"Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying": A story based on "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan, as suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman (39/100)

Let’s Go Shoot Her While She’s Crying

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Lyrics

Sarah Vaughan was an American Jazz singer from New Jersey. I don't know much about her--I know--vocal jazz never hooked me--but she seems like all the other extremely talented people in the jazz world who led a tragic life we were all charmed and horrified by. I read a long essay on Anita O'Day once, and she seemed to be the most sane out of all of them, and she was still batshit crazy. Still, that voice, those voices. Damn.

Dena Rash Guzman is the second in a trifecta of talented, cool-as-fuck knockouts to participate in OBCBYL this season. (Chloe Caldwell was the first, and Misti Rainwater-Lites is on deck in a couple weeks here.) Dena currently resides in Portland with her family and her dog. She's got a bunch of irons in a bunch of fires, so make sure you visit her at H.A.L. Literature (not music, but definitely rock & roll lit project out of Shanghai, for which Dena is the North American Managing Director) and Unshod Quills (an everywhere-all-the-time lit journal run by Dena). She's working on her manuscript(s), too. And she's a literary pin-up! That's it, I'm pulling a 1998 and telling people she's my internet girlfriend. Yell at her on Twitter and read everything she writes.

ALSO, in an OBCBYL first, Dena has also written a story about "Black Coffee." She did hers first, but I didn't read it until now, and it's pretty damn cool, so you should all hop over to Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee and check out Dena's story.
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Next week: a story based on "Parting Words" by Backwoods Payback, as suggested by musician Mike Cummings of Backwoods Payback.

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"Refund": A story based on "On To You" by The Constantines, as suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot (38/100)

Refund

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Lyrics

The Constantines are the most Canadian band ever other than The Weakerthans. They sort of remind me of Lucero when Lucero reminds me of The Replacements, so they pretty much kick ass. Steve Lambke has that Jawbreaker rasp in his voice and the songs are mighty tales of personal achievement/fuck-ups that never err on the side of sentimentality or whining. Features former members of the band Shoulder, who sometimes did err on the side of sentimentality, but still kicked plenty of ass.

Kevin J. Frank sings and plays guitar in Chicago's Haymarket Riot. In 2007, I saw the band in Dubuque, Iowa with Tornavalanche (same day I saw William Elliott Whitmore and met the girl I'd date fir the next couple of years). Personal attachment aside, they were really nice dudes and they kicked total ass. Their tunes are angular and frightening, the mood is as unstable and the beat is not. I don't know if this is the same Kevin J. Frank who played drums in Silvertide, but if it is, that's pretty cool too. (I liked that "Ain't Comin' Home" song!)

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Next week: A story based on "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan, as suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman.

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"B Sharp/C Flat": A story based on "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson (37/100)

B Sharp/C Flat

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Lyrics

Be Your Own Pet was a garage-rock band from Nashville, TN. They were around for about four or five years before breaking up. In that time they put out a string of EPs and two full lengths, all of it pretty much the most fun nihilism ever. They sing about riding bikes and fucking shit up, for fuck's sake. That's pretty cool. Jemina Pearl is the scariest dream girl ever.

Kevin Wilson, while not the scariest dream girl ever, is still a pretty dreamy artist from Tennessee. His debut story collection, 2009's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, is a combination of Rick Bass and Donald Barthelme's powerful absurdity. "Blowing Up on the Spot" is about a Scrabble factory, spontaneous combustion, a woman at a candy shop, and a pair of brothers--the youngest of which who won't stop trying to kill himself. More importantly, it's completely believable and endearing, the ways in which Wilson shows people at the end of their wits, and the situations we all know that come from being in such a position. He's got his first novel, The Family Fang, coming out this month, so pick it up. While you're waiting, check out some of the stories he's had published online. (I suggest “Blue-Suited Henchman, Kicked Into Shark Tank” over at SmokeLong Quarterly, who are awesome even if they've rejected me over a dozen times. Maybe that's why they're still awesome, actually.) (Also, looking through that list, I notice references to Lori Carlson, The Who, and others. KW was OBCBYL before there was OBCBYL. He's the Iggy Pop of lit. Sort of.) He blogs here.

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Next week: A story based on some song that's been suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot.

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Sittin' In: "We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed" by Melina Rutter, as based on the song "Failure" by Swans

I've been on and off for the past month or so, but I've got an excuse. A few of them, in fact.

