Say you're "jonesing" for a concert this weekend that will connect you to the days of Otis Redding or the Motown explosion. Say you're "jonesing" to see someone who is a burgeoning, soon-to-be success story, but don't want to leave the Newburyport area. Or say you're "jonesing" for a concert where you can say the word "jonesing " in front of some 20-year-olds and get away with it.

Either way, be sure to check out Eli "Paperboy" Reed at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in downtown Newburyport tomorrow night. Reed has invented the original Motown standard " or songs written in the past five years that sound so innately '60s they would make the Temptations blush. Just listening to him, you'd think for sure that Reed wrote them in a Detroit nightclub sometime during the Kennedy administration.

But Reed is actually 24.

After the Firehouse, the Allston transplant (by way of Louisiana �" his soul has some Southern roots) will take his era-defying niche that has garnered him critical acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone and Spin to London and Irving Plaza in New York.

Reed, the winner of Outstanding Blues/Soul Act of the Year at the 2007 Boston Music Awards, and his seven-piece band, The True Loves, play tomorrow at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20, $18 for Firehouse members. Call the Firehouse box office at 978-462-7336 or visit www.firehouse.org.

�" Ben Collins, correspondent