Author: T. Edward & Prince Asbo

T. Edward and Prince Asbo are retired critics living in Rockville, Maryland with their pet Welsh Corgis named Danko and Manuel. G. Hage lives in North Carolina, USA where he done all them purty pitchures. P. Asbo assembles the collages, as needed.

Band

Ämülët

Unless your band is The Supremes, The Ramones, or AC/DC and you’ve already hit on perfection, there’s no shame in adapting your art to suit the times, in evolving it to reflect your changing interests, knowledge, and personal development. Legacy artists have often found well-springs of creativity and challenge (not to mention commercial success) by incorporating contemporary sounds: Bob Dylan got to the peak of the hit parade by ‘going electric’ in 1965; Marc Bolan had loads of early 70s UK smashes by switching from airy-fairy folk to glam rock stompers; the Stones made it to number one (their last) in 1978 disco style; Billy Joel reframed his petulance as New Wave angst and topped the charts in 1980; Miles Davis’s and David Bowie’s whole modus operandi was based on their remarkable abilities as prescient musical changelings. And so on.

This is not to say that trend-hopping always pays off commercially: For every ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy’ smash, there’s a Further Adventures of Charles Westover by Del Shannon, a Flush the Fashion by Alice Cooper, and a Modernism: A New Decade by the Style Council dud. Still, these records, and others like them, have their defenders and have been subject to critical reappraisals.

Perhaps the unluckiest, most prodigious practitioner of the serial bandwagon jump in musical history is Chicago’s own Ämülët. Or more specifically its founder member (and the lone musician to appear in each incarnation), Steven Merrilees. That Ämülët eventually settled on music that was broadly Americana in style is the reason they’re to be found within these pages.

Merrilees grew up a foster child who, by age eight, had already lived with four different families. Like so many of his generation (and the one just previous), Merrilees’s introduction to performing consisted of playing along with Beatles’ records on a tennis racket in front of his bedroom mirror. His first band, Taking It To The Streets, was formed in the 10th grade and consisted of 7 teenagers singing along to a Radio Shack C-60 cassette tape of the contemporary Doobie Brothers’ hit album. After their first rehearsal, Merrilees suggested the gang “jam on a riff” he’d been driving his latest carers crazy with for the previous six months. There was no room for such freethinking in Taking It To The Streets, and the band asked him to leave.

Within weeks, Stephens had formed his own group, The Slick Backs, and was covering all the songs on Sha Na Na’s 1969 début Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay. He had a hyperactive, twitchy way about him when singing and his energy levels, irritating in one-on-one situations, were a positive boon onstage.

After a visiting “uncle” hipped Merrilees to Slade and urged him write his own tunes, out went the 50s Rock & Roll and in came the spangles, meat & potatoes riffs, and fey suburban poetry, inspired by the likes of Gary Glitter, Mud, and Sweet. Merrilees was convinced that Glam Rock was the way to fame and fortune.

All he needed now was co-conspirators. Shortly after, almost as if the gods had decreed it, Merrilees was introduced to the cross-dressing, multi-instrumentalist Mitchell “Michelle Strange” Strand at the Happy Cow food processing plant where they both had recently started part-time jobs, and Ämülët was born. It was not to be a “When John Met Paul at the Woolton Village Fête” event, but they weren’t to know this at the time and proceeded as if it were, discovering two more musicians at Happy Cow.

By the time this gang of meat packers formed Ämülët in 1978, its members were only recently out of high school and the band were able to spend all its free time rehearsing. Because of their dedication, they were offered quite a few support slots for national bands passing through the Windy City. On one such occasion, opening for The Romantics, they were spotted by Rick Gantz, A&R for Made-Up Music, and the band was on its way.

Their début 7″ “Lips & Earholes” (the original title, “Lips & Assholes”, was rejected for obvious reasons) jokily alluded to the band’s experience on the killing floor mopping up the bloody detritus and carting it off to the Happy Cow’s hot dog department. Unfortunately, Glam had ceased to be commercially or artistically viable at least five years previously; they had just missed the boat. The single, as with its parent Lp, Smell My Love (Made-Up Music, 1980), was so out of step with the times that even the archest of ironists couldn’t get behind them. That, coupled with the fact that few at the label really understood, or indeed particularly liked, the record, meant it stiffed and Ämülët were summarily dropped. One young intern tartly complained, “How am I supposed to do The Worm to this?”

The boys regrouped and did some soul searching. They knew that some sort of change in direction was in order, but which direction? Taking a late-night Showtime screening of Saturday Night Fever as a sign to ‘go Disco’, Merrilees urged Ämülët to follow that route. Despite some misgivings from the other members, Merrilees pressed on with his foray into pop-dance music, resulting in 1985’s Boogie Noogies (Casanegro Records & Filmworks). Alas, a minor country-wide backlash six years previously made the genre anathema to the record buying public and, as with the band’s previous phase, sales went nowhere in a hurry. Three years of gigging in white suits and middle partings were for naught.

Short-lived New Wave and Motown directions were signalled with the releases of The White Albumin [Smooth Brain, 1989]) and Souled Out (Engineville, 1994) respectively. Once again, timing was not on Ämülët’s side and both records fizzled due to being hopelessly out of fashion. Next, fully six years after Kurt Cobain was discovered lying dead in his Seattle home, Ämülët turned in their grunge album, Heavy Modal (Stoner Island, 2000), which was met with similar indifference and confusion.

By this time, Ämülët had run through seventeen different drummers, nine bass players, and three keyboardists, Mitchell Strand having long departed to start his own project managing a traveling Burlesque show called Vavavoom! Merrilees was beginning to believe his dreams of musical fame might never come true.

Now, it is a curious fact, but if you hang around long enough, you can, almost by default, become ‘legendary’. Also, styles that go all antwacky often come back into vogue via hipsters bent on provocation. Disco, New Wave, Psychedelia, and etc. have all had periodic renaissances following years of critical disregard. During these revivals, Ämülët’s relevant records would pique the interests of crate diggers, doing much to keep the group’s brand afloat. Because of this, and the fact the band was still remarkably beloved by local club owners, many of whom managed to mismanage them through their various phases, they were still landing decent support slots. They opened for The Jayhawks, Son Volt, Wilco, Cracker, among other Americana heavy-hitters, all in the span of two years in the late nineties. Soon, Merrilees showed up wearing a cowboy hat to their weekly rehearsals. At this point, the rest of the band just signed on without much of a fight.

With the 2008 release of the Country-themed Harvested (Ovaloid Records), the band, apparently creatively exhausted by its myriad volte-faces over three decades, manfully clambered onto its last caravan. At least C&W is a style into which one may gracefully grow old.

Mumbled in a gravely tone with the most convincing southern accent a suburban Chicagoan could muster, their lyrics still made no sense whatsoever. But slap on some basic acoustic guitars and fake steel guitar (opened tune electric through a Green Line-6 delay), add the best reverb that Pro Tools can buy and you had yourself a song. A couple of which actually got into a few films thanks to a few Hollywood film and television soundtrack friends who placed the tunes in early edits that the director just got used to.

Pitchfork, who had until this point completely ignored Ämülët, suddenly took interest when one of the songs appeared on Freeks & Geeks, noting enthusiastically that the “long-lived Chi-Town chameleon outfit’s latest tune was better than mediocre.” Their second release for Ovaloid, All The Gritty Forces (2010), upped the quality still further and the band began to talk up a 30-years-in-the-making overnight success.

Alas, it all came quickly tumbling down in what should have been a breakout appearance during SXSW at the Continental Club, where Merrilees, likely worn out from a heavy touring schedule, and most definitely drunk, began insulting nearly every band in his current genre from onstage.

“The Jayhawks are a bunch of old white guys,” he complained. “They don’t even like each other.” He rambled on. “Wilco? Gimme an f’in’ break! How many guys showed up to sign that record deal in the documentary? I’ll tell you how many: One! That ain’t a real band is it? Now, Drive By Truckers, that is a band, but how many albums can they make about the South being such a shithole?” The room, chock full of industry insiders and tastemaker went silent, there was no turning back from this. Steven Merrilees had not merely shot himself in the foot, he had blown both of his legs off.

