Robbie Fulks writes songs about tragedies: murderous jilted lovers, oblivious jilted lovers, and people whose lives have been or are being wasted on their own perfidy and ignorance. A lot of these songs are pretty damn funny. Probably some day Dame Fame will shoot his career right behind the ear by making one of his songs a "novelty hit." His funny song and video will be everywhere, and snobs like me will get sick of all the yahoos thinking they've found the best thing since Weird Al, and then all of us, snobs and yahoos alike, will drop him like a burnt hot dog.

That would be a shame, and it would also be just plain wrong: The fact is, his songs make people laugh because they make people uncomfortable. They're actually either really angry, really scary, or really sad. They're tragedies. Stupid people do tragic things, and stupid is funny.

But Robbie Fulks is a whole lot more than funny, and he deserves to get big and famous in the elusive, perfect way that maybe only Tom Petty or Lyle Lovett have managed, without ridicule or shame (or a tabloid marriage), because in addition to being a great songwriter, he is a great singer and guitar player: an all-around entertainer just waiting to play the big rooms. Unfortunately for him, Robbie Fulks plays country music, which is complicated because, like rock music after punk, there are now two kinds of country music, and the person who thinks you mean one kind will most likely hate the other with a scorn most people reserve for cockroaches, bad neighbors, and cops.

The unfortunate adjective "alternative" has been employed in both the rock and country contexts, but to the people who enjoy the music to which that label has been affixed, that music is the "real" kind, and the other kind is a false, empty abomination. Robbie Fulks is "alternative country" because he has more in common with George Jones and Buck Owens than with Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, who have more in common with Michael Bolton and Celine Dion.

It's hard to get big and famous playing alternative country music. It only gets you on PBS. The country music audience and industry are more conservative and narrow-minded than the rock industry and the Republican Party put together, and alt-country will never break like Nirvana, because most punk kids would rather pose like rap thugs than turn to the music of our heartland for solace and meaning.

What's more, Robbie Fulks is a rebellious smart-ass who writes funny songs about tragedies. Country music fans want good-natured and stupid, and most of the punk kids who have turned to the music of our heartland for solace and meaning don't want to laugh: They want to gaze mournfully into their beer and wish they were coal miners so they could feel exploited and resentful. So, Robbie Fulks may have a long wait until payday, but last Monday night, he and his three-piece band put on a damn fine professional music show, and if you were there, you already know that, and if you weren't, all you can do now is feel bad, and try harder next time.

Because he plays the sort of crisp country swing and pedal-steel laments that I imagine were heard constantly in every beer joint south of the Ohio prior to 1962, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd strolled onstage in a dusty Nudie suit. Instead, with the band playing an eerily familiar, ponderous intro, he arrived in jeans, short-sleeves, and a ballcap, and they all leapt into Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression, Part 2." (You know: "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends!") It was one of the best opening numbers I've ever seen--because there is nothing funnier than progressive rock--and everybody laughed real hard while the band went into interstellar overdrive. Afterwards, loose-limbed and full of kick-off adrenaline, Fulks shouted, "How about it, fellas? New York City--the Big Apple, they call it!"

The band covered the well-traveled musical terrain between Bakersfield honky-tonk and Dick Clark's rock'n'roll drive-in. The electric guitar player peeled off great leads, peering at his fingers through reading glasses like Homer Simpson's; after one of his impressive breaks, Fulks interrupted the next verse to shout, "That was really good!" The bass player's poker-faced falsetto on a Jackson 5 cover was a highlight (it wasn't "A-B-C" but it sounded just like it); the rest of the time he was merely half of a rhythm section that was tighter than Tupperware. (I'm not an A-list critic, so I didn't have a reserved table or even something flat to write on, so I'd like to apologize to the three musicians who shared the stage with Mr. Fulks, without whom the show's quality would have been seriously compromised, because I don't remember their names. In addition, the Damnations played a seriously good opening set, but I was out at the bar where I could sit down.)

The evening was full of finely rendered tunes like "I Told Her Lies," a peppy, first-person account of the evil that men do; "She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died)," a lively, cautionary tale of a woman who bought too much stock in her looks and then the market crashed; "Let's Kill Saturday Night," a perfect pop song about weekend vengeance; and "Papa Was a Steel-Headed Man," an energetic number about proud, stubborn men who work hard and die without ever entertaining an original thought.

Then there were moments of real darkness and melancholia: "You Wouldn't Do That to Me" was beautifully performed, a song made piercingly painful by the singer's desperate and clearly misplaced trust. Returning alone for the encore, Fulks sang the quiet, disturbing "I Just Want to Meet the Man," a chilling driveway confrontation between a husband and wife over the man who's waiting for her inside the house they once shared.

Robbie Fulks has the most-likely-to-succeed charisma of a guy who starred both on the basketball team and in the spring musical. He played acoustic guitar throughout, deprecatingly demonstrating his own impressive skills. (He once played in a bluegrass ensemble that was nominated for a Grammy. He's a really good guitar player.) He could not look like a more regular middle-American (he went to Columbia, for god's sake), but his voice has the high-strung nasal twang of a man raised on religious guilt and AM radio--and more than once he gripped the microphone in his right hand, gestured wildly at the ceiling with the other, and testified with a zeal equaled only by the deranged or the Pentecostal. He's funny, he's brilliant, and he's mad at all the right things. If he ever gets that novelty hit, I hope it comes late in his career, so snobs like me can enjoy him a good deal longer.