General Dixon

Despite personally living up to the promise of the words during their short career, General Dixon never actually said, “The South Is Gonna Bake Again” from the stage*–mainly because they never uttered a single word from the stage. You could reasonably argue that the taciturn jam band let their noodling do the talking. And not only was the group’s career short, but so lacking in physical stature were they that neither Kevin Barnes, Thomas Staggs, nor Carl Winston-Baker were ever likely to trouble Prince, Paul Simon, or Lady Gaga in a bar fight. We’re talkin’ knee-high-to-a-grasshopper small.

So, who wouldn’t want to boogie down with a classic, post-H.O.R.D.E., pint-sized Southern power trio with more hair than a combined Chewbacca/Cousin It/Sasquatch convention held at a Rogaine factory who were literally dwarfed by their Marshall stacks and Gretsch hollow-bodied guitars? Unfortunately, the answer, following a run of seriously bad luck, was “not quite enough people to make carrying on worthwhile.” 

Electric guitarist Kelvin Barnes and bassist Thomas Staggs met at Ole Miss and formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience-inspired Burning Jets before meeting drummer Carl Winston-Baker in 2011 at the That’s My Jam festival in Athens, Georgia. Two weeks later, after one deafening rehearsal, Barnes and Staggs convinced Winston-Baker, or begged him depending on who you ask, to join General Dixon. Only 17 when he played his first GD** show, the diminutive young percussionist was also known to fans as “the immature one.” 

It should probably be noted that, while each member had decent enough chops, any ‘magic’ evident at this semi-legendary first session came mostly from psilocybin mushrooms and any sparks that flew were, again, not musical ones, but rather those springing from the bowl of Staggs’s bong, aka ‘The Wizard’. But, as the saying goes, from small acorns, mighty oaks get high and, still tripping balls the next morning, the newly-minted band was game enough to tag along with Winston-Baker’s parents to Church on a family outing. One of their most popular numbers, ‘Stained-Glass Mind’, was written in response to the events of that day (“I don’t wanna know Jesus/Or test any faith that is blind/I just wanna go to the dust mote light/Streaming through my stained-glass mind”). It was just this kind of behavior that endeared the fun-sized band to American Jam scene bloggers and beyond to Europe and Japan, where their wending 17 or 24 minute concentration-busting tunes proved that Americana music wasn’t just made up of doe-eyed singer-songwriters getting all pissy about life.

Staggs, who had studied sound engineering at the Conservatory of Recorded Arts and Sciences (CRAS) in Tempe, Arizona, had amassed a fair amount of studio gear having worked various temp jobs around Oxford, and selling weed. He produced General Dixon’s first album, Starred & Barred, at Winston-Baker’s house (contriving an ingenious drum sound by recording them in Winston-Baker’s Dad’s gardening shed). Relix magazine called the album “the best début since Mofro’s Blackwater” and it earned them a ‘Best New Groove’ nomination at that year’s Jammy Awards.

Though popular enough within a fairly parochial scene (inevitably, their fans were known as ‘Dixheads’), General Dixon never quite broke out of the Jam Band ghetto and they blew what was perhaps their only chance at mainstream exposure following some ill-advised drug taking when oping for Todd Snyder. The band had all drunk some acid-spiked grape Kool-Aid™ during an early afternoon performance. The psychedelics didn’t immediately kick in and the gig was flat and lifeless. But kick in they eventually did and, as the group organized itself to catch an evening flight to appear on the David Letterman Show the next day, they became quite confused and very paranoid. General Dixon never made the plane and their slot had to be filled in at the last minute by the legendary NYC Guns ‘n’ Roses tribute band, Mr. Brownstown.

Three full-length albums and three years of near-constant touring later, General Dixon was an exhausted wreck. A mid-September mini-festival called VirGo Tell It On the Mountain their manager had hastily organized just outside Avalon, Mississippi*** went catastrophically wrong after a massive drug bust on the festival grounds. To make matters more galling, the arrest had been orchestrated by a female FBI agent literally working undercover who had slept with both Barnes and Staggs.**** Unfortunately for the band, it wasn’t just marijuana involved; employees on the General Dixon payroll were found to have sold LSD and MDMA to underage festival goers. These were Schedule 3 drugs in Mississippi, enough to land them in serious trouble.  

When it was all said and done, and every last piece of gear was either hocked or sold to pay the legal fees, General Dixon was no more.

For the next few years, Thomas Staggs periodically raised the prospect of a reunion show, but Kelvin Barnes, the bad taste lingering as he contemplated the world from a tiny Magnolia State correctional facility cell, point-blank refused and talks never advanced any further. By the time he was released, in 2021, the band was all but forgotten by their Oxford neo-hippy/hacky-sack obsessive constituency, who had by then moved on to techno-psych-folk-trance-hop-EDM-old-age-retro-trash-metal-indie-power-snuff-garage-boogie.

*It was, however, on one of their merch table bumper stickers.

**Given their same initials, there were also many, many pieces of Grateful Dead-indebted iconography on the band’s merch table; enough that the famously passive, as least copyright-wise, Dead organization were forced to issue cease and desist notices to General Dixon, such was their brazenness.

***This was the birthplace of Mississippi John Hurt, who they had learned about through Doc Watson, whose father was named General Dixon Watson and furnished the band with its name.

****As a direct result of her efforts, the undercover officer received not only a promotion from her line manager, but also payback of a less welcome sort in the form of genital herpes from Barnes.