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Should Bobby Bare Jr. decide to get out of the music business, he should seriously consider a career as a stand-up comedian.

With a dry wit and an eye for observational humor, he'd be a hit. As it is, he's as much a showman as he is a musician, regaling audiences with his on-stage banter and his quirky sense of humor. Take, for example, his views on fatherhood. (He and his wife have two children, the most recent addition to the family being 7 months old.)

"It's a party; kids, they love to party," he said. "Having kids is like having a drunk person move into your house. Every bit of it — the crying uncontrollably, the vomiting, the grabbing people's boobs no matter who they are, and all they want is the bottle."

Obviously, fans worried about whether fatherhood might tame the fiery attitude of a guy who once wrote one of the brashest break-up songs ever ("You Blew Me Off," from Bare Jr.'s "Boo-tay" album) can rest easy — he's still got it. Those wanting additional reassurance need only cue up his most recent album, last year's "The Longest Meow," to hear Bare rocking out in full electric guitar glory.

"It's the loud rock album," Bare said. "I don't know if I'm going to get louder or quieter on the next record, but this one is definitely the loud rock album."

"The Longest Meow" has been a hit with critics, earning a spot as one of three must-have releases from last fall in the pages of Esquire magazine. Bare is pleased with the reception, but having grown up in show business (as the son of country star Bobby Bare), he's ambivalent to the reaction of music scribes. What matters most is how fans take to it.

"I don't know, I've always had really great reviews, luckily, but you never know which album's going to take off," he said. "And the press usually doesn't give you an indication of what's going to take off. What does is people showing up to shows and knowing all the words, and people buying the record before you get to town. I just had something in Life magazine, and I don't know if it's going to help or not, but it certainly can't hurt."

Bare Jr. first found himself in front of a microphone in 1973 at the age of 5. That was the year his father recorded "Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends and Lies," which spawned the hits "Marie Laveau" and "Daddy What If," the latter of which was a duet with his son.

Although Bare Jr. wasn't destined for fame quite yet — his parents decided against pushing him toward child-star status, even though "Hee Haw" wanted to make Bare Jr. and his brother part of the cast — he was still around the business, both in the studio and when his father got together with such luminaries as Jerry Reed, Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall to play poker.

In college, Bare Jr. attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he got his first experience playing with a rock band. (In fact, a gig near Norris was the inspiration for "Flat-Chested Girl from Maynardville," off his "Bobby Bare Jr.'s Young Criminals Starvation League" album — a girl at a local convenience store back became the central character of that song.)

Saturday night, he'll perform at The Pilot Light in Knoxville's Old City, an intimate club setting where his electric guitar will no doubt rattle plaster off the venue's ceiling. It's a rare club date for a guy who's so busy he has to leave his family behind in order to find the solitude needed to write songs.

"Having a family is distracting, because it keeps you from being totally focused on being a songwriter," he said. "It's tough, so I have to set time aside where I disappear and go to another city and write songs. I usually end up in Chicago. That's such a great city; I have friends up there, so I have a free place to stay in the best part of town."

He's scheduled to head to Spain in April, and he's trying to encourage his father to record a folk album. (Bare Jr. served as producer for 2005's "The Moon Is Blue," his father's first studio album in 22 years.) And he's enjoying fatherhood as much as possible ... just don't expect him to write songs about it.

"Oh, I hate it when artists do that," he said. "I hate that [stuff]. Neil Young never really did it, at least until in the last year or so when he wrote a love song to his daughter. I don't know, I just hate that.

"I don't know ... they call it getting married and settling down, and I think that's funny, because it's the exact opposite. Nothing's settled about it. I'm not complaining, because it's a lot of fun, but it's madness, man."