Mon. Jan. 2

Sometimes, the ever-gushing fountain of big name pop music threatens to overwhelm and subsume us – the bold-faced names making pop or hip-hop that has mass appeal (that is, teen appeal writ even larger in today’s culture) splahsed all over it. They’re the descendants of New Kids and Backstreet Boys, the Justins and Taylors of today, the unoffensive, TV-friendly faces that dominate "Access Hollywood" and TMZ. We sometimes have to put up blinders, if only to remind ourselves, when it comes to music, it’s not the celebrity, it’s the art that got us into it. Celebrity might evolved out of that and every now and then the best float upward – like, say, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists or Florence + the Machine. But I have tremendous respect for the lifers, the career musicians who live below the mainstream radar, slog it out, hone their craft – folks like Elliott Murphy, James McMurtry, Ted Leo and the late Bill Morrissey – People who do what they do because they have to do it.

It is in this spirit that I recommend Tom Weber’s film "Troubadour Blues," a nine-years-in-the-making film about the travails of Peter Case (of new wave bands the Nerves and Plimsouls), former Bostonian Mary Gauthier (in photo) Chris Smither, Dave Alvin (Blasters), Slaid Cleaves and many others. It screens at Club Passim Monday Jan. 2. (Gauthier’s sad and gorgeous "The Foundling" was one of my favorites of 2010. It has to do with her being adopted and her search for her birth mother. It did not resolve well. I, too, am adopted and in 2009 searched for my birth parents, with far better results. That’s a story for another day.)

Weber, a Harvard grad who teaches video and media studies, provides a revealing look at the heartbreaks and joys of these modern-day wandering minstrels. The 95-minute film premiered Oct. 14, 2011, at the Buffalo International Film Festival. It features live performances of 40 songs by the artists who wrote them, including Case's "Icewater" and "Entella Hotel," Gauthier's "Drag Queens In Limousines" and "Wheel Inside The Wheel," Alvin's "Ashgrove" and Smither's breathtaking rendition of "No Love Today."

We see the artists both on and off stage. In revealing interviews, the artists discuss their craft and the state of the music business today. Case's story provides the film's main narrative, and we go with him to Hamburg, NY, where he grew up and learned to sing the blues, to San Francisco, where he polished his craft as a street musician, and to Los Angeles, where he played the Nerves and Plimsouls before launching a 30-year solo career.

What’s the message here? That there is real danger that the tradition of the itinerant working musician is being diluted or lost, the hidden corners of our culture, where honest, authentic songs reflecting the human experience are still being written and sung.

For Monday’s gig, Boston singer-songwriter Brendan Hogan will hopen, then the film and a Q/A with Weber, who is working on another music-related film, "Don’t Give Up Your Day Job," about serious amateur musicians.

Starts at 8. Cover: $10.

47 Palmer St., Cambridge, 617-492-5300 www.clubpassim.org