Low Cut Connie is back with an album, a movie, and an Xponential Music Festival show this weekend

When Adam Weiner was a junior at Cherry Hill High School East, he played in a band called the Gherkins.

“We got to the end of the first song at a battle of the bands competition, I think it was ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’,” he recalls. Just then, a bizarre idea struck the piano player, who now leads the Philly rock and soul band Low Cut Connie.

“I grabbed the mic, and I went to the front of the stage. A couple of thousand students were there. And I said, ‘If you scream loud enough, I’ll take my shirt off.’ And all these girls started screaming. It was shocking to me that I did it. But It seemed like the most natural thing.”

Thus the shy, contemplative introvert Weiner was as a South Jersey teenager — and he says he still is when not on stage — began his transformation. Nowadays, his sweat-soaked shows rarely end without him ripping his own undershirt to pieces.

That’s such a trademark move that Low Cut Connie recently sold 50 framed show-worn white Hanes shirts, accompanied by a Polaroid of Weiner, for $90 to benefit South Jersey’s Apple Farm Arts & Music Center. This weekend, the band plays the Xponential Music Festival on Sunday in support of its new album Art Dealers.

The festival, presented by WXPN-FM (88.5), is at Wiggins Park. Other performers include Allison Russell, Sunny War, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Leyla McCalla, and Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band.

The fest kicks off Friday with acts that include Old Crow Medicine Show and Margo Price and continues Saturday with the Hold Steady, Celisse, Wednesday, and others.

The album’s not all that’s keeping Low Cut Connie busy. There’s a music documentary of the same name that premieres this month at the Richmond International Film Festival, and will screen at the Philadelphia Film Festival on Oct. 27.

And on Dec. 30 and New Year’s Eve, the full LCC band will convene at Ardmore Music Hall to close out the year.

» READ MORE: Music under quarantine: How Adam Weiner of Philly’s Low Cut Connie became a live streaming star

Art Dealers, Weiner, 43, explained over a breakfast at the Penrose Diner, is inspired in part by the years he spent living in Manhattan at the turn of the century.

He was a senior studying experimental theater at New York University in 2001. When asked of his memories from the time, he remembered being part of an impromptu interpretative dance performance at the Manhattan club Limelight while Donald Trump looked on with a puzzled expression on his face.

“I formed this slightly perverse rock and roll style that I’ve been trying to get back to for a long time,” he said. “That was me being exposed to the world of transgender people at a very young age.”

Weiner’s first job out of college was playing piano at a gay karaoke bar called Pegasus, immortalized in Low Cut Connie’s 2015 song “Shake It Little Tina,” about a Tina Turner drag queen.

Many of Weiner’s best songs are women’s names: “Charyse,” “Beverly,” “Me and Annie.” On Art Dealers he expands his purview by writing from different gender perspectives.

The sweet and tender “Wonderful Boy,” in which he hits the upper reaches of his vocal range, “is a gay bar song. That’s me trying to write songs that I could go into that bar and play, that would work in that setting.”

That song was originally on an album Weiner released under the band name Ladyfingers in 2008. The Art Dealers title song also dates from that period.

Songs like “Whips and Chains” and “The Party’s Over” look even further back, to the denizens of the 1970s downtown Manhattan demimonde when it was inhabited by “art dealer” heroes of Weiner’s like Debbie Harry and Lou Reed, whose spirits suffuse the album.

Filmmaker Roy Power, who had previously directed videos for the band, was the one who had the idea of making the Low Cut Connie documentary. He decided to codirect Art Dealers with Weiner. It mixes roaring performances at the Blue Note and Sony Music Hall in New York with interviews with Weiner and bandmates, including guitarist Will Donnelly, singer and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Dempsey, and singer Amanda “Rocky” Bullwinkel.

In the film, Weiner describes himself as “very Jewy,” before performing “King of the Jews,” a song that’s an Art Dealers standout. The documentary includes scenes from a benefit for the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that Low Cut Connie played in 2018.

There is also footage from a Ladyfingers gig with the band playing to an almost empty house. Weiner recalled that U.S. tour as “extremely pathetic.”

Back then, Weiner was worried he had reached the end of the road. But he discovered an audience with Low Cut Connie, after founding the raucous, ribald band in 2010 with Birmingham, England, guitarist Dan Finnemore, who co-fronted the group until LCC became solely Weiner’s project in 2015.

That year, Barack Obama put “Boozophilia” from 2012′s Call Me Sylvia on his presidential playlist. The career boost allowed Weiner to quit his last side gig — as an SAT tutor — and concentrate on music full time.

Since then, Weiner’s songwriting has flourished. There were Dirty Pictures, Parts 1 & 2 in 2017 and 2018, and Private Lives in 2020. The uniformly excellent Art Dealers, with the soulful query “Are You Gonna Run?” as a calling card, keeps the streak going.

That creative run, Weiner says, comes at “such a terrible time for live entertainment. The music business is in such disarray. You have the tippy top 1% making beaucoup bucks, and people slogging it out.”

In response, he’s diversifying. The Art Dealers movie will surely win the band new fans. Next summer, he’ll bring The Connie Club to XPN, an hour-long variety show similar to Tough Cookies that will run for 10 weeks, with concerts and interviews repackaged for the radio.

Arriving at a point where he could concentrate solely on making music and performing took years of dedication. But the way Weiner sees it, he didn’t have a choice.

“I’m going to say the most pretentious [stuff] I’ve said all day,” he said, his cup of diner coffee in his hand.

“It’s a calling. When I look at Prince, when I look at Springsteen, James Brown, Patti Smith, Tina Turner. They’re called to make art every day. And they’re called to be on stage. And I was called to do that too. And when I tried to give it up, or do it as a weekend warrior, it grew and grew. And it called me back.”