ROX-TV takes a look at old time sound coming back across the heartland in a new way
Welcome back to the ROX-TV website. As always, we are glad to have you aboard tonight no matter where you come from or what you’re all about. I like to think of this site as a gateway into discovering something new from time to time, even if it’s not exactly new so to speak. Over the last few years, I’ve been running into music that harkens back to a time long forgotten by most. A time in America when the Jug Bands played, and the sounds were the craze. A place where electric guitars hadn’t been born yet and radio was mostly a dream.
It seems like with every new year, there is more and more people drifting back into that old time sound and I’m pretty excited about it. I will be the first to admit that I’m not an expert but what I can speak to is the songs and videos I have been “discovering” on YouTube in recent times. Music is an interesting thing, and it seems to have a mind of its own, popping up with new takes on old sounds, and old sounds influencing a new “school” of artists who are returning to the lost art of that Jug Band sound, with odd instruments.
I personally didn’t start out with too much of a working knowledge as far as the bands or history was concerned. To be honest, my first real insight didn’t even come from Jug Bands at all. I guess my first dip into the rabbit hole came in the form of “crust punk” (folk punk) and I ran into it sometime around the mid 2010’s (just typing that sounds weird), possibly near 2015ish? My first take on these bands were that they sounded like they were from another era, if that makes sense.
I’ve been around campfires and heard acoustic heroes going back as far as the late 1990’s, but they always seemed to be “covering” modern songs or at the very least, late sixties rock tunes. Some people could pull it off like my friend Ryan and others were near misses. Ryan was and still is a talented guitarist. We would sit around the campfire or even in a living room with the gang and get drunk. Ryan would start itching to break out that guitar as soon as he got a glow about him, and we’d shut off the CD player and let him do his thing.
We used to sing along to old David Bowie and Rolling Stone numbers, a little Velvet Underground…basically whatever we were digging on that night. Even if we didn’t know all the words or Ryan didn’t know every chord, we still made it work, blazing into the night with forty ouncers and a cigarette. All though it sounds simple enough, they were some of my favorite times of young adult hood. Like I said, other than Ryan, every now and again you’d bop into a guy trying to do the same thing at a party, although it usually was nowhere near as good as my friend’s sound.
So, I was aware of the guitar and that it didn’t have to be electric to sound good. That much I had down. I was hip to the campfire scene, but that was where the line was basically drawn. I didn’t look for it and didn’t much care, but that would change with the first video I watched by a “modern” street band. It was a song by the Rail Yard Ghosts (from what I gather was or is a loose knit group of folk punk musicians aka crust punkers, some hailing from Minnesota) and was called “Dirty Kid Rag”. It was uploaded in 2015 and to date has almost 2 million views on YouTube. Not bad for some street kids or whatever they like to be known as, playing on the corner of a busy city street.
I enjoyed the sound and knew just enough to know that it wasn’t new at all. But again, that was about all I could say. I had seen some footage of turn of the century Jug Bands in clips on random music documentaries and had heard small audio clips, but it had never dawned on me to get into the trenches and see what was going on. It was exciting to know that this music form was happening again with modern artists, and I slowly began to drift into it.
Not as an expert but probably better defined as a tourist of sorts. Like with many things in my life that I enjoy, I seldom live in that one place and time for long, I dig visits, and then I’m off into some other area of interest. I usually eventually return and if you could graph my life on a big enough timeline, I’m sure it would be very easy to see how my mind words. My life is like a giant Merry-Go-Round or like the wheel on Wheel of Fortune. All of my interests are on the wheel and my mind is the pointer. When the wheel stops, I’m back into that interest again.
From the Rail Yard Ghosts, I walked away with a new category on the wheel, and so I kept an eye out when smoking dope and watching videos late at night. I believe the next band in succession was a group called Days N Daze (founded in 2008 by Whitney Flynn and Jesse Sendejas) hailing from Texas. The song was called “Call in the Coroner” and was really interesting. The video was simple but effective and the sound, with the trumpet, guitar, standup bass, and wash board were amazing. They were thrashing an old, abandoned motel in Turbeville, South Carolina and I thought the sound kicked ass (1.7 million views to date, uploaded in 2015).
So here was this certain style of street music, folk punk, crust punk, whatever the hell you want to call it and they got these broke kids, some appear homeless (but not all the time), basically existing on the street. Whether they actually all are is probably debated somewhere but I don’t care about that. The thing I thought was amazing was that the kinds of numbers they were receiving on YouTube, playing with wash boards and shouting on the side of the road. People were paying attention and so was I.
From Days N Daze, I found the movie by a man I would eventually be proud to call a friend, Zoran Maslic (Director and creator of “Annoying” which was a docmusical). I found a trailer for the documentary which featured the song “My Lesson“. This trailer shattered my world in terms of expectations, raw imagery of life on the street, addiction, and of course my favorite drug, music. The trailer was uploaded in 2015 as well, I guess I found the medium at just the correct time. New shit was coming out heavy and from everywhere. I was stoned and enthralled.
