Adam Weiner bit the fateful Appel

LOW CUT CONNIE piano pounder and wailer Adam Weiner lets out a groan at the mere thought of opening tomorrow's Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival at "the crack of 11:30 a.m. At the other extreme, we once played a show in Portugal that started at 4 o'clock in the morning. Frankly, that's more our speed."

But how could this supergregarious, dancing-on-the-piano performer turn down the challenge from Appel Farm artistic director Sean Timmons to kick-start this outdoor, day-into-night megashow, also featuring the likes of Colin Hay (from Men at Work), Delta Spirit, Iris DeMent, John Gorka, Delta Rae, Caravan of Thieves, Brother Joscephus and the Love Revolution, Aoife O'Donovan, Joe Crookston and show-closing country-rock powerhouse Brandi Carlile?

"Me and Appel Farm, we go way back," he said.

Oh, and Weiner also is getting up extra-early today with his bandmates to do the "Free at Noon" concert series broadcast live from World Cafe Live on WXPN 88.5FM and streamable whenever at xpn.org.

Locally based (in part) but widely traveling, Low Cut Connie has been building quite a buzz for their offbeat, intercontinental mix of old and new styles - picking up supporters like Rolling Stone magazine and rock critics "dean" Robert Christgau.

"Christgau put us on the map first, when he called our song 'S**t, Shower and Shave' a 'scuzzball anthem,' " Weiner shares, with glee.

Think ragtime and bone-rattling rumble-rock colliding with Mersey Beat British tunefulness, often with edgy, caustically funny lyrics. That's what chemically explodes when you blend one front guy (the South Jersey-spawned Weiner) who grew up loving Jerry Lee Lewis and Screaming Jay Hawkins with another front guy from Birmingham, England - drummer, singer and guitarist Dan Finnemore.

"We first met and bonded in a Birmingham elevator that got stuck between floors for a few hours," shared Weiner. "All we had was a duffel bag full of Jim Beam and a couple guitars. One thing led to another. . . . But it was a few years before we finally got over our solo-career fixations - I was working as Lady Fingers, he was called Swamp Meat - and decided to collaborate, with our first show on New Year's Eve going into 2011, at Old Swedes Church, in South Philly."

Weiner's connection with Appel Farm - and that new challenge he couldn't refuse - goes back many more moons. "When I was 11, in 1991, I started going to overnight camp there. Appel Farm always had an arts orientation - I was big then into music and dance. Plus, you had to feed the pigs and shuck the corn and compost all the stuff, 'cause it was still a working farm then. Quite a culture shock for a kid from Cherry Hill."

Flash forward a decade later, and we find Weiner returning to Appel Farm as its official rock-music counselor, now fully credentialed. "I'd just spent a year in Memphis, playing out and learning some tricks of the trade from guys like Moe Vincent, a piano-pounding session guy at Sun Studios in the early Howlin' Wolf boogie woogie days." Another less obvious influence he now cops to is "Hasil Adkins, a West Virginia rockabilly one-man band who first hit in the 1950s and '60s, then came back in the '90s and early 2000s."

Then in 2005, Weiner did another summer stint working at the Appel Farm camp, this time starting to collaborate with a fellow counselor named Merrill Garbus, who's lately won quite a following as the eccentric voice and vision of tUnE-yArDs. "The bass player in that group, Nate Brenner, was with us that summer as well," he notes. "Merrill and I got to be close friends, made a lot of music and toured together and have both been on this path with our bands, and it started that summer. In fact, she fronted Low Cut Connie last year at my wedding."

Weiner is married? You'd never guess it from the twisted romantic tunes on Low Cut Connie's two indie-release albums (a third now in pre-production.) We're talking tales of disconnect like "Call Me Sylvia" and the means to forgetting - like their best known "Booziphilia," visualized with a raucously fun-tastic video shot at the band's favorite South Philly haunt, Ray's Happy Birthday Bar, a joint run by their sax-playing buddy Lou Capazolli, "who goes way back with rockabilly cats like Charlie Gracie."

But we "don't have to worry about the 'happily-ever-after' thing" spoiling Weiner's lyrical bent, he cautioned, half-joking (of course.) "I have enough sardonic tendencies and self-loathing to last me a long time."