The show effectively shut the door on Ämülët as going concern. Bookings completely dried up and record contracts were voided. A subsequent Post Rock recording made under another name, Pink Slime*, was sniffed out and rejected. An album of children’s songs Steven recorded for his grandkids, Merrilees We Roll Along, also remains unreleased.

It’s true that provincials are often a year or two behind the times and, on that score, Ämülët certainly started as they meant to go on, so that by the time the band had made each jump, the wagon had long left the depot. With each radical change in approach, Ämülët would alienate the few fans they’d managed to gather in the meantime and, for all practical purposes, have to start over from scratch; hence the five to ten year wait between releases. The thing is, every time they swapped their image they would proclaim, in total Stalinist capitulation to their new style, that, at last, “You’re seeing the real Ämülët!’

*Another allusion to Merrilees’s early days at Happy Cow.

Solo Singer-Songwriters

Jeffrey Friedman

Jeffrey Friedman, formerly the bass player of Storm & Twang and front man of The Fried Men, took what little earnings he got from a publishing deal that he’d lucked into upon first arriving in Los Angeles, and started a lucrative pot growing business out of his Eagle Rock garage. He possessed a green thumb, and the money rolled in. He would often play banjo to his plants, and sing them little songs that he made up on the spot. Things went well enough that soon he was able to afford a small chunk of land outside Landers, California near Joshua Tree. Here, he went full-scale ‘indoor warehouse grow’ and began to compete with the best of the best in the burgeoning California legal weed market. As with all recreational drug distribution channels, anyone doing reasonably well would most definitely meet unsavory characters along the way. These people would present themselves as ‘businessmen’ and then turn out to be very much connected to a cartel.

After moving to Nashville in the Great Eastward Migration of the 2010s, prior to the global pandemic, he continued to enlarge his marijuana business. He retained employees back in California while steadily branching out with a 60-acre purchase outside Columbia, Tennessee that was flush with pure underground spring water.

Friedman had a few local employees running that operation while he kept a house just north of Nashville in Whites Creek, where he lived alone with an orange Tabby cat named Sanchez. Although he purported to be a musician, and was actively playing sets at various East Side bars, he was in fact a successful drug dealer who was not quite able to shake some California business ‘partners’ interested in branching out to the ever expanding central Tennessee market. As a result of his dabblings in music (a somewhat genuine talent), Jeff Friedman quickly became the dealer or choice for many up and coming scene-makers, producers, lawyers, nurses, music business wranglers, as well as reefer connoisseurs residing in East Nashville and Music Row.

Lo and behold, it turns out his side hustle as a four-track cassette-recording enthusiast began to perk up some ears as well.

Several local clients were producers and Spotify tastemakers. Occasionally, Friedman would play his own music over the sound-system in the Whites Creek barn where he stored his weed, and, eventually, some heard a few of the unmixed cassette tracks while visiting. One of them asked to have a copy so he could bring the music to a label friend. At first, Friedman was sceptical, thinking his days of music business hustling were over, but the producer buddy was persistent and eventually Friedman mixed down a rough copy of the cassette into MP3 format. And thus we have the spark which ignited the fuse that detonated the bomb of this unfortunate story.

Between networking, establishing new contacts, and hiring employees Friedman unintentionally, if naturally, let more than a few distant relatives of the Sinaloa Cartel into the fold. Within a few years, men who wished to expand the business into more lucrative drugs, such as cocaine and fentanyl, were paying him visits. In the meantime, Friedman, who spoke enough Spanish and also was a serious aficionado of the gangster balladeer Chalino Sanchez, had begun recording his own Americana-tinged versions of original narcocorrido-style songs.

Friedman was tall, laid-back, and handsome enough. He often sported a leather trilby and had a gentle way of expressing himself. If there was nothing threatening about Jeffery Friedman, his colleagues were another matter.

After a music business associate made a Soundcloud link to pass around, the MP3s of Friedman’s songs began to circulate. The cover art was crudely made on his laptop from a printed image of the barn with the words “Passenger Slide” stamped directly on the front with an old typewriter. The photograph also featured a barely recognizable (to most) image of a lanky character in a straw cowboy hat entering the barn with a banjo on his shoulder.

One of the first people to hear the tracks was Kim Gantz of Dirty Pike Music. She raced out to meet Friedman and pitch him a deal. There was no two ways around it, the songs, primarily about the exact details, habits, mannerisms and fashion of actual drug dealers and cartel members, were catchy and recorded in a lo-fi way that made the listener feel like they were hearing something timeless and immediate at the same time. It was real street music, sung about real characters. Friedman possessed a gift of a baritone voice that kept your ears attuned. He wasn’t a perfect singer, but there was conviction there and any listener hung on every word.

The first track on the EP, called “Something That Is Real” had the lyrics:

I am no imitator,

I will not instigate your heart.

To break without good reason,

I have work to do and I am a man of my word.

The next time we arrive here,

I will have all of the things you need.

The silver and the gold

And we will take this town.

Other songs, with titles such as “Franklin By Midnight,” “Take Me To The Springs,” “River Of Blood,” “Last Strain In Clarkesville,” or “The Rat On The Roof” told specific details of drug deals that had gone well and some that had gone awry. The most popular track was a lone banjo and vocal song called “Man In The Black Truck” and it had specific details of an especially dangerous thug that Friedman had only encountered once down on the grow site outside Columbia, Tennessee.

His Mexican associates referred to this particular gangster as El Animalito (The Little Animal). Friedman, who had never ran afoul of his business partners, was very fortunate in that he never had to do any of the truly dirty work, i.e. the intimidations and sometimes beatings of local hoods who were late on paying their bills after being fronted drugs to sell. The successful pot farmer slash songwriter “El Jefe” Friedman maintained his own crew of both Caucasian and Latin American youth that had come up through the chain of command and had passed the various tests of trust and soldier camaraderie.

The cartel was simply not ever going to let a business opportunity just evaporate and the connections from California to Tennessee just got thicker as time went on. The Sinaloa Cartel in particular was brilliant at placing American born sons into universities where they would get business or law degrees and keep tabs on the local trade. These descendants of thieves had money and fast cars and they were able to infiltrate social scenes. They had jobs at legal firms and were completely planted to keep track of the workings of all illegal drug trade. They were not interested in the legalization of any of the drugs they moved and therefore letting the government take a cut of their money. Ironically, many were knows to contribute heavily to the campaigns of politicians who were anti-legalization of any kind.

As the underground popularity of the Passenger Slide tracks and then homespun videos made by super fans just took over the Americana internet channels, the Spotify numbers just rose and rose until eventually there was actual money being reported via the ISRC Codes implanted in all songs on all formats. So where was the money to go? At first it went to Dirty Pike Music, who then had to report these earnings and then open up an account with Friedman so that he could be paid his rightful royalties for being the composer, performer, and sole musician and vocalist on all of the tracks.

This was all a big surprise to Friedman, who didn’t have Spotify or television and basically listened to old blues and Narcocorrido albums on poorly attended vinyl and cassettes up in Whites Creek. He was completely unaware that local radio stations—specifically WXNA, had begun to play his songs quite regularly. Other local stations followed. Eventually, the call came in from Todd Snider, who was also a customer and had heard the tracks first hand, to do a support slot at The Ryman set for April 20th of 2021. The gig was eventually cancelled due to a Covid-19 situation, typical of that time, but Friedman and Snider decided to have a little shindig up at the barn in Whites Creek on that same day anyway. The party attracted more press about Passenger Slide and what it was all about. Nashville Scene did a two-page spread with the headline “The High Life In Whites Creek”, which featured photos that accidentally showed the distant relatives of actual cartel members. The FBI began to make just enough of a show to motivate certain activities intended to preserve the way things were.

One week after the Nashville Scene article came out, Friedman was paid a visit by El Animalito himself, along with a few of his subordinates. They got out of their trucks at 8 a.m., and kicked the door down, startling Friedman, who had taken to falling asleep on the couch in his living room, which had also become his home studio and ping-pong room. Friedman’s gun, a loaded, old-school cowboy style Colt .45 revolver, was on the coffee table next to him. There was no time to reach for it and besides he was severely outnumbered with several guys packing much more serious heat.

