This spring marks the 20th anniversary of Provincetown singer and songwriter Billy Hough’s show “Scream Along With Billy,” in which he and his musical partner, Susan Goldberg, perform entire albums — mostly from the rock, punk, and folk canons — cabaret style before a live audience. “We’ve covered all of the Velvet Underground albums,” says Hough, “half of Joni Mitchell’s, all of the Stones.”

Each show is part musical homage and part stream-of-consciousness performance as Hough discusses everything from the social context of the music to its influence on his own life and work between songs. Musically, Hough describes himself as well-versed at replicating the greats “without being too on the nose.”

“You listen to the sound of my voice when I sing Joni Mitchell,” he says, “and nobody’s like, ‘Oh my god, she’s here!’ ”

As part of the first Provincetown Outsiders Festival, on Saturday, May 10 at 8 p.m., Hough will mount what is perhaps his most ambitious homage yet: a restaging of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a legendary multimedia gesamtkunstwerk originally produced by Andy Warhol in New York’s East Village in 1966. The original spectacle featured a live performance by the Velvet Underground and Nico, layered with strobe lights and warped, dizzying projections of Warhol’s films on the walls and the bodies of the band and onstage dancers.

The show toured through the U.S. over the summer of 1966 and came to the Chrysler Museum in Provincetown (in the former Center Methodist Episcopal church building that now houses the Provincetown Public Library) over Labor Day Weekend that year.

“They were supposed to do a five-night gig,” says Hough. “They ended up doing four nights because on the day of the fifth show, several of the members of the EPI entourage were busted shoplifting cough syrup at the Adams Pharmacy.”

While multimedia rock shows involving lights and projections are commonplace now, it’s difficult to overestimate the groundbreaking effect of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in the mid-1960s. The spectacle combined elements of the various arts — music, film, performance, and visual art — that had been coming out of the Factory, Warhol’s open studio on East 47th Street in New York, which became the epicenter of the era’s social and creative spirit. But according to Hough, its roots extended even further back in the 20th century.

During and after World War I, artists experimented with new forms of expression that broke with established norms. In visual art, Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of the “readymade” to the art world when he signed an industrially produced porcelain urinal and submitted it to an exhibition in New York City in 1917. The new sensibility was expressed in music in the work of composer Igor Stravinsky — whose startlingly discordant score for the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, had caused an uproar upon its debut in Paris in 1913 — and, decades later, in the work of John Cage, whose 1952 piece 4’33” was simply four and a half minutes of silence, with the ambient noise in the performance space providing the content of the composition.

For Hough, artists like Duchamp, Nijinsky, and Cage were outsiders whose work underlined the essential “ridiculousness” of life. He defines an outsider as someone who does “things that aren’t necessarily popular, and oftentimes things that are upsetting or don’t make any sense to the average person,” drawing a line from Duchamp to Warhol to John Waters. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was part of that lineage, he says, and marked the transition from the optimistic, LSD-tinged hippie scene of Haight-Ashbury to a darker era of rock musicians in “black leather jackets on heroin.”

For Saturday’s restaging of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Provincetown, Hough is planning to include as many elements of the original production as he can. “We’re going to have the film, we’ll have the music, we’ll have the lighting,” he says. New York-based filmmaker Melissa Kinski will contribute the film and light components.

And the music of the Velvet Underground — Hough’s “favorite band ever” — will be central to the event. “I think that people don’t realize just how ahead of their time they were and also how damn good they were,” he says. Along with Hough’s frequent collaborator Goldberg, the band will include Hough’s brothers Paul and Matt. The four will perform songs from the Velvet Underground’s first three albums, and depending on the vibe of the crowd, says Hough, they’ll also include songs by other “outsiders,” like David Bowie.

Hough has a vision: “I picture a room full of smoke,” he says. “Videos playing on the back wall; strange lighting everywhere; people dressed to the nines all the way down to the nudes.” There will be dancing, he says, and “people banging chains on the floor.”

“It’s not going to be like most concerts, where you turn the lights on, then you turn them off and it’s over,” says Hough. “It should be an immersive experience.”

For Hough, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was a pioneering event: strange and intoxicating and out of this world. “I’m going to do everything in the world I can do,” he says, “to try to create that experience for people.”

Strange Lighting and the Velvet Underground

The event: Billy Hough’s restaging of Andy Warhol’s 1966 “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”
The time: Saturday, May 10, 8 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $25; see campprovincetown.com