The crazy thing was that six years later, when I started writing for ROX-TV in 2021, I reached out to the creator and amazing artist Zoran Maslic for an interview. I had been so moved by his creation, that I was still humming on it six years later. I figured it was a wish, but Zoran wrote me back a few days later. I explained to him about what I was hoping to do and talk to him about and he agreed. It was electric, to reach out across the world and touch this thing that had captivated me, and the interview was magic.
I got hooked into the music of Annoying (Chad Fontaine and Grant Faithful) and although it was similar to the other bands I’ve mentioned they were more raw and certainly living closer to the edge. No one can deny that, or at least a reasonable person couldn’t after viewing footage of them. Sadly, Chad Fontaine didn’t make it (RIP 2016). When I spoke with Zoran about the name “crust punk” and if it would endure, he believed that “folk punk” would continue because of bands like Days N Daze that had already secured that footing in history.
“If you listen to folk-punk, you will realize it is a continuation of an old and great tradition. In a way, Woody Guthrie is their great grandfather. In a way, it is Americana with a hangover”.
“Folk-punk is an exciting genre in modern music. First of all, it is spontaneous. It grew out of the soil without any “genetic engineering” of record companies. It is organic. That is a big quality in the world that is becoming fake. They will often sing about train-hopping, drugs, troubles of life of a drifter, etc. Not all of their themes are Americana. But in their songs, you will find things that were fundamental for American culture and which the rest of the world loved about it. It is the idea of wide-open space and freedom. That cowboy that rides into the sunset is still somehow there. Well, this is at least how I see it. In the beginning, I was not too fond of lots of folk punk. I thought Jessee Stewart’s singing was forced, but I love it now. My music ears formed in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. I am an older generation, and my ears needed adjusting”.
“Chad didn’t see his music as folk-punk. I used that term in connection with him because many people saw him in that way. I thought that some songs like Outta Town and Carry On sounded folk-punkish”.
-Zoran Maslic (excerpt taken from ROX-TV interview March 11th, 2021)
From Annoying, I continued to listen to Chad Fontaine’s “Duct Tape Rose” (Zoran recorded the album) while waiting for the next comet in the genre. As I floated around, other bands continued to pop up and others were just waiting for me to find. A great example of this modern hybrid old time band folk type thing was a group called Steve’n’Seagulls who were Finnish. They did a remake of “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC and again I was fucking blown away (137,145,170 views to date on YouTube) (yes that’s almost one hundred and forty million views by some guys in the backyard!). To put up numbers like that using only the instruments in your hand, the backyard, and your musical talents is beyond words.
Record companies used to go mad for a hit record, I wonder what they would consider those kind of views to be? Then again, how could the industry harness this re-surgence of an old Americana form of music? Or better yet market it? As far as I’m concerned, the industry has been blind and dog shit since before the fall of MTV and the Radio. I hope the artist continue to hold onto their rights and any money they can make. The toxic plague of the record industry and the pathetic and terrible products we’ve been sold for so long have earned the industry as a whole, a proper fuck you from everyday people who enjoy music.
The revolution may have started with cassette tape copies, moved onto burned CD’s from Napster or whatever it was called, although the industry slowly fights to reclaim monies lost. Only time will tell where that all goes, but the machine is crafty, and it will be a cat and mouse game probably forever. Oh well, on with the story…
I think I was talking about Jug Bands and old-time music re-rediscovered. So, I will work back that way. My interest in the new age of old music has led me to find some real gems. The Memphis Jug Band is one in particular that reaches across time to me in the present day. The Memphis Jug Band was an American music group that was active from the mid 1920’s to the late 1950’s. As the story goes, somewhere around 1926, African Americans in the Memphis area started to group around a one-man army of talents, Will Shade. The man also was known by some as Sun Brimmer. The roster for the group varied, sometimes daily according to the information I can find online.
Will Shade was born on February 5th, 1898 and passed away on September 18th, 1966. It is reported that the name Sun/Son Brimmer was given by his grandma Annie Brimmer (apparently the son was short for grandson). Will’s mother was the one who taught him how to play his first instrument…the harmonica. In 1925, Will heard jug music for what was believed to be the first time, although who can ever really know that. The result was, regardless, by 1926 he had recruited some musicians to join his Jug Band, one of the first ever in Memphis. Members included Lionhouse, who became a jug blower, Tee Wee Blackman on guitar, and Ben Ramey on the timeless Kazoo.
The group in various configurations recorded eighty songs between 1927 and 1934 before the sound became less in demand. In 1966, the Grateful Dead covered the group’s 1928 song “Stealin Stealin” for their first single, or so the story goes. The Memphis Jug Band is credited with influencing countless other musicians and although the electric sound would eventually overshadow them and their contributions, people who know…know.
To me, knowing that history helps me understand the trends of today, although I’m afraid a lot of people don’t value history these days. We must preserve the past and the present, if we want any hope of knowing what the future will hold. If we don’t, I’m afraid we will wander blind forever and it doesn’t have to be that way. And besides, since everything that came before does influence the present, who knows, you will probably find slivers of the things you love today, I certainly did. I’m almost out of room, so I will wrap it up by saying thanks for spending a few minutes with us today. Keep coming back, we drift hard, so there will always be something for someone here. Until next time, take care…
Signing Off,
Mike Shepard
ROX-TV Head Writer
shepard2909@hotmail.com