It seems the higher ups at the Cartel were none too pleased that Friedman has called so much attention to his (and by proxy, theirs) operation with his “pequeñas canciones maricon” (little faggot songs) that revealed a little too much. He tried to reason with them, but the order had come down, and while the subordinates surrounded the couch, the boss appeared from the kitchen calmly petting Sanchez the orange tabby cat and humming the melody from “Man In The Black Truck.” El Animalito, who had used cat food from his pocket to attract Sanchez, slipped on some oven mitts that were next to the stove, and continued to pet the purring cat. At once the men all grabbed Friedman and slammed his face down on the ping-pong table, ripping down his sweatpants and underwear. El Animalito slammed Sanchez down on the table in front of Friedman’s face, took out a machete and severed the head of the cat in one fell swoop.

Friedman was crying in horror at this while the little underboss made his way over to the instruments hanging on the wall nearby. He grabbed the banjo that was used in “Man In The Black Truck” and walked behind Friedman, who was still being held down by the underlings. “No mas Spotify, no mas Chalinillo,” he kept saying, using the derogatory term that Mexican music fans had invented for Chalino Sanchez imitators, before sodomizing him with the headstock of the banjo and smashing the body onto the Friedman’s head, severing the neck from the body of the banjo, while also rendering him unconscious.

Before exiting the property, one of El Animalito’s men watched over Friedman’s limp body while the rest went into the barn and helped themselves to all of the product that was stored there. They also took all of the Passenger Slide vinyl that had been recently delivered, plus used a baseball bat to smash all of Friedman’s recording gear, and were gone before 9 a.m. When Jefferey Friedman came to, he called a friend and told them to bring over a first aid kit. There was a mess to clean up, and there was business to tend to.

The phone call to Kim Gantz was easy. Legal documents had never been signed, so when Friedman asked her to remove the tracks from Spotify and she protested slightly Friedman yelled, “Take the fucking songs down right now!” and hung up the phone.

Passenger Slide was, obviously, never performed in public, and the Spotify account was removed the following week. All bootleg social media accounts were issued a cease and desist order, through Friedman’s lawyer, and the town quietly murmured about what may or may not have happened.

Today, the songs are the stuff of whispers and legends, as it is never brought up around Jeffrey Friedman, who gratefully returned to the horticultural life that had first brought him peace.

Religious Solo Singer-Songwriters

HUCK PAXTON

Normally we at Americana Unsung research and write our own profiles of alt. country’s lesser lights. Recently, however, we received an unsolicited auto-biography from former Bloodshot & Yep Roc recording artist Huck Paxton. Not that we necessarily want to encourage this sort of thing, we felt this story was simply too good not to publish. So with no judgment and only slight edits for clarity and punctuation (for the subject was, as he stated in the March 2023 cover email accompanying his memoir “a damn good story teller but a hack of a writer”), the editors of Americana Unsung have agreed to publish his story, pretty much verbatim leaving most of Paxton’s eccentric syntax intact.

The Troubadour Hustle aka ‘Dancing With The Devil’

I am not famous. Sometimes, when I talk to people, I can tell that they think I am famous. On any given day-to-day walkabout, I can stroll freely about town and not encounter what actual famous people tend to call their “superfans.” I only have about a dozen or so, and they can get ahold of me very easily on The Internet. None of my superfans live in Nashville, Tennessee, where I see bonafide celebrities at the local supermarket. You can find some of the best pedal steel players in the world just by standing around in the produce section of the Kroger’s. I have had several occasions when I found myself shopping for veggies alongside notable singer-songwriters like Gillian Welch. Once, once while her and I were both milling over some eggplants, I tried to make small talk by asking her, “How do I know which one is the best?” She looked up from under her big straw hat, rolled her eyes, and said, “I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.” I knew exactly what she meant.

Long ago, when I had a younger man’s moustache, things were going my way, i.e. the Music Business Machine was behind me and the doors for decent support tours seemed to open, but I simply made a mess of every opportunity. I wrongly assumed this “life on the road” would last forever; being in a new town every couple of days, eating from a never-ending backstage platter of cheese and grapes. I became lazy and complacent, and thought it would be a good idea to not settle down into a relationship back home just because a person may have really cared about me, and instead have sex with whomever I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I was.

I managed to get a truck load of songs out of that wayward path, but it was simply a way of life that did not have much sustainability in regards to stability and other things that I had no concept of in my twenties or thirties. Several rehabs later—three for booze and drugs, one for sex, and a few “retreats” for whatever else there is to get strung out on. Unsuprizingly, I found myself struggling to make ends meet.

I still toured Europe here and there, because, as true to cliché, I had a minor hit in Belgium with a song I wrote when I was 26 called “I Will Not Die For Rock & Roll (But I’ll Get As Close As A Blind Man Can)” which got into a cult French rockabilly noir film called Les Diables Rebelles.

Every now and then, because I am accustomed to hustling the good hustle, I will put a song up on my Instagram page. About the same 35 to 70 people seem to give a damn every time. The numbers rarely stray far from that zone. Mostly Europeans, and a few Australians. I do have a few elderly divorcee superfans in Texas and Louisiana that will buy anything I release, but other than that I simply have a hard time keeping the lights on with my music. I needed a regular source of cash, so I took a warehouse temp job after I got sacked from Amazon for crashing their delivery van when I was stoned one morning. Well, I didn’t crash it exactly, but scraped the whole right side of it along the corner of a brick wall that I didn’t realize I was parked that close to. Not one of my best days.

At one time you may know that I made a few decent records: the Plaid Reputation ep on Bloodshot, followed by two Yep Roc full-lengths, Principles Of Chaos and Greydog To Rockford. I was temporarily booked by MANAGE THIS! out of Philadelphia, but I kept sleeping with the wrong people or ingesting the wrong substance, and anyway all of that just sort of dried right up after I couldn’t put ten paying customers in any room in Chicago. I am Writing All of This Down in order to be a proper Cautionary Tale for some young creative that may come along. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I have made, and then find out at 40 years old that you’ll never be invited to perform on the Outlaw Country Cruise even though you’ve done more actual time in jail than all of the headliners combined. Yes, I may have driven a few cars into the ditch, and I might have flubbed a few shows because I was drunk, and therefore ruined my chances to move up the ladder. The way I see it is that I just wasn’t able to make the Lucky Breaks work for me.

Here’s another nickel’s worth of free advice: maybe don’t take all the mushrooms that Chris Robinson offers you backstage. Maybe don’t sleep with the lighting rig person just because Win Butler did. Maybe don’t drink all of the Jonny Walker Red from The Jayhawks’ rider, several nights in a row on tour, therefore rendering yourself unable to play the mandolin during your cameo in their set. Maybe, instead of taking LSD while on a transatlantic flight, you could read a book or watch a movie. You can thank me later.

Once, while on tour with Jason Molina, who somehow managed to regularly outdrink me, I was so nervous before a show of bigwigs in Los Angeles that I drank far too much more brown liquor than I should have and ended up walking off stage mid-set to throw up behind the speaker column. It wasn’t a great night, and nobody wanted to take me out to dinner or help me get a lift back to my hotel, which I had forgotten to book in the first place, thinking that my manager had done it, but in fact I had forgotten that we had parted ways just a few weeks previous. I was basically homeless and slept in the back seat of my rental car, which was not a new thing. My drunken pleas from the merch table did not garner me any invites to crash on couches, and I did not have any merch to sell anyway, having left it all in San Diego at the venue from the night before. You see what I mean about making a mess?

The next night, in San Francisco, after missing soundcheck because I couldn’t find a parking spot near The Bottom Of The Hill, an audience member loudly barked out the word “yawn” in the middle of my set, which caused a decent amount of titters through the crowd. I got into it with the audience and said something like, “If you’re so G-d damn special let’s hear your songs!” Nobody took me up on it, and I stormed off stage.

At one point after leaving the dressing room to begin my set, somebody had snuck a tie-dyed bandana into my guitar case backstage. Inside it was a crucifix hung on a chain. Some blind instinct made me immediately drape the chain over my head. The silver crucifix hit my chest like a pile of bricks. At first I thought I’ll just stop drinking right now, but a few hours later I was at The Hotel Utah ripped out of my mind.

