When you're part of a community that revolves around a single band, and that band's been going for over two decades, you're bound to run into posts like this:
Some folks are just going to be that way. You can agree with it, disagree with it, whatever. What you don't expect, however, is for someone from the band itself to personally respond:
How about that? Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Travis! That's sure to get some conversation going. Let's read on.
Huh? Okay, that's weird. I don't think anyone in this thread mentioned Billy specifically ..... did they? Maybe I'm just blind as a bat, I combed the thread a few times and don't recall seeing anything of that nature. That's an unusually specific point to address in thi— Wait. If Travis is a member of this group, then he's probably not just reading this one post. Of course, he's a busy dude, he's not spending all his time on the internet, but I assume he keeps tabs. So that means that very quite possibly, he's read a few other recent posts ..... including one that said something pretty close to what he describes in his comment—something along the lines of:
Oh, heeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Now, I could be imagining things here. For one thing, to assume that that second remark was leveled at me and/or something I said says some less-than-flattering things about me: it makes it look like I have a pretty high opinion of my own negligible influence, and it betrays the unattractive paranoia of self-absorption. Nevertheless, whether it was aimed at me or not, I think it's safe to consider my face well and duly egged. But hey, that's part of the mission I signed up here for. Work things out on the screen, learn lessons along the way. I thought they'd be more related to the craft, but this is just as valuable, if not more so. With the fresh perspective, I can see that what I said was rather gauche. Not only is it easy (and tempting) to play armchair quarterback, but when you've been listening to a band and closely tracking their ups and downs for 13 years, you might convince yourself you know more than you actually do about their inner workings. I'd say I overstepped some boundary with what I said. How on earth can I presume to know what those guys are actually feeling? I used to work with a guy who was a theater major, but profiled people as if he was a psychology major, and he annoyed the crap out of me. In future I'll stick to what I see at face value and try not to get too carried away with reading things into the narrative that may not be there. As the commercial says: you live, you learn, and you get Luvs. Keep it greasy, friends.
Even though the String Cheese Incident gets top billing on this Internet writey page of mine, I started it up at a time when they had just recently wrapped up a tour, so there wasn't a whole lot of current Cheesy stuff to talk about, and for the most part I'm not terribly interested in the fart-sniffing of past glories. Today, however, we get to do both!
String Cheese kicked off their typical summer festival circuit on Friday night with the first of three performances at Electric Forest in Rothbury, Michigan. Since its inception, the festival has gradually given itself over to an increased presence of DJs and EDM acts, but SCI has always served as its anchor, headlining each night since 2009 (when it was still just "Rothbury") with multiple sets each night.
Once one of the elements that threatened to tear the band asunder, SCI are now no strangers to synths and knobs and laptops and wubs, though it's typically only a small part of a largely organic whole. In its current manifestation, it's less a means of brand growth than an occasional toy or tool, but last night it seemed the band actually maybe could have been viewed as extending an olive branch or two to the molly-gobblers, first in the form of a second set loosely themed around assorted candy connotations, then a Doors encore with none other than the mainstream face of dubstep himself, Mr. Sonny John Moore, a.k.a. Skrillex.
This took me literally two mnutes to make. Memes are a disease.
