucent Dossier, an elaborately costumed "vaudeville cirque" from Los Angeles. (They're also mutual admirers, not surprisingly, of Boston's own Dresden Dolls.)

The Yard Dogs, who take their name from the tramp's term for a little railyard locomotive, still feed off the allure of the open road, says Cotton.

"The road really turned me into an artist," he says. "Whether I'm rolling on the bus or on the back of a train, things just come to me the minute the wheels start turning. It's classic. I'm not the first storyteller to say that, for sure. But that's where the magic is."