The tour carried on to Portland and Seattle, and I felt a certain heaviness lift from me that I could not quite explain. I had strolled into a small bookstore outside Medford and found a bible. To my surprise, I read it from start to finish in a very short time. I couldn’t wait to read more and more. I went on line and read the manifestos of David Koresh and Theodore Kaczynski. I subscribed to websites I had never seen before that were telling me the Real Truth. A light was turned on inside me. I did not feel afraid anymore, but I was also still drinking hard cider.

At one point I reckoned that if I just quit trying to make records and slowed down and got a job driving for Uber then maybe I could find myself in a revival position some day. Five years later, nobody had come knocking. I had been Officially Forgotten. I also gained a bunch of weight and contracted Hepatitis-C. I was able to make rent and car payments, but that was about it. I had no ambition; I had nothing. The local Church Of Christ told me I needed to clean up my act or find another congregation.

I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, as they say. I decided to come back to the 12-step rooms and just lay it all out there. A year and some change after that, I have found full-time employment down in the windowless basement of the Nashville Public Library, sorting out the never ending truckloads of books that arrive for me to put into the outgoing boxes to different branches. Some people think that Public Lie-braries are the greatest source of Misinformation and Legalized Pornography going, which may or may not be right. Let’s just say I’m in the belly of The Beast. They tell me that soon I can get promoted to janitor, which will come with a few more responsibilities and a lot more keys. I have wondered if perhaps I should apply to be a janitor at Calvary Hill Church Of Christ because at least there I would be in one of G-d’s many houses. I have also asked myself “now just how many houses does G-d need anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to keep just one house clean?”

I found a girl that loves me for me. Her name is Cindy. We met in the Program. She only had two weeks off the sauce when I asked her out, much to the chagrin of our local home group. We eventually had to quit going to AA after we encountered one too many loose screw heathen Atheists who believed their Higher Power was a doorknob or the ocean or some other woo-woo cult shit. We found Jesus and that is our story and we are sticking to it, by G-d.

Cindy is four months pregnant and we are going to start a family. If there is one thing I know, this child will not be reading the terrible books they offer in the Nashville Public School system. This child will be 100% home schooled. This child will not be going to college where they clearly teach the Devil’s words.

For a short time I had taken to wandering onto the campuses of Belmont and Vanderbilt and testifying. Students would gather and sunbathe in front of me while Cindy, or “Sister Cindy,” as the students named her, would preach when I needed to sit down. They love when I call marijuana “the Devil’s cabbage,” or tell of my LSD mishaps–like the time I tried to go from NYC to Philly in the undercarriage luggage storage of a Greyhound bus. Neither school will let us preach on campus anymore, or within a one mile radius of campus, so we have taken my preaching over to the Five Points area and Germantown, where we can get a decent crowd on a weekend night.

You can write to us. Please do. We are looking for like-minded people to start a family-based organization called G-d First and we would love to hear from you. If you are struggling, please tell us your story. We want to help you. If you run a record company and want to take a chance on a Born Again man who sings songs for Jesus, I am your man! I have pawned all my gear but I still have my “Beulah,” which was my Grandfather’s Martin D-76. I lost it once in a dice game but the Dutch promoter took pity on me and gave it back the next morning. If any of you European promoters want to take a chance on a guy who may or may not have stolen money from you in the past, or left a few bar tabs unpaid, I’d like to make it up to you. I swear on my Mother’s Name that I will pay you back, I just gotta get over there and sing some of these new songs first. Cindy will help me sell the merch.

Reach out please.

G-d First

PO Box 409

Nashville, TN 37210

Huck Paxton, a stage name, was thought to be a combination of the Mark Twain character and Tom Paxton the folk singer. Presently, Timothy Patrick Ptovsky is named in a cease and desist lawsuit from both the Mark Twain Estate and Tom Paxton.
The editors believe that the once noted singer-songwriter is attempting to start his own cult.

Comedy Novelty Act Solo Singer-Songwriters

Boner Jack

There existed back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s an underground music scene as lively, wilful, and independent as Stiff, SST, and Sub-Pop combined. This scene was made up of the pro- and semi-pro musicians who played a circuit of private members-only bars operated by fraternal and veterans’ organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Eagle, Loyal Order of The Moose, VFW, American Legion, etc. in the Midwestern and Southern United States. These venues fulfilled an important social function, allowing men a safe space to behave in ways which were growing ever less socially acceptable; business was conducted, off-color jokes were swapped, money was lost quasi-legally gambling, and, as concerns us here, country music singers were cheered.

Among these performers was the notorious Boner Jack, who, in the early 60s, was known as Bruce Jackson, a classic country singer in the Hank Williams mold.

Movie-star good-looking with the slick hair of Sal Mineo, the perfect teeth of Tab Hunter, and the strong jaw line of Rock Hudson, Jackson was regularly seen in the company of gorgeous women during his first flush of (semi) success in the 1960s. Nonetheless, he remained a confirmed bachelor until long after his show business career was over. Indeed, as quiet and retiring off stage as he was flamboyant on stage, Jackson’s personal life was a closed book to all but the series of young, handsome personal roadies who always accompanied him on tour.

Jackson was perhaps best known for his flashy stage appearance, replete with a pink pearl snap shirt with white fringes, diamel-encrusted 10-gallon hat, and a gaudy gold-plated belt buckle big enough to poke a bear’s eye out. He released several well-received singles on Wheeling, West Virginia’s Turn-Pike Records, starting with “Sweet Harvest Moon” and “Runnin’ (With the Devil)”. The others followed suit with plenty of regional airplay, but no traction anywhere other than the tri-state area.

All he needed was a break.

An appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1968 should have been just that break. But apart from striking up a friendship, based on shared experience, with fellow Ohio-native Paul Lynde backstage at NBC Studios, Jackson came away with precious little from his Burbank adventure. While the broadcast gave a bump to his then-current Lp, Tomcattin‘, it was nothing like enough to sustain a career; while the single he was promoting, “Gorgeous Eyes”, struggled to make 113 in the Country Music charts, let alone a showing in the American Top 40. Soon, people stopped returning his calls.

And thus by 1975, age just 32, Jackson’s singing career was all but over; not so much a ‘has-been’ as a ‘never really was’. Eighth on the bill in a regional touring Hee-Haw-style variety show called Corn Pone, he began to resent the very songs he’d recorded over the previous decade which had so signally failed to break him nationally. One drunken night in the middle of the tour, in a perverse act of revenge heedless to the sensibilities of what remained of his fan base, Jackson re-cast his entire back-catalogue with smutty lyrics assured to offend anyone in earshot: “Gorgeous Eyes” became “Gorgeous Ass”, “Runnin’ (With the Devil)” became “Fuckin’ (With the Devil)”, etc., etc. He debuted the new versions the following evening at the Memorial Theatre in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The audience gasped open-mouthed as Jackson snarled one sexually explicit, profanity-laden song after another. As he begun to sing his final song, “Sweet Harvest Poon”, the revue’s panic-stricken director cut power to the stage as a chorus of disgusted boos reigned down from the hall. It was as twisted a musical self-sabotage as anything this side of Metal Machine Music. Sure enough, Jackson was fired as he walked off the Corn Pone stage. He was replaced by a Ken Berry look-a-like comedy monologist.

But in one of those strange twists of showbiz fate, Bobby Sirica was in the audience that night. A booking agent who dealt exclusively with fraternal organizations in the American South and Midwest, Jackson’s puerile re-writes had him in stitches and gave him a flash of inspiration. Immediately after Jackson was dropped, Sirica strode up and told Jackson he could guarantee him five nights a week performing his ‘blue’ act at his clubs in states as far west as Illinois, as far east a Pennsylvania, as far north as Michigan, and as far south as Tennessee. With no other options on the horizon, Jackson summarily ditched the straight Country Music career he’d been denied, spurned the Country charts to which he’d been barred entrance and set about, with his brand new booking agent, creating a new show-biz persona: Boner Jack.

A flamboyant, filthy-mouthed caricature, Boner Jack would be a magnification of Jackson’s already fairly over-the-top stage incarnation. What had been a career suicide attempt turned into a nothing less than a lifeline.