Ooh laws, and you thought the old-timers flipped their stuff when "Desert Dawn" got wompy. I only listened on a Mixlr stream—big ups to Phishfiend for giving us couch folk crystal-clear Cheese straight from the soundboard—and later caught some 144p video on YouTube courtesy of the indispensable Martin Singer, and a couple of things seemed apparent to me. 1: Billy was flying first-class, which generally is his preferred method for convincing himself that this too shall pass, that this is sometimes the price of being part of a democracy rather than a dictatorship, and maybe if I put on some big goggles and a wizard hat and do a good enough job of pretending like I don't know where I am then maybe they'll let me bookend a set with "Colorado Bluebird Sky" tomorrow or the next day. 2: They were having fun (especially Travis), which in a live organic mode that usually requires the listener to endure and forgive occasional-to-semi-frequent musical and lyrical burps, warts, and/or flubs is in my opinion a slightly more useful rubric for determining the value of a performance than something strictly technical. I'm the kind of person who derives nourishment from the schadenfreude of large-scale butthurt even when I kind of agree with it, so this sort of event rolls right off my back. But it's hard for me to see how this is anything other for a win for SCI. For one thing, how many bands could have the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Skrillex play with them in the same night? If you put together a list of some of the most high-profile acts that have sat in with SCI (which I'm not going to do right now because this has already taken me several hours to write), you'd get a résumé even the man from Moab would get Tex Avery eyes looking at. Jam band fans pride themselves on being open-minded and accepting folks, but events like this reveal what a wet-paper facade that often is. It takes a lot of guts to cast aside your long-codified musical preferences and prejudices, even more so when you're doing it on stage in front of thousands of people who know very well what they like and what they don't like and don't mind telling you either way, and yet still String Cheese manages to frequently lead by example. It's an incredibly hard thing to do. It would be easy to keep inviting the same Keller Williamses and Warren Hayneses to sit in and stay snug in that comfort zone, and not many people would complain if they did. But they stretch out, they expand, and they, and ultimately we, are better for it. They play with the likes of Dierks Bentley and Lauryn Hill. Does it really matter, in a macro sense, if the performance is bad? Does it matter more that it happened at all? Who cares if Skrillex can't hold a candle to Kang or Billy on the guitar? He's much more theatrical with his body than they are, but he had fun with them and he hyped them up to the crowd and he repped them to people who normally would never have had the pleasure of having them in their lives. He's a friend of Cheese, like it or lump it. The more puritan fans do have some options for consoling themselves. First of all, it was night one of three, and if you want to tell yourself that maybe they're just getting the Madison House promotional stunt out of the way early and gearing up for something a little more traditionally heady, then by all means, vaya con Dios. You can consider that they spent 13 minutes jamming with freakin' Skrillex and only one of those minutes comprised predominantly EDM elements, therefore it could have been much worse. But if nothing will salve your wounds except some aged gouda, you're still in luck, because yesterday marked the 13th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite incidents: the band's performance at erstwhile concert venue Barton Coliseum in Little Rock, Arkansas.
* * *
2002 was the year I discovered SCI by downloading "Texas" at four kilobytes a second on good old spyware-infested Kazaa Lite, so right away that puts it somewhere among at least the top three years of my life to date. The On the Road archival series was just beginning to take off, and even with the existence of the Live Music Archive and the file-sharing flavor of the month, $20 for 3+ hours of unimpeachable live music was a steal even then. This was the second OTR package I bought, and it took me straight from appreciative neophyte to devoted disciple. Despite being straitened by a curfew and the package containing only two discs as opposed to the normal three, the band packed more energy into any given song of this show than they do into some shows' entire running times. Usually the first song or two or three can be written off as a warmup, but here "Cedar Laurels", so often accused of overplay in those days if I recall correctly (along with "It Is What It Is" and "Joyful Sound") comes roaring spotless out of the gate; it's still my definitive version of the song. Speak of the allegedly overplayed devil, "Joyful Sound" is next, and segues into "Orange Blossom Special", forming a sly setlist reference to none other than the vaunted "Incident in Atlanta"—of which of course there have been many, but you know, the Incident in Atlanta—though there's a sinister bite to the playing here, especially in the jam leading into OBS and the first few minutes thereof, that makes me give it the edge over the November 2000 versions. "Ten Miles to Tulsa" will have you longing for more appearances of the sort of material Billy pumped out when he was collaborating with Liza Oxnard, and a shorty in the middle of some extended jams is always a nice treat, especially when it ends up serving as an amuse-bouche to the 1-2-3 punch of "This Must Be the Place", "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", and a set-closing "Shine" with just the right amount of ramshackle. What's going to catch most people's eyes here on paper is the second set, one of those beautiful unicorns that appears maybe once a year, if even then: the all-segue set. In this case we get back-to-back rarities mixed in with indisputable classics: "Johnny Cash" kicks things off, followed by a cover of Yes's "Roundabout" that starts off in recital mode but finds that essential String Cheese ownership during the jam. The next 30 minutes of the set find the band alternating between "Sand Dollar" and "Texas". Neither gets its traditional ending, but the interweaving of the jams more than makes up for that. "Texas" crashes into the end of "Johnny Cash" to bring everything full-circle, bringing one of the tightest (in many ways) sets the band has ever played to an exhausted close. If you think an all-segue set is rare, then prepare for the breach of an even bigger white whale: an audience request! Unfortunately, they weren't able to fulfill the original request of "Pirates" (an idea that was completely alien to me at the time—how do you forget a song you've performed hundreds of times?), but they encore with "Howard" instead, a more-than-acceptable substitute and a perfect capper to a crazy night. The show is available as a digital download on Live Cheese; if you've never listened to it and you dare to call yourself a fan of String Cheese, you owe it to yourself to add this notch to your belt. Here's the "Roundabout" cover from that show, to give you a small taste of what went down that night.
