Born Laurence Krantz, Lefty Wrong looms small as an archetypal “What If…” story in the annals of Americana. Krantz’s parents were circus carnies and, being in the business of show, were forever entertaining visitors with the stage props and musical instruments to hand around the Krantz home.
It was no place for a child.
Juggling pins once concussed Young Larry, a youthful greasepaint experiment chemically burned his backside, and the house upright bass nearly crushed him aged three, leading to a life-long fear of any musical instrument greater than toddler size. And so, he took to the ukulele.
However, Krantz’s klutzy strum kept breaking the uke’s ostensibly resilient nylon strings, earning him the family nickname “Lil’ Concrete Hands”* from his father. So profligate was Larry’s string abuse that the elder Krantz soon gave up replacing the strings altogether, so that as often as not, the boy was picking away on just one string, which he repaired by tying pieces of broken strings together. This ‘Frankenstein’ string created a loud hum when plucked earning him another family nickname, “Lil’ Annoying Buzz”**.
Krantz adopted his self-deprecating stage name years later in a fit of pot-fuddled whimsy shortly before his début open mic performance in Gainesville, where he was enrolled at the University Of Florida. It was during this period that the newly christened Lefty Wrong*** developed and perfected a remarkably eccentric repertoire and singing style that involved half-yodelling, half-grunting songs originally performed by Dock Boggs, Doc Watson, and Doc Severinsen.
Shortly after declaring himself a UoF Communications Major, an illustrative incident occurred during the course’s formal introduction session. Students were required to write and delivery a potted autobiography to their classmates, an exercise the head of department insisted on in order to get a decent read on each individual’s public speaking abilities. Nervous and high as a kite, Krantz reverted to his Lefty Wrong stage self and half-yodelled, half-grunted his way through the speech. At the end, his teacher shook her head and joked that she wasn’t sure “if that was English or Nadsat,” the class laughed, and congratulated itself on appreciating the professor’s Clockwork Orange allusion. Larry lasted two more semesters before sensibly dropping out and moving to Saint Augustine to push drugs full time, a more honest and certainly more lucrative way to pass the time.
Soon, he took up with the old-timey St. Augustine beachfront musicians and started to study mandolin and claw hammer banjo in earnest. While he never quite mastered the two instruments, the still uncannily heavy-handed Lefty could fake it just well enough to fool Americana dilettantes.
Even among the Saint Augustine’s bronzed beach bums, Laurence Krantz was not considered an ugly man, and had let his dark, curly hair and beard grow out just enough to blend in with the local bohemians. His hands, however, were almost permanently oil-stained, as he was working at the local Jiffy Lube in order to make ends meet when the retail marijuana business was dry. Locals grew to recognize his banjo very well, not due to Lefty’s distinctively clunky picking, but because of the banjo resonator and fingerboard’s oily brown patina and the ends of the instrument’s strings had globs of black grease where Lefty cleaned his fingernails. At the same time, Lefty’s vocalizing could kindly be described as ‘singing adjacent’, more akin to hillbilly wheezing with a few recognizable words tossed in to make the listener think there was perhaps a real song there.
Certainly, he could croak out a tale or two, and those tales usually involved swindling drug dealers and then sleeping with wild women with whom Lefty had just done swindled drugs. It was considered bad form to brag about these things, and the stories circulated, tarnishing both his stage and given names almost as much as his fingers. After his dealer roommate caught Lefty pinching the goods one too many times, he was kicked out. The small, closely-knit Saint Augustine drug dealing community closed ranks, more or less blacklisted Lefty, forcing him to drift onwards.
As bad luck would have it, a proper train wreck of a girl named Clementine Sloan had recently seen Lefty perform and had drunkenly extended an open invitation to join her in Dallas whenever he had a mind to. Taking it as a sign, he gathered his remaining seventy dollars and hopped a Greyhound to Big D. Sloan was deeply embroiled in another relationship at the time, and her boyfriend did not take too kindly to this “Sweet Sufferin’ Jesus hairdo motherfucker” showing up at their apartment in the middle of the night. A knockdown fight ensued, ending when the boyfriend smashed Lefty’s banjo over his head. Bleeding and concussed, Lefty headed into to town, drank away his last few dollars, and slept at the Aquarium in Fair Park. He applied for a bed at the shelter the next day.
The shelter required mandatory 12-Step meetings, and at first it appeared that Lefty Wrong was going to walk into the light. Within a few months, the still young man managed to get a job at Lube, Tube & Doob, a combination oil change, tire repair, and vape shop in Deep Elum. His parents had recently re-connected with him and had sent along his old ukulele in the mail addressed affectionately, if prosaically, to “Lil’ Estranged Son.” It still had flecks of regurgitated chocolate pudding powder on it from a childhood vomit incident.
A rental room opened up, and some time shortly after that Lefty took up with the wrong bartenders and soon begun moving herbs around Deep Elum. He bought a decent guitar and took to wearing a 3-piece thrift store suit wherever he went. Before the year was out, he was a known character around local open mics again, with Clementine Sloan always on hand to offer thoughtful bathroom or back alley bumps.
With his newfound fortunes, Lefty Wrong bought a used Nissan Rogue and celebrated by inviting Sloan on what he said was a “totally random trip” out to Marfa, in West Texas. In fact, the journey wasn’t random at all. Per the request of a Dallas Cartel associate, the intention all along was to mule a significant amount of drugs back to Metroplex, intentions he kept secret from his darling Clementine. Unfortunately for the pair, the journey went sour after an all too familiar Cartel misunderstanding and they were both shot in the back of the head by the side of the highway.
*His father was a fan of Elvis Costello. And also of opioids.
**Which, coincidentally, his father also nicknamed the particular ‘high’ he got from opiates cut with talcum powder.
***A misnomer no-one, including Krantz, ever caught: He was right-handed.
Americana Unsung 