Sirica was true to his word and, shortly, had Jackson working more than he ever had before. Private members clubs pay well and operate under an entirely different legal rubric to their public counterparts and so, unrestrained by obscenity laws or, indeed, taste, Jackson took his stage act to outrageous new heights. He found he enjoyed openly flaunting his personality and was beloved in a way he could have never been previously.

In addition to scatological takes on his own old material, Jackson parodied well-known songs (“Don’t It Make Your Brown-Eye Red”, “When I Get Her From Behind Her Locked Drawers”), as well as newly-written songs in a similarly rude comic vein (“Tanya Fucker”, “I Wouldn’t Kick Her Outta Bed For Eatin’ This Cracker”). Jackson soon incorporated a drag persona named ‘Dolly Hardon’ into the show, performing covers of “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” and “Stand By Your Man”, and new purpose-built originals like “Are You A Donnie Or A Marie?”. He further supplemented his income by selling 8-tracks and cassettes of his shows such as Boner Jack’s Triple XXX Party!, Bugger’s Banquet and (as Dolly Hardon) Here You Cum Again, none of which were likely to ever trouble AM radio.

He did, however, get the attention of at least one station owner. In late 1978, country radio maven, Marshall Rowland, received a cassette copy of Jackson’s Hell-Bent for Pleather from his friend, the cult humorist and musician Jerry “The Mouth of Mississippi” Clower. Rowland loved it, knowing, of course, he couldn’t play note one of Boner Jack’s music on any of his radio stations. But he wrote Jackson to offer encouragement and a promise of future help should the opportunity arise. It was only six months later that he called Bobby Sirica to offer Boner Jack a gig with Clower, who was hired to play at a swanky private party in suburban Atlanta. Jackson was scheduled to play the ‘after hours’ part of the show when the more sensitive guests had been packed off. He duly showed up at the Tuxedo Park mansion the day of the show, but Sirica, a life-long Democrat affiliated with the labor movement, refused to let him to perform on discovering Clower didn’t belong to the Musicians Union. Rowland was angry and embarrassed. The situation was only remedied when a last-minute deal was struck to allow Jackson to perform as Dolly Hardon. Honor was duly saved, but any hope of a lasting friendship between Jackson and Clower was dashed following an awkward misunderstanding during a drunken good-night hug.

It was shortly after this that Jackson was offered a potentially lucrative slot as warm-up act on a tour with George Carlin. Calling him a “lank-haired pornographer”, Jackson dismissed the comedian’s observational style as “dirty, and not in a good way” and turned down the offer “on aesthetic grounds.”

Still, the Carlin opportunity lifted their sights. And, per the example of Redd Foxx, Jackson and Sirica, began to plot a move from X-Rated comedy in the denizens of private members clubs into more mainstream entertainment. As they put feelers out, his old friend Paul Lynde booked the singer to perform (under his real name) one of his less lascivious new songs in a (never aired) 1980 re-boot of Lynde’s Halloween Special. Alas, shortly before he was to fly to Los Angeles for the taping, Jackson’s mother Alma suffered a massive stroke and he remained in Ohio to look after her. While the stroke didn’t kill her, it left Alma severely incapacitated, and so her dedicated son turned his back on his second show-business career to look after her.*

She passed away quietly in her sleep in 1987, by which time Jackson had settled down to a modest life with Pat Meecham, the private carer who’d helped look after his mother during her final years. The couple were married on June 27, 2015.

*In the post-pandemic era, as recently as 2022, Boner Jack performed a “’22 Comeback Special” at Flaming Saddles, NYC’s campy cowboy bar.

Band

Junior Jr.

It only takes one decent record collection and some open-minded parents to get a kid thrilled about the glory of music and songwriting. Start them out young, and the possibilities are infinite.

Junior Jr.’s story, juvenile punk rock band turns alt. country Native American artistic well-spring, is enough for a feature-length documentary, but Americana Unsung is going to focus on the family saga behind Junior Jr.’s founding member.

The family tree had tangled roots and branches spreading wide enough to involve African and Spanish ancestry. Born in 1910 onto the Seminole Reservation in Wewoka, Oklahoma, James Crenshaw Sr. was literally the seventh son of a seventh son. Both of his parents died young from alcoholism and fatigue. Several of his brothers and sisters also died before their time. Crenshaw family lore held that their immediate predecessors, originally from Florida, had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and that this was where the family name came from.

The Wewoka community fairly shunned the next generation of Crenshaws. Though initially something of a local hero, James Jr. became persona non grata as a result of a colorful variety of unscrupulous behaviors. Confusingly nicknamed “Senior” after he led the Wewoka Tigers to a district championship in 1950 as quarterback during his senior year, he skimmed hundreds of dollars from the Buffalo Nickel Casino in Wewoka, not to mention schtupping the boss’s wife. “Senior” got married and sired three children in short order, including yet another James Crenshaw in 1955. As if things in the nickname department weren’t bad enough, the family dubbed James Crenshaw III, “Senior Jr.”.

After a stint in County for grand larceny, “Senior” spent the remainder of his life working as a clerk at a downtown gas station, drinking, smoking, and slowly dying, which he finally managed in 1960. James III’s mother lasted another decade. The last words she spoke to her eldest were, “’Senior Jr.’, promise me you will leave the ‘Rez’.” He simply nodded his head as his mother lay dying.

On the eve America’s Bicentennial, James III kept the promise to his mother and left his surviving family behind. Moving to Los Angeles, he quickly found work as a mechanic. Luck and timing netted him a few roles as Chicano-looking background actor in Hollywood. It was on the set of the first post-Freddie Prinze suicide episode of NBC’s Chico and the Man where he met his future wife, the Puerto Rican actress and musician Francesca Mia Amado Gonzalez. The two of them fell madly in love with each other and, almost simultaneously, out of love with LA. A chance catering gig brought them to Oklahoma where the now-married lovebirds pooled all their credit and savings together to put the down payment on a house in Tulsa. Before long, they had a notion to start their own family. Francesca became pregnant right as “Senior Jr.” finished his mechanic’s licensing requirements. He opened up his own business, and began to establish his reputation as a hard-working and honest family man.

In 1978, shortly after James Crenshaw IV (nicknamed “Junior Jr.” for reasons no-one could quite explain) was born in at the St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, old Sun Studios comrades and co-dependent troublemakers Johnny Cash and “Cowboy” Jack Clements decided to take a road trip together. The two hadn’t really hung out for years and were keen to relive, for a short time at least, long-gone days of unencumbered freedom. They hatched a plan to drive one of Cash’s Jeeps to visit Woody Guthrie’s birthplace in Okemah, Oklahoma. Cash had been more or less sober for some time at this point, but his friend “Cowboy” had other plans and brought a tray of high-powered pot brownies and a baggie of magic mushrooms along for the journey.

Everything was going just fine, and the two made their Okemah pilgrimage as planned. On their way back, the pair decided to hop off Interstate 40 and head for Tulsa, where, as fate would have it, they encountered a broken fuel pump situation. A passing trucker* picked them up on the side of the interstate, and dropped them off at Crenshaw’s Garage, the all-around auto mechanic and service center run by none other than James Crenshaw III.

That just happened to be the day when Francesca Crenshaw needed to take her beautician’s certification exam, so sweet baby James and his crib were dropped off at dad’s office for the day. Soon enough, “Junior Jr.”‘s face and onesie were smudged with grease and grime as mechanics came to fuss over the boy.

There was a lot of business to tend to that day, including sending the tow-truck out with “Cowboy” Jack and the driver to go back and fetch the car. The Man in Black himself hung out and played the Silvertone acoustic guitar that hung on the waiting room wall at Crenshaw’s, and he also ended up changing James’s diaper during a more hectic part of the afternoon. There was a lot of laughter that day and memories of the story remained strong. During the layover, while waiting to get their fuel pump fixed, Johnny and Jack checked into a local Ramada Inn, but ended up having dinner with the Crenshaw Family. Photographs were taken of the meal; and framed copies adorned the kitchen wall of “Junior Jr.”‘s family home.

Before long, “Junior Jr.” began to study the records of his father’s collection, which included plenty of Cash, Kristofferson, Elvis, Link Wray, Jesse Ed Davis, Loretta Lynn, Gram Parsons, and The Clash.

