I'm a native of Jackson, Mississippi and I've been playing guitar for 23 or so years. The songwriting has been a vice for almost as long.
The first band I was ever in never had a name, a show or even a practice. I recall it was an unwieldy would-be conglomeration of two bassists, a keyboardist, three guitarists, a front man and junior high school hormones. We broke up because of artistic differences.
The first serious attempt was a group called Local Concern, a death-punk outfit performing in empty classrooms on the Starkville campus of Mississippi State University. around '87. I played drums (a snare, a couple of toms and a beat-up old cymbal borrowed from a friend and thoroughly abused), while Andy DiMichelle played guitar and bass, Philip Reynolds played guitar and Matt Schultz made his short-lived vocalist debut. I think we played one show; my cymbal fell over. We broke up because spring semester was over.
Then Matt bought a bass and we started tackling some tunes together, smoking dope and strumming guitars in dorm rooms. Matt came up with the excellent name Feet Of Clay and we basically played warm beer odes and assumed an artistic stance on dormitory balconies while attempting to play the odd party here and there. Steve MacDonell also played guitar during that period, while another dorm mate named Craig Smith played drums for a while.
Matt and I both dropped out of school by mid-'88 and got an apartment in Jackson, where we hooked up with Corey Ray, who was playng drums at the time before moving onto vox with Fling Hammer. More beer, a marginally better sound and a show at WC Don's and it was almost decent. FOC broke up when the lease ran out.
It gets foggy here.... lots of drinking. At some point Andy DiMichelle moved to Jackson and we started playing experimental acoustics together with David Wright (no relation) and Jeff Hemphill, both on hand percussion, under the name Old Vulgar French, another great name. No club dates but lots of interesting tape recordings. I can't even recall why that ended, but probably because most of us were too drunk to play or just plain uninterested.
Somehow I managed to get my hands on a bass -- I guess we're talking late 80's/early 90's now (either/or) -- and started playing with Corey Ray again on drums and his roomie Morris Mitchell in a grungy three-piece band called The Watchmen. As they actually had a damn clue about getting club gigs, we played several in Jackson, Hattiesburg and even Pensacola (my very first interstate road gig!) We were using equipment that was bought for them by some rich kid for another of their bands, and eventually that kid needed his money back for the gear. Right around that time Morris and Corey put Fling Hammer together and got very busy -- they kicked lots of ass.
Me, I was back in school and getting into the news business by this point, but continued to play solo acoustic guitar and writing songs and recording lo-fi. The biz took me to Atlanta, where I moved in with a guy named Judson Henry in '94. He played guitar and wrote songs too. We started practicing with bassist Dave Siff and harmonica/horn player Jon Hill under the name Cousin Hattiesburg -- very acoustic kind of stuff, with some lean toward the alt-country genre. Very much a living-room drunk party kind of arrangement that was more fun than I'd ever really had with music.
We didn't so much break as dissipate and morph into another band, whose nucleus was myself, Judson and our friend Faith Kleppinger, who was just learning her guitar and vocal chops at the time. We planned to record an album, a three-way split on songwriting credentials, as Little Bobby Taylors. We went to Neil Fried's Chelsea Studios on Judson's dime and recorded "What Y'all Got Going On In There...A Carnival?" in 1997. There were quite a few club dates and high hopes that were dashed with the dosage. I quit the band amid an ongoing drunken row with my fellow songwriters.
Over a couple of years of continued drunkenness and songwriting, I eventually began collaborating with Neil Fried, donning his songwriter's hat, and started recording demos at his Arlyn Worth studio with Clark Vreeland on bass and his nephew Eric Reed on drums as The Racket around 2001. Those are certainly my favorite recordings but I don't think we ever played live shows as an electric act [editor's note - we did play a couple of live shows! I don't know why I thought otherwise, blame the medication]. Eric moved away to NYC and the remaining three most recently played live shows as Acoustic Racket, eschewing percussion and inviting a young violinist named Kim Twarog to join. That was active around 2004-5, doing a couple of coffeehouse gigs until I moved back to Mississippi, June 2005.
And so here I sit, gulping my coffee and recording my tunes through the wonders of Garageband in the Republic of Crossgates. As of this writing in September 2006, I'm working on a live solo set and hoping to gig around at some point by the top of the year -- I'm in no rush. In the meantime I pay the rent and serve the viewers as a morning news producer at a Jackson TV station.
