Speaking volumes about where the recording industry finds itself in 2007, Bobby Conn has a pretty good idea what won't be on his merch table during his upcoming Vancouver visit.

"You should publish this: 'I'm not selling any fucking CDs at the show,'" the pintsize raconteur says, on the line from his Chicago home. "It sucks–they are so expensive that why would you ever want to buy one? I feel like an asshole selling a CD for $15, which is pretty much what I have to sell it for to make it worth selling. So if you wanna buy one, buy it in the store. Or have your friend buy it and then burn a hundred copies for everyone on CD–R, which is what everyone does, and then just give me straight cash."

As much as that rant makes him sound more embittered than Don Imus during Black History Month, Conn actually comes across like he's amused. The idiocy of making music in the everything's-free-on-the-Internet era is just one of the Comedy Central–quality tangents he goes off on during the half-hour interview. Also covered is the brilliance of the vampire-themed '70s soap opera Dark Shadows, the drawback of cordless phones ("the FBI doesn't have to tap a wire–they can pick you up on their scanner"), and the challenge of creating a story for the movie that he's been shooting in installments as a companion piece to his latest album, King for a Day.

"It took us like three months of pot smoking to come up with the script," he reveals. "There's pot smoking, and then there's really serious weed smoking, where there's no TV on, okay? We're talking about sitting around with a piece of paper, smoking pot, and then occasionally looking for a pencil. But we came up with a script and then started filming. Unfortunately, I believe the budget for this film was .0000000032 million dollars."

That Conn seems not entirely right in the head won't surprise anyone who's caught his previous, riotously entertaining Vancouver shows. His first local appearance, at the Brickyard in the late '90s, played out like Bastille Day in Maillardville. Wearing a René Simard–issue white jumpsuit and a black hood, he stood motionless on-stage for three minutes before stepping wild-eyed to the mike to shriek, "Who speaks French?" Subsequent highlights have included an unforgettable 2001 Starfish Room stand where his duet of "Up Where We Belong" with Canned Hamm's Robert Dayton made for one of the year's classic concert moments.

Even though Conn grimly refers to King for a Day as a "market failure", that does little to dull the record's demented brilliance. Rooted in the era of huge flares and even huger Afros, the loose concept album deals with the trials and tribulations of rock stardom, or lack thereof. Over the course of 12 defiantly analogue-sounding tracks, Conn proves equally adept at panty-removal funk ("[I'm Through With] My Ego"), coke-dusted '70s pop ("Love Let Me Down"), and off-Broadway acid-rock ("Vanitas"). Lyrically, the singer comes off like the world's most entertaining idiot savant, with classic lines including the "Mr. Lucky" gems "Feed a duck and feel a little pride/As he paddles for your cracker/You have helped him to survive."

In the end, King for a Day is every bit as entertaining as Dark Shadows, no small compliment considering the cult-soap is worshipped by everyone from Tim Burton and Johnny Depp to Madonna. And even if Conn's latest exercise in oddity hasn't exactly usurped Avril Laí‚ ­vigne on the charts, that's not enough to get him down. Just because he's banning CDs from his merch table doesn't mean he's ready to walk away from the microphone.

"King for a Day is a market failure," he reiterates. "But that's okay. I'm going to make more music, and that's not going to stop me. Fuck, no."

Bobby Conn plays the Media Club on Saturday (May 19).