That same baby whose diaper was changed by Johnny Cash grew up to be quite a drummer, and guitar player, and not too shabby engineering a four-track cassette machine either. Before all his latter glory as a producer of a few score of classic Tulsa Americana albums, he started a short-lived punk band, Junior Jr., releasing two 7″ inch singles on the band’s own Top Knot Records. The first single was a thoroughly strange and disturbing deconstruction of his one-time babysitter’s “I Walk The Line”, sung from the point of view of General George Custer as he and his army were being slaughtered at Little Big Horn.

I keep a close watch on this gold of mine.

I keep the red folks underneath my eye.

I keep the tight noose on necks that bind.

Because I’m white, I’m going to die.

The track, with a running total of one minute and 52 seconds, implodes in a fury of destruction at the end with chants of “Fanny can you hear me now?” This alluded to both Custer’s golden locks nickname and to a widely-reported, though likely apocryphal, story which held that two elderly Cheyenne women crammed their sewing awls into the ears of old “Iron Butt”‘s corpse on the battlefield, so that he might “hear better in the afterlife.”

On the flip was a thrash-style cover of “Cowboy” Jack Clement’s song “We Must Believe In Magic,” a deep cut from his 1978 Lp All I Want To Do In Life.

This garnered Junior Jr. enough indie credit and interest to receive an invite to support Green Day and Panzy Division on a few Midwestern dates in 1994. When the offer to tour in the big leagues came in, the unfortunate fact was there was no real band to speak of: “Youngblood”, as he was known in Tulsa’s punk community, had recorded all the parts himself on a Tascam 4-track. But with the help of Green Day and a loose national punk rock grapevine, he found an all Native-American hardcore band that was able to join him for the tour. Green Day’s drummer, Tre Cool, offered to sign on as a legal guardian for the latest James Crenshaw, who was only 17 at the time.

This newly minted band only recorded one more 7″ before calling it quits. With both sides being recorded in a furious 45-minute session at Columbus, Ohio’s Mu-si-col Studio before a late-November support slot that night at Newport Music Hall, the sophomore single featured a couple of politically-charged, if puerile, tunes: “Christopher Columbus (Come Blow Us)” and a 52-second blast-off chant called “Andrew Jackson (Chew My Bag Son)”. The b-side offered up a grungy 3-minute dirge, “You’re Welcome Day,” which was the band’s topical First Nations take on Thanksgiving.

Junior Jr., the band, was enjoying a reasonable amount of success for a hardcore operation and was being offered development deals by no less than three different major labels. The word on the streets was that they had already sold out by even considering the corporate route. Punk doctrinaires in Phoenix and San Diego chanted, “Sell out, sell out, sell out!” when the band took the stage–and not because there were no tickets left for sale. A two-day session was booked at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles where the band recorded 17 songs under the watchful eye of Reprise Records’ A&R guru Jake Schmenk. No evidence remains of these sessions as Crenshaw, in a fit of pique after reading on a message board that Junior Jr. was a “manufactured boy band created to fill the company coffers à la Green Day”, stole in to Sunset after midnight and razor-bladed the two-inch tapes.

As happens with many an earnest punk rock band throughout history, Junior Jr. listened to bad advice and believed the press and fans rather than listen to their own musical hearts. Of course, you could also say that they simply grew up and evolved as musicians. Along with his bandmates, “Youngblood” founded a recording studio named The Rez. The Rez soon became one of the destinations for alt.country musicians all over the country and each of its founders high-profile community activists in Tulsa. Crenshaw himself recorded dozens of bands and singer-songwriters before disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness to homestead and raise his own family.

There’s no word if his eldest son, James Crenshaw V, has been nicknamed “Junior Jr. Jr.”

If found in good shape, his old band’s 7-inch records are valued at $270 per copy according to RecordCollectorMag.com

*The driver, Dan “Mushmouth” McClenahan, dined out on this story for years afterwards, an autographed Live At San Quentin 8-Track provided conclusive evidence for many a rapt audience.

Solo Singer-Songwriters

Ralph Lee Gimmel

Country Music aficionados will tell you that it was right about the time Curb Records started a Music Business School in Nashville when things just went to hell. Similar programs soon sprung up at major universities across the US, effectively making Frat Boys the majority tastemakers in the music biz. Waylon Jennings himself noted, “these so-called seats of learning cranked out 1,000 degrees for every decent Country tune that’s been written in the last 25 years.” And anyone who’s heard a Hank Williams song might be inclined to agree. Not to mention anyone who listens to Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson or Loretta Lynn, or any number of songwriting masters who lived the songs they wrote, delineating a life in lust with living and heartbreak, and cuttin’ loose all of a Saturday night. Our cynical Old-Timey friends argue that what people call Country Music today is an embarrassment, that the Hot Country Charts are full of garbage, quoting from classic hits all the while growing further distant from the magic that made the originals great.

Charlottesville, Virginia-born Ralph Lee Gimmel was one who knew all this only too well: steeped in Outlaw Country, his alcoholic and abusive father audibly groused about the wicked influence of Nashville ‘countrypolitans’ all the time. No stranger to boozy flights of fancy and wild claims, Ralph Sr. regularly boasted that a young David Allan Coe was his biological father. Ralph Sr. took to saying that since Coe has never returned his calls to explicitly say that Gimmel wasn’t his son, his paternity was almost as good as Gospel.*

But what concerns us here, is how Ralph Lee Gimmel went from street performer to Americana Music Association’s Best Emerging Artist (and where else could you ’emerge’ at the ripe old age of 31?) to the bar-brawling wild-man who pulled a gun in a parking lot, ending up doing five years for domestic abuse and possession of a controlled substance? And all in the space of 2 years?

Nobody will ever truly understand the why or how, but his songs remain to tell the who, the what, the where and the when. That is, they remain in physical copies on vinyl and CD only. There are no traces of Gimmel’s music on Spotify or any digital distribution network. Axton Records and RED Worldwide removed the album from all digital distribution when it was discovered that their charge had been in a physically abusive relationship with his spouse of 17 years, and that the disturbing songs he was singing were the literal truth, and not just the gussied-up fictions of an outlaw poet.

Gimmel, whose high tenor was augmented by a distinctive sibilance occasioned by having his front teeth punched out in a fight during his senior year in high school, managed to get his controversial opinions quoted on a variety of subjects other than the pathetic state of Country music (e.g. the role of women in society, drugs, immigration, the 2nd Amendment, climate change, etc.) in his few years in front of a microphone. One of Gimmel’s theories about his approach to Country Music also became a verse in his first Americana #1 song, “Feel Good Movie,” wherein Gimmel cleverly turned all the negatives of the protagonist into the positives of a Summer Blockbuster film:

A D.U.I. don’t make me an outlaw,

Like swimming don’t make me a duck.

I don’t get off paying court costs,

To my lawyer who’s a lazy river in a feel good movie.

Another move that endeared him to the local musicians’ community, but alienated him from the major labels, was hiring C and D-list musicians as the band on his album. These perfectly talented pickers couldn’t believe they were hired to play authentic country music. It was a righteous, working man’s move. “How’s a player going to get off the bottom rung unless he gets a session on an actual record instead of cutting demo after demo for some bullshit factory on Music Row?” Gimmel replied to a journalist who asked him why he didn’t use the best guys in town for his session. You could hear the band calling out cues and moves in the background. They didn’t whitewash the life and love out of the music.

Oklahoma oilman William ‘Slick Willie’ Beresford, who decided he was going to get into the music business rather than give all his money to the I.R.S, financed the entire album. He saw Gimmel play one song at an AMA Day party and within 2 years of coming to Nashville, by hiring the right publicists and project managers and a horde of blood-thirsty college graduate interns anxious to sink their teeth into something even remotely real, Beresford and Gimmel defied all the received wisdom about Music City being a ‘Five Year Town’ for success.

The darkness begins to creep into our story when the album, which critics agreed was lyrically outrageous, musically sharp, and not auto-tuned to the point of being robot music, started to get the kudos it deserved. Having earned the attention of national touring acts who were starving for anything genuine-sounding to help warm up their crowds rather than the latest hat with a guitar who never wrote a damn song in his life, Gimmel had to get serious about hitting the road. He had no children, but he did have a wife that nobody seemed to know anything about. One afternoon, when Jamey Robinson, a staff photographer for The Madisonian, a Madison, TN arts magazine, came over to visit the house for some “down-home porch shots,” Gimmel’s wife, Nora, surreptitiously passed the lensman a folded-up note that read only, “He’s a monster. Help me.” Robinson was nonplussed at first, but eventually Nora’s plea made its way to the proper authorities. Rumors started spreading.

