Comic Heywood Banks will perform March 4 at Brown County Playhouse.
Photo provided
Even after all these years, Stuart Mitchell, better known by his stage persona as Heywood Banks, still earns compliments on his guitar playing, ranging from bluesy licks to folk. Yet, he tries to strum up only just enough excellence for a solid comic underpinning. Nothing more.
“Number one, I’m a comedian first and foremost,” he said, speaking by phone from his home on 30 acres with a duck pond in Howell, Michigan. “I actually can’t have people distracted by any fancy guitar playing.”
But let’s be honest. Even earth-shaking guitarmageddon sounds hardly could overshadow the 71-year-old Mitchell’s oddball and off-the-wall antics and tunes that have won audiences nationwide, including in the Columbus area, especially since the 1980s.
At comedy’s in-person apex in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Mitchell could sell out two shows of 400 people each at the original Commons in Columbus with just one appearance on the nationally syndicated “Bob and Tom Show.” Now, he brings most of his classic songs — “Wiper Blades,” “Fly’s Eyes,” “Toast,” “Trauma to the Groin” and others — and some new numbers to a 7:30 p.m. March 4 show at the 425-seat Brown County Playhouse in Nashville.
He expects to perform two 50-minute sets, with plenty of time for an intermission to hawk his discs and other merchandise.
“Very shamelessly,” he said.
He is grateful for solid crowds — some of his most full venues since the pandemic — during recent Indiana performances. In his home state, with mask mandates in place, some performances have drawn about one-third of capacity.
“There is so much pent-up frustration in the world right now,” he said. “Everybody needs to be able to laugh. If you can come to a comedy show and can feel safe, you can maybe remember what it’s like to just be a normal human being.”
Funny he should say that, since his perfected stage silliness has hardly been considered normal.
Most recently, he has still been posting Christmas tunes on his Facebook feed because of a holiday album he has been planning, and because he just signed with 800-Pound Gorilla Records to get his music on leading platforms. So he’s had little time to consider Valentine’s Day, which was the day before this conversation about his upcoming concert.
Married for 45 years to his sometimes-writing partner, Shirley, he sees love and commitment in much simpler terms than most people.
“We just get along,” he said. “And we argue only for the exercise.”
He credits his wife’s fear of a childhood puppet as inspiration for the song “Never Trust a Puppet.”
“She’s definitely my muse,” he said.
He figures he finally has achieved success with a career that began in 1970 when he dropped out of college to be a touring folk singer. He surmises that because of his hit country-style song “Big Butter Jesus” about Ohio’s 62-foot King of Kings Jesus statue, destroyed by lightning in 2010 along Interstate 75. He discovered that if a person types in the song title on Google, photos of the statue appear onscreen.
“I’ve finally made it,” he said.