Today is String Cheese Incident keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth's birthday. Kyle wasn't a charter member of the band, but he made minor contributions to Born on the Wrong Planet and joined permanently shortly afterward. Without that first album and a handful of Archived shows and demos, it'd be nearly impossible to imagine their sound without him. What definitely is impossible, however, is to overstate his importance to the evolution of the band's sound. He helped bring more Latin and jazz fusion elements to the forefront, as well as introducing the electronic sound that, while not without its growing pains, eventually became yet another indispensable piece of the band's multi-genre tapestry. Naturally, to celebrate, I'm posting some of my favorite Kyle moments. If you had to ask who I think tears it up more vigorously than any other band member, it'd be a tough choice, and sometimes I might go for Kang, but on most days I'd say Kyle. What puts him over the top is that he's the one that I most often wish I had his skills, particularly the ones that let him perform some of the sorcery he unleashes on these picks. 1. "Restless Wind", April 2, 2005
Sounds at first like your everyday garden variety Restless Wind, until the jam segment takes it to the space farm. Kyle starts out noncommittally picking at something that sounds like an electronic banjo. With a little gentle encouragement from Billy, he explores it more fully and turns it into an interesting sort of electrograss hybrid. "Sounds just like Earl Scruggs, doesn't he?"
This was during the period when Billy was visibly struggling with the more hard rock/electronic direction the band was taking, so bonus points for him feeling this moment and allowing it to happen.
2. "Boogie On Reggae Woman", November 26, 2011
In which Kyle runs a talkbox through one of his synthesizers during the jam. He's done this a few times in the last few years, but this was the first time I heard it. If you've only ever experienced a talkbox in the context of a certain Peter Frampton jam, listen to this and have your brain cracked wide open. It's almost a requirement that you have to cover "Boogie On Reggae Woman" to maintain legal jam band status, but a String Cheese Stevie cover is almost always a home run, and this one in particular sails effortlessly into the upper deck.