It all came to a head the following Monday night at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge when Gimmel, who was supposed to sit in with the Bluegrass session that night, was called out in the parking lot for being a “goddam wife beater,” and he responded by brandishing a loaded .45 revolver, which quickly got the police called in. Shortly, they discovered an unusually large amount of weapons and Crystal Meth in the bed of Gimmel’s Silverado.

Today, Ralph Lee Gimmel is serving out his sentence at Brushy Hill while his wife, having moved back to Charlottesville, collects all the royalties earned from his one album–named with bitter irony–My Perfect Life. It was the first album by an emerging Americana artist to sell more than 14,000 physical copies.

*During hotel room one-night-stands, quickie fumbles in the back of tour buses, and stage door alleyway knee-tremblers, D.A.C. was well-known to have sired many a baby while on the road, so who really knows?

Band Bluegrass

The Johnnys

Bluegrass has had more than its fair share of internecine brawls. Divisions between traditional ‘Bill-Done-It-This-Way’ devotees and the laid-back progressives have grown quite marked over the years and it’s led to some of the meanest, most judgmental muso-backstabbing ever to take place in American music history. No sociologist could ever been able to truly explain the rage and divisive anger that accompanies this nastier side of Bluegrass.

Led by identical twin brothers Kyle and Stephen Johnny, no band better demonstrates the fierce conservative side of this divide than Massachusetts’ The Johnnys.

The siblings’ father, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Johnny, a lifelong Amtrak employee, was old enough to be their grandfather and his ‘generational’ views were to inform those of his children. He had grown up in Massachusetts after his family moved there from West Virginia as part of the great migrations in the early 1900s. The Scotch-Irish heritage was keenly felt and travelled north with them, along with the family Victrola and a love for the old-time mountain music. Paddy was forever spinning 78s by Bill Monroe and The Bluegrass Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and Dock Boggs and any time there was a Bluegrass show within a reasonable drive, the whole family would attend, camping for the full three days if it were a festival. Kyle and Stephen Johnny were given as good an education on Bluegrass music as anybody might want, and while Stephen took to it like a duck to a lake, Kyle fought it as best he could. But make no mistake, Kyle loved his father and generally tried to please him. Even so, the old man could be hard to love as he indulged in rage-filled rants attacking anyone and anything to the political left of John Birch, but specifically African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, and, basically, anyone the Paddy called a “Goddam ‘Hyphen’ American” wondering aloud “Why ain’t simply ‘American’ good enough for ’em?”

Patrick Johnny also didn’t much care for the new strains of Bluegrass that emerged in the late 70’s with the likes of Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and company. In fact, so upset was the elder Johnny that he refused to let his sons attend the sets of these ‘Newgrass’ bands now invariably cropping up on the festival circuit. If he was going to listen to anything of a modern vintage, he preferred what became known as the ‘Dayton School of Bluegrass’ or the music that came out of Ohio made by West Virginia and Kentucky transplants who’d migrated north for work and brought their music with them. He was very fond of The Hotmud Family’s “The Girl On The Greebriar Shore.” As it happens, this was the first song ever performed by the twins during a grade school talent show. The show was less memorable for the music, these were 10-year olds after all, and more for Kyle’s first ever public tantrum. “God-damned piece of shit!” he wailed in front of shocked parents and teachers (and delighted primary-schoolers) when his single-coil Lawrence pick-up picked up some of the CB trucker talk that was blaring off of Interstate 90 just a mile away from the stage.

Traveling came easy to the boys, and Christmas after Christmas they were presented with more and more music, better and better instruments, and more than a few pistols and rifles. Finally, they were granted admission to a few Christian-based “fiddle camps,” where they honed their chops and, by the mid-90s, began writing songs together.

As they grew older, the twins began to consciously adopt the old man’s flat-out racism and ultra-conservative political views. Stephen wasn’t quite as loud about it as his brother Kyle, who was known to drop hate speech at a rate comparable to his father. This was unfortunate, but alas, it also did not hold them back in their field. A chance elevator encounter in Lowell, Massachusetts with their hero Ricky Skaggs only re-enforced these notions. Skaggs happened to mention something about a “dirty Mexican restaurant” next door to the town Shoney’s, suggesting that that was where he was going to have all of his meals while in the city. The brothers elaborately planned every opportunity to stalk Skaggs around Lowell, waiting for more of what they were fond of calling ‘Ricky wisdom’ or ‘Skaggs nuggets’.

No-one will deny that The Johnnys were capable of decent ‘blood harmony’ singing, as they were indeed twin brothers. In 2006, John Lawless of The Bluegrass Blog noted that pair “could hit the high notes with pride,” but continued that “the songwriting is what you, if you were being generous, might call ‘Traditional’, but is in fact derivative, even mundane.” The first original song of any note was “Grampa’s Tractor.” Though it was actually about their neighbor’s tractor, the pair’s real grandfather having been killed in an Amtrak-related incident long before they were even born, it won them a few slots held open each year for newcomers at the International Bluegrass Musicians Awards in Raleigh, NC. Another tune that caught the ear was “Daddy Drove A Train,” which was also fictional since their father pushed paper around at the Worcester Amtrak Station office, never riding on a locomotive unless it was for a company outing.

Soon enough, the festival circuit began to keep them busy and they supplemented their income selling homemade cassettes and, in time, CD-Rs. But it was after their appearance at the Black Swamp Festival in Ohio, specifically following a backstage hookup with a girl who got him very high on marijuana, Stephen began to associate less and less with his angry brother. He started to drift towards the ‘rainbow crowd,’ as Kyle like to call anybody who covered a Newgrass song or would take a radio hit and play it in a Bluegrass style. Kyle was adamant that there was no room in The Johnnys for “any of that gay shit. We play Bluegrass, God damn it! We love Jesus, not fucking Justin Timberland or whatever the fuck!”

Through persistence, the band scored a record deal with Rural Rhythm Records for one cd, and fought their way up the Bluegrass Circuit for a few years before moving to Nashville where they started their own label called Black Boot Records.

In many ways, things were looking up for the band. Though their refurbed 2010 Bluebird All American Tour Bus crapped out just outside Rosine, Kentucky, where the boys had gone to pay tribute to Bill Monroe’s birthplace, they traded up for a Prevost bus rental. The band spent the majority of their days on the road, but alongside Kyle’s heavy-handed but passable rhythm guitar plating matched with Stephen’s IBMA-winning mandolin chops, there was was a lot of side-musician churn. On any given week, The Johnnys were auditioning new members to sub out the spots for people who had quit because the two brothers had, for various reasons, become increasingly unbearable to be around. The roster of bandmates that the twins burned through during the 14-year period of their recording and traveling life is quite long and included over a dozen upright bass players, 6 banjo players, and at least 14 fiddle players.

Kyle had taken to showing off one too many pistols in the back of the bus and at one point sent a bandmate to the hospital after shooting him in the foot. And Stephen took to summarily fining the hired hands for bum notes and missed rehearsals, à la James Brown. It was also mandated that everyone in the band attend Sunday mass wherever they were located, and there was always a group prayer on the bus just before each set.

Kyle would lead these prayer sessions which were more like accusatory chants where he would ask for God to bless the band and protect them from any outside forces such as ‘Democrat’ voters and the like.

Things came to a head one day in Wheeling, WV when a former local campaign worker for George W. Bush got on the bus and started barking about “towel heads” and going on about how he was at the Atlanta airport recently “where I seen a Quatar Airlines plane on the tarmac and thought, ‘Well now these A-rabs are on the march and we gotta step up our game and defend our country’” to appreciative nods from the twins.

It was just 20 minutes before set time, and a few moments after those words were stated on the bus, the then-current bass player and fiddle player asked Kyle to step outside the bus where they turned in their resignations on the spot.

“Oh, you’re gonna Jew me out of a set are ya?” Kyle responded.