1) I'm editing and contributing to a local zine. It's called ruix. Saying that ruix is a monthly zine by a collective of Dubuque musicians and artists who share the common goal of promoting and sustaining local music, art, and literature gets you close to an explanation. Saying that ruix is for those looking to capture and consider original sounds that are bent, but pure, gets you even closer. The collective behind ruix has not gathered by chance. Its brain—its brawn, too, for that matter—is borne from the natural forward motion of the arts community, the progeny of community and imagination. Everything is happening now.

If it's local and original, we want. No cover bands, no arts and crafts fairs, no bullshit. This project is consuming my life right now, editing all of the content in addition to writing original articles, show reviews, blurbs on new albums, and other odds and ends. If I've done any writing lately, it's been for ruix, which you can find on Facebook or on the plain ol' world wide web.

2) I'm in two bands, both of which are in the process of recording albums. My main project in which I play guitar and do vocals, Legal Fingers, spent most of last week recording the drum tracks for our debut sleaze rock album, No Time For Tenderness. (Featuring the hit single "(I Just Wanna Get All Right) Tonite!")In addition to that, we're breaking in a new vocalist who is talented as all get-out (and a hot chick, to boot). I'm teaching her the old ones when we're not at practice working on new songs for her to sing, and I've written four songs in the past five weeks that I hope will all make the cut when it comes around to throw her into the full-band mix. I also play bass in a street punk band called Bucket House Hooligans. I joined the band a couple months ago, and I'm still getting a handle on the tunes, which I'll be recording here shortly for the band's debut album, Dubuque (That's not me in the video).

3) I'm running a six week YA writing workshop. I've done this every summer for the past three or four years, for all the reasons anyone cites in doing something like this: teaching kids not to be dickheads who suck at writing is a good way to give something back and keep up on the basics myself, in the process learning something, teaching something, and being looked up to as a mentor. Warm fuzzy whatevers all over the place. But, as much as I love them all, it takes time to figure out what we're going to talk about, what and how I want to explain my comments on their written work, and the hour round-trip commute (and hour and a half spent in the actual workshop). They're great and it's satisfying, but I'm on week six of six here, and I'm getting to be glad my English degree has nothing to do with traditional education.

This is in addition to thirty three hours a week working as a janitor, between four and eight hours a week as a door-guy at some music bars in town, and still trying to do cool shit like meet Hacksaw Jim Duggan (and Terry Funk!) in Waterloo, Iowa. That said, I hope to get back in the OBCBYL game full-fledged once the workshop and recording process are both over. The zine is still taking a lot of time, but once we get used to deadlines and figure out the best ways to work alone and with each other, things will smooth out. Until then, here's one of my absolute favorite stories that's been sent in to me, Melina Rutter's "We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed."

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We Can’t Even Elegantly Bleed

We used to have to stand in rows while the nuns checked out our fingernails. There was a kid named Shane Braddock whose father was a miner in Wyoming, and his hands were clean, the cleanest. Every day we watched the nuns shine their approval all over him because of his clean, square-cut nails, his long, tanned hands. To us, it was the way he wore his jacket, too, the dark disconnection in his glance, the bump on his nose that made him look like he’d just come up from a fight. Their approval was endless, all-encompassing. It made everything about Shane Braddock enviable, no matter how amiss it was.

He saw his father only once that year, and when the time came around we knew, because he had his pockets full of gravel that he brought out in the yard, pointing at some near-invisible sparkling flecks. It was a warm, windy day, and we were all squinting and restless. “Gold,” he said. “It’s gold my father brought for me.”

The day Shane Braddock brought his so-called gold to school was the only day that year he was punished. When it came time for the inspection, his hands were smudged black, nails full of dirt. Some of us leaned forward in line to get a better look. “That gold is dirty stuff,” someone whispered and a few of us laughed.

But in truth we were undone that day. Shane Braddock with black hands, Shane after his once-a-year-father, Shane who had special rocks dug up from the earth, was more enviable than he’d been with the nuns’ approval all over him. We looked down at our own washed-quickly hands and saw our dishonor.

* * *

We were eleven that year and had stashes of shameful, beautiful things hidden wherever we could make them last longest. We’d stolen cigarettes from our older sisters, chewing tobacco from a cousin, small nips of whisky straight from the liquor cabinet, ink bottles from the counter at the art store, ten bucks from a drunk aunt’s wallet, the key to the basement, some poker chips, baseball cards, and always the magazines we weren’t supposed to know about, a few we’d found used in a dumpster behind someone’s building, and those we’d dug a hole for in the yard and buried. There was a girl on one page called Sweet Tooth Savannah and she was our chosen one, the girl we wanted most. She lay in a bathtub filled with licorice, her eyes sullen, breasts exposed, dark hair indistinguishable from all that candy. She had black licorice ropes wound between her fingers like snakes or jewelry.

