Category: Band

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.

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.

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.

In the 1970s and 80s, there was, of course, no such thing as ‘Americana.’ There was, however, ‘Southern Fried Rock’. Pretty much any small town south or west of Massachusetts was host to six or more pedestrian bar bands specializing in humorless, unswinging Lynyrd Skynyrd/Marshall Tucker Band/Allman Brothers covers, which, if an audience was drunk enough, didn’t sound enough not like the originals to pass. Bocephus Junior was one such group.

Formed in part for the purpose of hanging out and pounding brewskis in guitarist Jody Stout’s basement while nominally rehearsing, these high-school seniors at least partially made up for a lack of imagination and chops with a winning lack of pretence and sense of fun; their parents and girlfriends were supportive and all was good.

Typical of most other high-school bands, expressions of hitting the big time, the designing of band logos, and the naming future albums featured as prominently during their rehearsals as did the actual playing of music. Per the fashion at the time, all four members wore longish hair parted down the middle, which they covered with baseball caps adorned with sports teams or the trademarks of local businesses, worn unironically. Don and Jody could even lay claim to moustaches, however wispy. Eric sometimes sported a blue F.F.A (Future Farmers of America) jacket with its distinctive gold stitched emblem on the back. (His friends would make fun of this look, calling Eric a ‘Future Fuckhead of America’.) Boot cut or flared Levis, black t-shirts obtained like trophies of war at deafening concerts in Columbus and Cleveland emblazoned with the iconography of various hard rock bands, and tennis shoes of different shades completed the outfit.

They’d been playing for several months and even notched a few afternoon gigs under their belts at indulgent downtown Monticello, Ohio bars when an opportunity arose to play at the band’s high-school talent show. It was a high-profile show locally: the high school administration and staff, the school board, and other Monticello grandees would be present, not to mention all of their high-school buddies. So the band was especially conscious that putting on a good show would be important. Agreeing that Lynyrd Skynyd’s anthem ‘Free Bird’ was exactly the showpiece with which they could regale a 900-strong Ludlowe Theater audience, Bocephus Junior woodshedded harder than they’d ever done. They were proud of the results, which were, to be fair, at least credible.

The band would be one of the last acts to perform, so it was going to be a long night. Backstage jitters were calmed with a large bottle of MD 20/20 White Label (gulped surreptitiously in the alleyway behind the Ludlowe) and general joshing around. Among a variety show-style bill, Bocephus Junior was the only band to play that night and an air of aloof cool, along with the Mad Dog, coursed through their bodies.

Then came the unexpected, potentially catastrophic news that the three-hour show was running late.

An entertainment licence lasting till only 10pm broached the very real possibility that the band’s very spot on the bill was in jeopardy. This was a fate they’d never even considered. Shortly, performers were being asked to truncate their acts. Bocephus Junior was told they’d have to edit out the entire extended jam section of ‘Free Bird’.

“That’s total bullcrap, man,” Mannfred said angrily to Mrs. Potts, the MHS science teacher and stage manager for the evening.

“Any more talk like that,” replied Potts firmly, “and you’ll be out of the show altogether.”

The band was not happy. Two months of honing their performance to perfection down the toilet because of some half-assed magician, a Benny Hill impersonator, and whoever the hell else it was in the first act that couldn’t watch a clock.

Drastic measures were called for. A quick huddle led to a significant change of plans and fifteen minutes later, with the courage that comes with shooting a bottle of fruity 18% ABV fortified wine, Bocephus Junior hit the stage like they were expecting to be hit back.

“ARE YOU READY FOR A BJ?” yelled Stout into his mic, then pausing for dramatic effect. “BOCEPHUS JUNIOR, GEDDIT?”

The crowd gasped. Educators shifted nervously in their seats, while the teenagers, mouths agape, laughed and whooped.

“We gonna do an old song for y’all!” Stout carried on, only slightly less shouty. “It goes a lil’ somethin’ like this!”

And with that, he and Weissman launched into a scatological version of Dan Emmett’s ‘Ol’ Dan Tucker’ that they’d composed together in grade school when Weissman played the author of ‘Dixie’ in a school play called ‘Dan Emmett As a Boy’. 

As the song concluded, Mannfred and Mount kicked over the drum kit for good measure.

Pandemonium ensued.

The younger half of the crowd was literally going wild, racing up and down the aisles shrieking, while teachers and parents chased after them in vain. Mount boomed, “ROCK AND ROLL!” into the microphone as the band strode off the stage, heedless to the mayhem they’d caused.

Obviously, a price would have to be paid for their recklessness and sure enough, all four members of Bocephus Junior were suspended from school for three weeks and told they were lucky not to be expelled. In addition, rock groups were forever banned from the school’s talent show. It was just the kind of outlaw comeuppance upon which legends are based.

Despite the publicity, Bocephus Junior really weren’t good or interesting enough at that stage to parlay the notoriety into any kind of meaningful career momentum and broke up without fanfare shortly after graduation. Later, Mannfred, Stout, and Weissman formed a regionally popular hardcore punk band called StröhBraü while attending the Ohio State University, releasing a 4-song ep on Whatever Records called Last Train to Shitsville (1986).

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.