The bass player, who was Jewish, narrowed his eyes and answered, “That’s right.” With a smile, he took the opportunity to remind Kyle that part of his last name was John, and that the name John named from Yôḥanan, a Jewish man in the Bible, and that the name meant ‘Graced by Yahweh,’ and that Jesus was in fact also Jewish.

Kyle walked away. He and his brother were quite used to performing as a duo when required.

Only another year passed before radio stations banned their music, mostly due to a flippant comment that Kyle made live on the air in Vermont about how, “Bernie Sanders is a Communist who does not have American values in his Jew heart.” No worse than other statements he’d made dozens, if not hundreds of times before, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and at long last made them unwelcome anywhere, anytime. “Cancel culture,” Stephen was heard to mutter ruefully.

Today, Stephen Johnny teaches mandolin and fiddle at Christian Bluegrass Academy in Elizabethtown, Tennessee. Kyle was repairing buses at Anchor Transportation in Whites Creek, Tennessee, living alone in a rented bungalow just a few miles away. Unsurprizingly, Kyle refused to get immunized against Covid-19, which he referred to as ‘The Hillary Flu,’ so when he inevitably contracted Corona Virus, his symptoms became so acute, so quickly, by the time he called an ambulance to take him to the hospital, it was too late. He died with a Trump sign still in his front yard.

*Presented with matching ukuleles on their 8th birthdays, Kyle had smashed his over his brother’s head two weeks later after Stephen attempted to show him a chord he had learned.

Band

Oak & Ash & Sand & Nail

This remarkably unremarkable short-lived trio (and some-time equally unremarkable quartet) from the well-to-do North Atlanta suburb, Vinings, GA. were college-boy, roots-rock dilettantes with too much time and money on their hands. They never bothered to listen to, much less learn a single Kris Kristofferson song. Their whole shtick was less “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and more “Friday Night Let’s Use My Dad’s Credit Card.” OASN’s obviously manufactured ‘pain’ and ostentatious yearning for ‘life on the road’ proved to be their quick downfall, along with blatant unoriginality and a distinct lack of experience of, you know, ‘life on the road’.

It’s true these kids had (their parents’) money to burn* and their (parents’) money lasted for two full albums of what was, for all intents and purposes, re-written Dawes songs, before the jig was up. Daddy wasn’t going to pay the piper, or any other session musicians for that matter, ever again.

During their heyday, which lasted for two or three months after their second album (We Are There, 2016), the core group of three (Jespers was unable to go on the road—especially in Spring, due to nut and freshly-mown grass allergies) could pull moderate crowds at a few venues in Nashville, but the audience was comprised mostly of college buddies who they had bribed with the lure of free beer. As with many groups at this level, band and audience looked pretty much the same: trucker caps, jean jackets, tattoos, and stubble. They were accurately, if unkindly, described as “Nashville Brobots”.

A week before that appearance, a nugget of unfortunate publicity appeared in The Fire Note blog where their copy-cat of the Dawes-style was so obvious that Taylor Hawkins, lead singer of Dawes, had taken to calling them Oak & Ash & Plagiarism. This ended up being the most famous thing about them. A doomed SXSW day-party gig at a rented Mexican bar on the far North side of Austin called Shimmy’s finally put paid to their career. A grand total of four people, all old college friends currently living in Texas, showed up at the place.

They wanted to be bad boys and, in a sense, they got what they wanted: they were, it turns out, pretty bad.

OASN ended up renting an over-priced office on Gallatin Pike in East Nashville and forming a music business marketing and consulting firm called EASTWESTNORTHSOUTH. They went out of business after less than two years, surviving as long as they did by simply by doing to others what had been done to them.

After being #metoo’d by four of the female college interns he had personally hired from the University Of Georgia’s Music Business Program, lead singer Kilmer Patton moved to Norway, where he found work cooking and playing at an “American style” BBQ joint. The rest of the band went back to working for their family businesses, but still dine out on that time when they were rock stars.

*If you search back far enough in Kilmer Patton’s personal Instagram page you can literally see him drunkenly setting a hundred dollar bill alight.

Novelty Act

Grand Dad Opry

“Ya gotta have a gimmick,” or so advised the late Stephen Sondheim in his 1959 musical Gypsy. Well, Antony Spumoni thought he had a doozy. The concept was simple: Sing country songs in cod-operatic style and wait for the variety show dollars to start rolling in. That this particular shtick failed for so long was not for want of trying, it turns out that it was simply a stupid idea. For despite superficial similarities between the two genres—both are lachrymal, over-dramatic, and unhealthily obsessed with drinking, death, and yodelling—they don’t really blend at all, and end up cancelling each other’s best points. And yet….

——————————–

Spumoni’s oddball mash-up spent a long-time gestating. Indeed, he first started telling friends he’d “invented a new musical genre” while attending the Julie Hard School of Music* in Bloomington during the mid-1970s. He refused to say what this genre was out of a ludicrous overabundance of caution: Spumoni truly feared one of his fellow musicians might steal the idea and swipe the awaiting fortune he thought his rightful due.

Our hero didn’t get around to putting his plan into action until 1996 (hence the punning, advanced-age referencing stage name) when he got himself transferred from the Fur, Feathers ‘n’ Fun pet store he’d managed in Sanders, Indiana for over a decade to the shop’s Nashville branch to facilitate the launch of his new career as ‘Grand Dad Opry’. It was here that Spumoni finally began re-tooling popular arias for a country audience: Thus “Libiamo Ne’lieti Calici” became “One More Drink (No, Better Make That Ten),” “O Mio Babbino Caro” became “Dear Ol’ Daddy”, “Nessun Dorma” became “Ain’t No-One Gonna Sleep Tonight”, and so on and on. A large, round man in the tradition of male opera tenors, Spumoni wore formal tails augmented with rhinestones, a similarly decked out 10-gallon hat, and a bolo tie clasped by a locket hiding a picture of his mother.

He spent several years in Music City polishing his act. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to know. To make matters worse, he chose to self-release his music exclusively on Cassingle, calling them “the music delivery system of the future.” Perhaps if he’d been making Hastings Grimestep Glitch Techno, Spumoni might have garnered some hip cachet, but as it was (and, indeed, is), Cassingles were (and are) a thoroughly inefficient and very silly way of music sharing.

Finally, in the mid-teens, when he had all but given up on his dream, pretentious East Nashville art-school types in need of weirdo performers to fill out bills began indulging Spumoni. A cult act’s cult act, Grand Dad Opry was publicly lauded by none other than Ginger Minge of the notorious shock-folk due The Kunt and the Aids. With characteristic grace, Minge declared, onstage at DRKMTTR in Nashville, that anyone who didn’t like Spumoni’s show should be “forced to watch their own mother being sodomized and cannibalized by leprous stockbrokers, starting at the feet for both.”

And then, as Sondheim (again) would say, a funny thing happened.

A junior AT&T digital marketing executive, Michael Messerschmitt, was in town to see his girlfriend, who was performing as ‘Krystal Mess’ in an all-female The Kunt and the Aids tribute band cleverly named The Runt and the Raids.** He chanced to hear a cassette of Grand Dad Opry’s version of “Largo al Factotum”, re-titled “Here Come The Bossman”, playing over the East Room PA system. Sensing a kooky commercial hook, the adman sought Spumoni out via a mutual friend who runs The Sounds of Pestilence, one of the Nashville’s three animal embalming diorama stores. A licensing deal was arranged in short order. The ensuing series of online AT&T commercials featuring Grand Dad Opry’s music went viral, providing a balm to a pandemic, election year weary United States. Remarkably, the performances appealed to both audiences: opera buffs enjoyed slumming it and country music fans believed themselves elevated. This paved the way for a best-selling Lp compilation of his cassingles entitled Are You Sure Handle Done It This Way? (Thirty Tigers, 2020). Spumoni retired shortly after, a happy man, his vision realized.

It turns out that sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ones.

* Ms. Hard was soon legally forced to change the name of her school. She didn’t learn her lesson, however, and suffered a similar fate with her next conservatory, The ‘Berkley’ College of Music.

**Jesus, things had gotten very meta in this particular scene.

Novelty Act Solo Singer-Songwriters

Lefty Wrong

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.