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Eliot Lewis brings his talents to the Village Idiot

Eliot Lewis brings his talents to the Village Idiot

Eliot Lewis is the consummate working musician, an artist who's perfectly comfortable laboring in the arena-sized shadow of pop/soul giants like Hall and Oates and then pivoting to promoting his own work in small clubs such as Maumee's Village Idiot.

A 50-year-old accomplished multi-instrumentalist who started playing drums when he was a teenager and graduated to bass -- which he played for 13 years in the Average White Band -- and keyboards -- which he handles for Hall and Oates -- Lewis will be at the Idiot on Tuesday playing guitar and performing his solo material interspersed with covers from some of his favorite artists.

He acknowledged that there's a fine line between promoting the songs on his three solo albums, while balancing his sideman status and pursuing a burgeoning career in black and white photography.

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"It's a fine line finding that balance and I always say there are two styles of musicians. There's people that are players and they sort of dedicate themselves to being the best at their instrument they can," he said in a phone interview from his Connecticut home. "But for me it's always been about [that other style], becoming a songwriter and an entertainer."

His career has been long and circuitous, with plenty of lucky breaks interspersed with the kind of grind-it-out commitment it takes to maintain a thriving career in music. Early on, he met Dan Hartman, the bassist, producer, and songwriter for any number of acts, including Tina Turner, the Edgar Winter Group, and James Brown, among others.

Hartman was a mentor to Lewis, providing him with session work that paid the bills, teaching him how a studio works, and connecting him with other musicians. Eventually Lewis was a staff writer for Sony Music and Warner Brothers, at some point realizing that he was more of a producer and writer than a performer, which wasn't the direction he wanted to go.

"I sort of lost track of what I was starting out on, but of course it was a great experience," he said.

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Over time he met Daryl Hall, who introduced him to Alan Gorrie, the bass player for Scottish blue-eyed soul hit makers the Average White Band. When Gorrie left the group, Lewis played bass for the band for 13 years, a run that eventually led him to Hall & Oates as a fill-in bass player and eventually full-time keyboardist in the early 2000s.

All the while, Lewis worked on his solo material, releasing three albums -- "Master Plan" (2003), "Standing On Top of the World" (2006), and "6 and One" (2010) -- and the bulk of what he'll play Tuesday will feature those songs. He records his own "backing band" and then plays along with those tracks.

The upside of this approach is that it allows him to play concerts without having to pay to bring a band along (although he does plan to tour this summer with a three-piece outfit), but the downside is that it makes improvising difficult.

"I'm sort of a perfectionist and I tend to want to change the arrangements like a band would improvise things every night, so I literally change my arrangements and these recordings pretty frequently," he said.

Lewis still works with Hall & Oates -- you can check him out on the excellent Web and TV program Live From Daryl's House at livefromdarylshouse.com -- and also exhibits his photography at various studios.

And he still strives to write "the perfect song," which in his mind would be something like Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me" or Hall & Oates' "She's Gone."

"They're really perfectly written songs," he said. "It's just the artist having the right idea and the right lyrics and the right melody all coming together at just the right time. These songs are written in just 10 or 15 minutes as one conscious thought."

Eliot Lewis is playing at the Village Idiot, 309 Conant St., Maumee, Tuesday night. Tickets are $5 at the door and show time is 6 to 9 p.m.

Contact Rod Lockwood at rlockwood@theblade.com or 419-724-6159.

First Published March 22, 2012, 4:30 a.m.

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