* * *

We heard about the mine collapse on TV during dinner. We knew it was Shane Braddock’s father’s mine because one of our mothers took their dresses to Shane’s mother for alterations and it was certain, tragically, unbelievably; it was Shane’s father’s mine, yes.

Some of us were stupid enough to ask about gold.

The mine was called Freedom but it was a coalmine. A coalmine, and nine men were dead underground, their faces blackened like Shane Braddock’s hands the day he was punished.

We went to sleep feeling too full from our dinners, babyish, hemmed in. We wanted to climb out the window and run the seventeen blocks to where the Braddocks lived, near the train tracks and the highway, where we could sit in the warm, dusty night on the porch and share our sleeplessness. Instead we turned over and over in our beds, unsure of what we had lost.

* * *

Shane was not in school the next day and we circled his empty spaces hungrily, in packs. The closer we imagined ourselves into his life, the more adequate we became. We took turns collecting his schoolwork for him, hoping to bring it by his house ourselves, but it was always collected by some adult or another—“the neighborhood pulls together in times like these,” was how one of our mothers put it. After some weeks it became clear to us that Shane would not return. We were told the mother couldn’t afford the city anymore, much less the school, and had moved Shane and his two younger sisters back to Wyoming.

Years later, we’d still be in the old neighborhood, just blocks from the classroom where we were made to stand in rows, compare ourselves against each other. We hadn’t seen the Badlands, the Rockies, the Snake River. We knew there were Indians who lived on all this land farther back than we cared to envision, and we’d have told our well-schooled kids about their battles and horses and visions without ever having met one.

We saw Shane Braddock one day, coming down long and loose from the elevated tracks; we knew that look of his even with twenty-five years piled on it. He was more torn up than we were, pinched, lined, underfed. He rolled a cigarette as he walked. He moved outside of the city-rhythm, any native could see that. He was there, coming down the stairs, then stopping to look far down 125th street, and then he was almost gone, his back to us, moving into the crowd.

He had gone down with his father in some pit unknown to us, he had left us, his stolen pocket money, his Sweet Tooth Savannah, who was his as much as ours; he had faded into some margin of half-existence. “Gold my father brought me,” he had said, and we could laugh for days.

But there were our washed-quickly hands, again, and there was the certainty that it was we who had given in, we who had been tricked, strung along, and we watched him go—quick in his old canvas shoes, his cuffs falling past his fingertips—again.

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Lyrics

Swans are a band led by Michael Gira. Imagine the pants-shittingly downtrodden and tortured you've ever felt in your entire life. That's what listening to Swans is like. They're probably the best band I can hardly bring myself to listen to sometimes.

Melina Rutter is a slender girl in Germany who writes awesome stuff at bark (a culture, literature, and art blog) and her own personal blog, Invisible Adventure. She likes tattoos and good tunes. Born on Earth, dead on the moon.

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Next week: A story based on "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson. (For real this time, hopefully.)

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"A Priest and a Rabbi Walk Into a Car Crash": A story based on "Love" by John Coltrane, as suggested by musician Steve Marion of Delicate Steve 36/100

A Priest and a Rabbi Walk Into a Car Crash

When Father Garrison and Rabbi Kohn both stepped onto the accident scene at the same time, they were surprised to see each other, as though they'd walked not into chaos, but into the set-up for a joke. The cars had collided at their front corners and then slid around each other in such a way that their tail ends touched, like two people in the beginning stage of duel. Garrison and Kohn each had their instincts: the Father to the knocked-out mother and crying child in the station wagon and the Rabbi to the nervous and harrowed teen in the Saab. They thought nothing more or less of each other for this, and in the odd spaces that appear in times of disorder, were thankful for the efficiency of their reactions.

They'd met a few times before in passing, at interfaith events or conferences. After the accident, realizing their previous appointments were as good as cancelled, they decided to go to a nearby café and discuss the accident. Neither mentioned the ways in which they followed another instinct, to bond over grief and reflect on what is gained when nothing is lost.

* * *

Earlier in the day, before the accident and the café, a woman had come into the church and done a tarot reading for Father Garrison. He was in the confessional finishing up with one member of the congregation when the door opened and then immediately closed again.

