I met Steve Martin at a laundromat in Boise, Idaho…

Of course, that is a re-tooled Steve Martin joke from back when he was selling out arenas with his stand-up comedy act.

These days, he’s playing ad-hoc outdoor venues in the hinterlands with his Bluegrass outfit. (Picture above courtesy of the amazing photo technology of the G3 iPhone—thanks, Apple!)

Lucky for me, I call The Hinterlands home these days.

[Sidebar: In case you’re not familiar with Bluegrass, it’s like country jazz: It’s played with traditional country/western instruments, but it’s real fast, you can’t follow what’s going on melodically and you shake your head that mere mortals are capable of producing such a magnificent sound and fury. Also, like jazz, there are not a lot of strong hooks for one to hang one’s cowboy hat on, just stunning musical virtuosity on display.]

So we packed up The Boy for his first grown-up concert last night and drove another 15 miles deeper into the wilderness.

The venue’s location was brilliantly chosen, at the end of a long, winding, one-lane road, choked with a line of idling cars that was being passed by old people in walkers so fast they were hardly more than a blur.

After sneakily circumventing about the second half of the inexorable line of cars (we are from L.A., after all), we made it into the concert just as the band was hitting the stage.

The venue itself was an open field, with what looked like a stage the band brought with them, and rows and rows of folding chairs with less leg room than the cheapest economy seat on the smallest commercial airplane. When I had to leave to go get a drink, I drew lots of unhappy vibes from my row-mates, and some open hostility on my way back. I told one particularly pissy older woman, “Hey, I didn’t lay the place out!”

But the homemade environs aside, we had come to see Steve Martin, and there he was onstage, in his trademark white suit, wearing a banjo.

The concert that followed was about 65% music to 35% stand-up, as Martin filled in the dead air whenever the band stopped to tweak their tuning, which was frequently.

When he introduced the band, The Steep Canyon Rangers, he explained they were already a band long before he came along. “They’re not so much my band, as I am their celebrity.”

The night was full of memorable quips I no longer recall, but since I never caught him in comedy heyday, this was closer than I ever thought I’d get. When The Missus wakes up, I’ll have her remind me of a few and I’ll add them in and delete this sentence.

Equally impressive (to me, because I came for the jokes) was the fact that Martin wrote all the songs but one in the two-hour program, the venerable “Orange Blossom Special.” And only a couple of the tunes were what I would describe as comedy or novelty numbers, mainly “Atheists Ain’t Got No Songs,” a gentle, hilarious send-up of gospel music.

As expected, there were not a lot of catchy melodies to be had, but the songs were short enough and the between-song patter snappy enough, that even The Boy didn’t begin to flag until about 90 minutes into the show.

Early in the first set, Martin apologized for not having any “big hits” to play, before wondering aloud just what the hell we had come out for, anyway. Then he mentioned that, well, he did have one hit, and when the audience began to stir, he mumbled that yes, they’d play that too.

True to his word, he and the Rangers sent the crowd back to traffic gridlock with a Bluegrass version of “King Tut,” which lost very little in its translation to Hillbilly, and which I present at bottom, also courtesy of my last-gen iPhone’s prehistoric video technology.

All in all, some day we will remind The Boy that his first real concert was Steve Martin, and in Boise Idaho in 2011, he could have done a lot worse.