Back in the day, I didn’t get into Townes Van Zandt
a whole lot, because of the too hip know-it-all shineface types that was hyping
him to me through the smoke and blurs. Contrarianism will deny you some good
shit sometimes. Luckily for myself, I came around, and though shitty Townes Van
Zandt is really shitty (which is to be expected of artists steeped in addiction
tbh), the good TVZ is some of the most solid psychic shit. “Mr. Mudd and Mr.
Gold” for example has manifested in my life into an entire outlaw jack of
diamonds philosophy.
Wino I never didn’t get into but I did overlook
for a while, because his dirtweed metalhead stage of public greatness (albeit
along the margins… always choose marginalization as my man T-2 Billion said)
came later than my retirement from teen dirtweed metalhead and I had moved onto
whatever I was onto next in my stumbling path of personal growth from white
trash to dirtgod. But Wino has never not been great to some extent (despite
being steeped in addiction).
Many metalheads and punks when aging go the acoustic
route as an artistic contrarian act, and much of it is super-pretentious and
unnecessary. It’s basically “hahaha this guy used to scream about crazy shit
and now he’s singing softly about crazy shit, isn’t this great?” No, much of
the time it is not. In fact, this song is off an album of that type of shit by three dudes. The other two guys (don't even know who they are, some sort of punks or metalheads or some shit) are mostly throwaway tracks.
Such is not the case with Wino though. His
acoustic catalog now rivals his old shit in pure hugeness of amazement. So of
course if you throw a TVZ song into the Wino garble acoustic flim-flam process,
it’s likely to be great. Guess what? It is. Last I heard about Wino he got busted in Scandinavia for possession of crystal meth while on tour, which means he's still balancing the addict/artist process. That's a fine line to walk, and I don't condemn anyone for doing it because the world needs arts born from addictions to escape the horrible pain that is existence. That shit will eat you up (either the art side or addiction side) so metapsychic daps to Wino for having successfully navigated that madness for so long.
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