“Touch the cards,” the voice said.

Father Garrison reached up and placed the tips of his fingers on the cards and then leaned over top of them to peer through the screen. A dark figure, like everyone else on the other side.

“These things usually start off with something along the lines of ‘forgive me father, for I have sinned’ and not a request to touch a deck of cards.” He had become more serious in these later years, for the first time feeling as if he were forced into the priesthood by his family and then, after time, by convenience.

The figure on the other side of the screen was still, but Father Garrison could hear shuffling and, on the small shelf reserved for the folded hands of kneeling confessors, the laying down of five cards. He sat back in his chair, curious.

* * *

Father Garrison came over to the table and lightly placed two cups of tea in front of him. “Rabbi Kohn, do you know much about tarot cards?”

“Is that what the disco singer says she’ll do on those late night infomercials?”

“Not exactly. A woman came in today for confessional and mentioned something about them.”

Rabbi Kohn nodded, but was obviously thinking about something else, already having passed off the situation as a non-sequitur, a way to not talk about the accident.

Father Garrison’s card in the first position was the Knight of Wands. “The horse is riding through the desert,” the figure said. “Constant movement is necessary so you are not burned on the hot sands. If you stop, you burn.” Her voice wasn’t that of an old crone or a young gypsy. She was as worn out and non-descript as a news anchor or a waitress in a big town. “The horse is moving to the left, the path of non-traditional thought.”

“Miss, this is an obvious fabrication, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to make a mockery of my life as I’ve lived it for our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” Father Garrison’s tone was level and stern, but he didn’t even bother to lean forward, a defeated edge in him that made the woman continue, unabated.

“Your card in the second position is what you cannot see: the Hierophant. You may be feeling a lack of respect for ceremony and the law, perhaps doubting your knowledge of tradition.” She drew for him the Ten of Cups in the third position, showing that he is able to do away with what he’s comfortable with. Then the Two of Swords in the fourth position, his inability to change intuition or rely on other senses, blind in his situation but unafraid and, in fact, centered.

Father Garrison moved his head from against the wall and took a slight glance through the screen. He quietly asked if they were finished, but he was ignored again. “Your last card in the last position is your overall outcome. The Fool.”

“Wait just a damn minute,” Father Garrison burst out under his breath. He did not realize until a long lull in conversation with Rabbi Kohn later on that he had swore in the house of the Lord.

“Now now, Father,” the figure said, for the first time sounding as if she were deviating from a script. “The Fool in the final position it not bad. Look forward to a new beginning of simplicity. A fresh start with a straightforward heart.”

Father Garrison stood up and then sat back down when the woman said, “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

* * *

“Do you remember why you became a rabbi?” Father Garrison asked Rabbi Kohn.

“Ah, boychick, what a heavy question!”

“I used to think so myself, but . . .”

“But?”

“But now I don’t.”

“Well, I mean, I had a good education as a young Jew in the Midwest, that was a good start. I learned early on that the Jewish peoples have a rich history, one of sorrow and longing and, above all, hope. I just wanted to learn and teach, be burrowed in so deep to that one thing that it surpasses faith and become knowledge.”

And like that it became quiet, God as uncomplicated and sensible an intangibility as love itself. Father Garrison sat back slowly and thought of the baby crying in the backseat of the car, pieces of the windshield shining like heaven in her hair.

**********

John Coltrane was a jazz musician who pretty much ruled. He made a tenor sax sound heavier than any metal band. He died of liver cancer at the age of 40. He also did a shitload of drugs and was sainted by the African Orthodox Church in 1982.

Steve Marion is the main creative force behind the band Delicate Steve. He likes doing yoga, which I tried to do once, but stopped after finding out it's more breathing exercises than Tae-bo. The new Delicate Steve album Wondervisions is cohesive not despite of its wandering, psych-melodies and soundscapes, but because of them. You can buy it here.

"Butterfly" from Wondervisions

"The Ballad of Speck and Pebble" from Wondervisions

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"Over, Easy": A story based on "Buriedfed" by Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, as suggested by writer Chloe Caldwell (35/100)

Over, Easy

In the gas station by the river, there’s a guy who works third shift and sees more dead people than most other folks do. The dead ones come in to buy Marlboros or a Pepsi from the soda fountain and they never want a receipt. It’s not fair to say that they’re alive when they come in, but obviously they’re not as dead as when they jump, gainers and swans and belly-flops from a few hundred feet up. Almost all of them do it into the water, but every once in awhile there’s someone who goes off into the rocks like a lawn dart and, then, at the bottom, like a Slinky.

