Jonathan Castain

Not merely painfully soft-spoken, but painfully soft-sung, Jonathan Castain didn’t so much burst on the Americana scene as he murmured quietly into its folky, shell-like ear. Remarkably for a live performer, Castain’s vocals were virtually inaudible when employed in the wrong setting, e.g. a bar, tavern, inn, public house, club, or any place that had a stage and/or served alcohol.  He fared better with small, captured audiences.

Some admirers claimed Castain had a magnetic quality about him. Certainly he was good-looking enough, very tall and thin with flowing, should-length sandy brown hair and piercing, hazel eyes.  And the murmuring thing lent him an air of mystery. But in fact, unbeknownst to his fans, he was literally magnetic. An experimental treatment for chronic iron deficiency during his adolescence left Castain with a permanent five o’clock shadow made of random metal filings attracted to his face and neck. This was all well and good for a folk-singer in his 20s, when such affectations gave him a grizzled, care-worn air, but looked distinctly odd on an 8-year old with buckteeth and a cowlick. It may, however, explain the man’s latter-day vocal indistinction.           

“The Mumbler,” as he was known to more than one bartender in East Nashville, stood out amongst all the hats and beards in that part of town—due in part to his hatlessness, but also because, as a gentleman, he could drink a substantial amount of whiskey and remain relatively coherent, even if you had to stand right next to him, lean in and shush everyone in the room to hear him.

A house concert staple (almost always uninvited) and unallied Folk Alliance mainstay throughout his mid- to late-twenties, Castain also taught at folk school potlucks, where led workshops on his uncanny knack for off-off-rhyme and meter, as witnessed in a touching ode to close friend Cowboy Jack Clement, to whom he was personally unacquainted, called “Me and Jack and His Old, Old Lady.”  

            Ol’ Jack and me wanted to get drunk one night,

But his ol’ lady wouldn’t let him and so we got stoned instead.

            There were parrots talking circles around the moon,

            And we discovered we were through with justice.

Castain regularly haunted the hallowed hallways of Nashville’s Thirty Tigers Records, spreading gentle gloom among the Tigers’ lugubrious in-house management team, its bean-counters in distro, the vengeful legal department, and the 48 or so desperate, over-caffeinated interns. After months of non-stop sotto voce badgering, the company accidentally signed the ever-so-quiet singer during a particularly heavily refreshed impromptu house concert, the location of which remains lost in a fug of inebriation. Perhaps it was a Shoney’s.

Castain was assigned to high-flying A&R representative Angie Bradshaw, as she was on vacation at the time. In a company famous for artists who broke even, Bradshaw had already known no little success having ‘discovered’ at least three performers who had yet to lose Thirty Tigers money, including a Mac Davis lookee-likee.  Alas, Castain was all too quick to second-, third- and even fourth-guess his rep’s decisions, thereby rendering her useless as a champion of his subtle oeuvre.

A week before Thirty Tigers was to release his début, The Wild Wind And The Deaf, Castain went rogue. And probably fugue. He fired Bradshaw by fax, got very drunk indeed, and, in a fit of pique at what he called his “artistic manacling”, defecated profoundly in the front lobby of Thirty Tigers’ office building. Unfortunately, TT’s office building also housed the headquarters of WXNA, the only radio station in the world that might have possibly played his records. 

All signs were pointing to a Wild Wind ‘abort’ when Castain scored a lifeline in the form of a sweet opening gig for The Missing Children and the record was back on. The Children were at the peak of their short-lived fame having just released the notorious album, Have You Seen Us Since We Died? (Bludinstule Records, 2013), that year’s ‘hot biscuit’ for every pasty, lank-haired record store clerk in the continental United States. Castain was one of only twelve acts The Children had met at a recent Folk Alliance event at which they’d mistakenly appeared to whom who they’d promised a support slot. When every one of those other acts proved unavailable, Castain got the job. But it was a job he nearly lost on the tour’s very first night in Nashville after an obscene Cannery Ballroom dressing room incident involving personal lube and the Children’s lead singer’s Adam R. A. Kane’s electric toothbrush. With the mighty weight of Thirty Tigers behind him, everyone was instructed to chalk it up to opening night jitters. He managed to last a few days on the tour before blowing it in Pittsburgh at a party celebrating his first DUI by performing a Mumford and Sons parody that was better than Mumford and Sons. Castain was unceremoniously booted off the tour and retreated to his couch fort in East Nashville. 

Despite the setbacks, it was a hopeful time for Castain, for his almost comically hushed vocalizing seemed to genuinely relax people, if not put them to sleep entirely. Featuring cameo appearances by some of Nashville’s best, cheapest new crop of session players, plus some other friends that would work for food, Castain had been able to put together a satisfactorily workmanlike début. The sounds were solid enough and the lyrics were reasonably well observed, but critics simply weren’t buying the whispered vocals shtick. Of all the harsh reviews, Pitchfork was perhaps the harshest, critic P. ‘Pee’ Donnellson writing that Castain’s singing reminded him of “a blue whale’s death rattle” and prayed that “when his career inevitably fails, he never, under any circumstances, takes a job as a network continuity announcer, carnival barker, or Brian Blessed impersonator.”

To compound Castain’s bad luck, the Wild Wind record release party in was cancelled on the day of its issue due to an unlikely PA snafu at Nashville’s Five Spot. Late that afternoon, during one of the Happy Hour residencies, the Five Spot sound system power overloaded leading to what the Nashville Times described as a “seismic polarity incident” which caused Guru and J Dilla beats to be broadcast at punishing volume. The resultant party left the club packed for the next three weeks. Forced to re-schedule, the hapless Castain pledged to a date two months later, but ended up canceling that show due to a potential scheduling conflict that turned out not to conflict with anybody’s schedule whatsoever.   

With no management, no booking agent, no lawyer, no champion nor even a close personal friend to support it (and with Thirty Tigers just biding its time in the unlikely event that it broke even), Wild Wind finally dropped only to find a permanent home on the shelves of The Groove, Found Object, and Grimey’s New And Preloved Records, as if super-glued to the racks.  A last-gasp Record Store Day ‘hipster bait’ ruse to characterize the Lp as some sort of limited edition lost masterpiece, replete with newly-printed hype stickers pointing out that it sold no copies when issued earlier that year, failed to fool anyone. The entire run of albums were eventually returned to Thirty Tigers, who at least finally broke even by melting and molding the vinyl records into potpourri bowls and selling them at craft fairs.

Within a half a year of what should have been his triumphant début album’s release, Jonathan Castain celebrated his second DUI. But he would celebrate it alone, there would be no party this time and he accepted a gig at Cumberland Heights Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center. There he found God, just behind the groundskeeper’s shed in front of the compost storage unit.

Clean and sober at last, Castain moved back to Rhode Island, enrolled in a real estate course at Quahog Polytechnic and, less than two years later, was a practicing realtor back on home turf. His firm, Keegan, Kline & Ripley, mostly relegated him to office work, since his on-site sales patter was too faint for anyone standing more than two feet away.