The trend was comparable to layering Day-Glo socks or buying Spin Doctors albums. Embarrassing, but, hey, there it is, a good idea at the time. They found a guy at the top of the bridge who had gotten so drunk he passed out and choked on his own vomit. The clerk sold him the vodka a few hours earlier. Suicide hotlines say not to take any threat of self-harm lightly, but what was there to say? The clerk told him not to do it and the guy said, “Don’t you think I thought about that already?” They answer all questions with questions. That’s what answers have become at that point: more questions.

The next ones almost happened. Some guy shot his wife and felt terrible enough about it to tell everything to the random clerk, who would have recognized the wife as the woman who came in looking like a jumper, but ended up bailing on the plan after buying a bag of generic barbeque chips, eating half of them at the top of the bridge, and then walking home. It doesn’t matter what the clerk asked him, but here’s what the guy said back: Shouldn’t my aim be better? More questions. He bought a hot dog off the roller and started heading up the hill, where the cops cut him off about halfway up. He told them he didn’t care what happened and then he set his hot dog on the ground, kept calling to it like it was a real dog. “Not much for fetch. But stay? Hot damn.” The clerk got the confession and the police got the apathy. It’s how the Midwest works.

They took him to the jail before he could jump. His wife came to see him when she got out of the hospital. She was dirtier than he was and even more unimpressed with his aim. “Way to blow it, William Tell. All I wanted was to die.”

He said, “Didn’t William Tell hit his target?”

“Can’t I just die already?” she asked a guard at the jail. The guard gave a straight answer like the living are known to do, and told her, “No.”

The jumps petered out after a dozen more, but nobody really felt better. It just didn’t seem like a viable option to anyone anymore. The clerk was especially confused. All those last meals of Fun Dip and Funyuns. He began going home each night and eating baked potatoes slathered in butter with dollops of sour cream speckled considerably with salt and pepper. He grilled thick rib-eye steaks and New York strips and put bacon on almost everything, zested citrus fruit on everything else. It was so easy to do that one thing right, to lie down in a casket with your gut heavier than gravity.

Some girl came in sometime near the end of everything and bought a Whatchamacallit and a yo-yo. “Know any tricks?” the clerk asked her, pointing to the yo-yo, a Duncan Imperial Butterfly that had been sitting on the shelf for years.

Her eyes were puffy and red from crying and her cheekbone was swollen on the right side of her face. She had a hairline fracture around the base of her eye-socket. The doctor asked her where it hurt earlier on in the day and she pointed to her heart and said here. “Why would I buy a yo-yo at a gas station if I already knew enough about them to do tricks?” She dumped her change into the penny tray and walked out the door, winding the yo-yo tight with the smell of juniper and chocolate buzzing off her tongue.

**********

Lyrics

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson is some dude from the Pacific Northwest who gets really fucked up and sings songs about how he gets really fucked up. He's apparently had a tough life, but I don't know the guy. I hope he's doing all right. He's got a couple albums out, with his eponymous debut being produced by some dude from Grizzly Bear (who, despite being a big deal to a lot of people I think are dickheads, are actually really awesome). He put out his second album in 2009, entitled Summer of Fear. It came out on Saddle Creek Records, the messageboard of which my friend Toots used to hang out on and argue about Bright Eyes with other girls in their mid-teens, providing yet another reason for me to seriously consider no longer being her friend.

Chloe Caldwell, much like a John Cheever story, is from a small town in upstate New York. Her musical crush is Will Sheff of Okkervil River. Her writing is often hyper-sexual and intense, and, if I can say so myself, she's quite the emotional little firecracker. Her first book, the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray, will be released in the spring of next year by Future Tense Books. In the meantime, you can keep up with her at her website and her weekly "Love & Music" column at The Faster Times. She ran the site Sleep.Snort.Fuck. where I had an essay accepted for publication around the time things fell apart over there. The archives are still up, though, so get reading. Chloe was really nice when I wrote to her, so I'm glad it wasn't in person, because girls make me nervous and I most likely wouldn't have had access to a chemistry notebook with which to cover up my unsightly erection. In our correspondence, I had to go back and delete the "DeVille" I kept compulsively writing after the "CC" I used to address her.

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"A Painting of a Woman On a Motorcycle": A story based on "Shimmering Rain" by Gideon Smith & the Dixie Damned, as suggested by Gideon Smith (34/100)

A Painting of a Woman on a Motorcycle

After three days of non-stop rain, a man showed up at my door trying to sell me a painting of a woman on a motorcycle. The painting was wrapped in a thick piece of clear plastic like an oversized sandwich bag. I could just make out the blues of the sky and the grays of the road.

The man himself stood no taller than five feet. His face was swollen to bursting, like a glove filled with turkey and dressing. He was balding, his head like an egg in a hula skirt, and for the first few minutes I was distracted by it, the way the rain sat there as if his skin had recently been sealed with wax. When I invited him in, he removed his jacket and gave it a shake above the rug he was standing on.

He was nervous and said little. After he finally rubbed the water from the top of his head, he repeated the act several more times as a matter of habit, looking around my sparsely decorated living room as if he were considering renting the place. I could understand why he felt sheepish and was unable to conceal it. There was only a couch and a folding chair to sit on. In the corner were two broken televisions stacked on top of one another. I unwrapped the painting and examined it in the light before propping it up against the televisions. I know nothing of art but everything of looking at something slowly. The woman’s eyes were slightly crossed and there was a lake in the background, far enough off that it was almost lost, a single swipe of the brush. I owned no other art at the time and hadn’t even really hung up anything on my walls since the centerfolds of my youth.

I paid a meager sum for the painting and sent the man on his way, both of us content. My head was burning, but not in any way I could help with medicine or rest. The woman on the motorcycle had never felt frustration. I could tell. It wasn’t the freedom of the road, the biker clichés. It was the way her knuckles, white at their centers, wrapped around the handles with the satisfaction of revenge. But her eyes! There was not the silence of precision. One eye refused to follow the other directly and the resulting clash made her face a mass of harsh, beautiful noise. I fell asleep in the folding chair that night wondering how heavy her love could be.

The man showed up again a few days later. It was still raining and we went through the same procedure as last time, he acted no less awkward and embarrassed for my living situation. By then I had started recreating the painting on the longest wall of my living room. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. He needed the painting back. Apparently, there had been a misunderstanding. I made it clear that I didn’t comprehend, but that was all he said. Surely he didn’t work for a company selling individual paintings door to door. I was sure he’d sold the painting in haste, a painting that belonged to either him or someone he was momentarily upset with, and he was then trying to undo what he had done out of dissatisfaction.

I told him no. He didn’t beg or attempt to explain his situation. But he didn’t leave. I asked him if he’d like to help me finish the painting on the wall. At first he declined and said he’d watch me paint instead, but eventually he made his way over and began painting a tree in the far off corner. “I watched Bob Ross,” he said. “When I was younger.” I nodded and told him that he was doing good but that he must keep consulting the original. We painted through the night, the rhythms of the rain against the windows lulling our brushes into a sort of fluidity. In the morning we were finished and as I stood back to look at the finished product, I noticed that I had made her mouth open, not in a smile, but in a laugh. In the original it was closed. I looked at the pudgy salesman and told him to mix up white and blue with a drop of black. “Like this,” I said, dipping my pinky finger into the mixture and setting it down lightly on the wall, lifting up into a wisp on top of the dot. The rain came down on her like a marching band. Oh, how little she cared.

**********

[No Video]

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Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned is a band from North Carolina, also known as "Horsemen Country" in the world of professional wrestling. Somewhere between the Allman Brothers and mid-period Corrosion of Conformity is Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned, vocals and riffs both grizzled and authentic, unable to be spoken about without using the word "swagger."

Gideon Smith is the leading force behind Gideon Smith and the Dixie Damned. Not only is he a musician, but he's a writer, too, having released the book Way of the Outlaw Spirit. He's also done spoken word and poetry in the vein of a shamanistic southern gothic troubadour (so basically, he's badass across all mediums). From my personal dealings with him to everything I've read about him, Gideon is the coolest, most positive dude in the world. Rock and roll need more guys like him. Everything needs more guys like him. If he's ever in Southwest Wisconsin, I'll buy him a burger and let him crash on my couch. Buy his music through Small Stone Records here.

(I'd like to extend a special thanks to Scott from Small Stone Recordings for hooking Gideon up with this project. He runs a great label with some of the best heavy rock there's ever been. Without a lot of the bands on Small Stone, I wouldn't play the music I play or listen to the music I listen to. Thanks for everything, Scott.)

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Next week: Still gathering responses from musicians and writers. Stay tuned.

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