3. "Rosie", November 12, 2014
Fall 2014 represented the finest return to form since the boys emerged from hiatus, in some cases even earning comparisons to the rarefied year 2000. It was an especially good time for first sets, with lots of creative segues and song combos. And for me personally, this right here was the best of the best: a first-set-closing "Rosie" at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, with Todd Stoops (of RAQ and Kung Fu) joining in for a double keyboard assault. When the band's happy, the fans are happy, and there's a lot of happy Cheese to go around here. From Billy shouting "More! More! More!", to Kyle motioning to Todd like, "okay, now go do something awesome on that one over there", to Todd grinning from ear to ear while pawing at the keys like a cat playing with yarn, there's nothing here that will let your smiling muscles go slack for even a second. SCI needs to go play at Todd's house more often. 4. "Chameleon", April 8, 2002 These days, "Chameleon" has sadly been relegated strictly to a thankless sandwich role, only popping up for about 3-4 minutes in the middle of "Miss Brown's Teahouse". In the pre-hiatus days, however, it was a powerhouse standalone tune, and the best one-stop shop for some truly pyrotechnic synthesizer antics. Removing any shred of doubt that this cover is very much the property of one Kyle Hollingsworth is the fact that it debuted on this day, his birthday, 15 years ago, in that legendary year of 2000. This version, from an otherwise mostly lackluster outing at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas (the last time they've been there as a full unit), is my personal favorite. The show itself is kind of a mess, particularly the second set, but since you can get individual songs on Live Cheese, it's well worth dropping the 99 cents just for it. Of all the filthy funk they've ever unleashed on this song, it never got filthier than on this occasion down in Texas town. (Close second: This one from Interlaken, Switzerland (March 20, 2004). The deciding factor for me is that it stays very low-key for the first five minutes or so, whereas the Dallas one is high-intensity, high-energy, and fire throughout.) 5. "¡Bam!" > "Fuck You" > "¡Bam!", March 10, 2011 One of the ways String Cheese tried to regain their footing after returning from hiatus was one-offing popular mainstream songs during their big multi-night runs. It wasn't often successful, but it did result in this salty sandwich that my taste buds can rarely resist revisiting. If it's true that Cee Lo Green's golden pipes make Kyle sound like a rusty faucet—and I don't think even many diehard Cheeseheads would argue that's not the case—then it's also true that Kyle can B-3 Cee Lo under the table, as he nimbly demonstrates before returning to finish off "¡Bam!". 6. "Orange Blossom Special", June 27, 2002 Kyle slows the train down for a pit stop in Bluestown at the 3:20 mark. This track hails from my personal pick for the best show of 2002, which could easily have been lacking, to say the least, with the band feeling the squeeze of a curfew in the middle of Arkansas, but the band roared out of the gate without even having to take a few warm-up frames, eventually turning in an unimpeachable first set followed by the mother of all second sets, a monster all-segue "Johnny Cash" Dagwood sandwich. For bonus points, this song segues directly from "Joyful Sound", making it a direct callback to the storied Incident in Atlanta, although I'm going to put my chips down and make a bold statement here: I think this Joyful>Orange is better than that one. (And I don't even care that Tony Furtado is on that one. There's a darker edge to this one that resonates with me. The band really hit a hot streak when the gravity of the fact that almost every show they played would be turning up on CDs in music stores hit them.) 7. "Bumpin' Reel (Athens Jam)", May 2, 2014 It's not the actual song that this moment occurs in, but rather the jam that takes place afterward, tracked separately as the "Athens Jam" on Live Cheese (starts at 10:16 on the linked Archive track). This is where things start to get, as Billy delightfully coined when he was pontificating on the origin of the song "Las Vegas" a few weeks ago, a little squiggly. The whole set is just the right amount of ramshackle, but Kyle especially sounds like he's having fun during this jam at the 14-minute mark, with the almost T-1000 liquid metal-like synth sound and what sounds like a Birdland tease on the B-3, gearing up to an unusually barn-burning "Close Your Eyes" set ender.
The String Cheese Incident's Winter Carnival wrapped up in Las Vegas this past weekend, and the next closest Kangfirmed appearance thus far is their annual Electric Forest run at the end of June. Four months is a long time to have to wait for more heady gouda, but in the meantime, we can occupy ourselves with a little unscientific speculation about the band's possible studio adventures. Ask any jam band fan what they think of the studio albums and you'll get opinions, sure, but not without a generous side of eye rolls and out-of-hand dismissals. The consensus view is generally that the studio output of any jam band doesn't tell half the story, if that much. I might be a bit of a heretic in this regard, but I confess I pull up the studio tracks a lot. Like the band themselves, my main reason for enjoying the studio product is that I like retracing the chronicles of where they're going and where they've been, so when the band books studio time, my salivary glands kick into high gear. The fact that nine whole years passed and Song in My Head turned out as good as it did should be all the more reason for future studio excursions to become appointment listening for fans. The well of new tunes didn't dry up with the release of Song in My Head; the boys are still on a creative tear and still debuting new original material, as well as reworking some older chestnuts. They've expressed interest in getting back into the studio as soon as possible in interviews, and they've already got at least a few nuggets stored up that I think have a greater-than-99-percent chance of making the cut. There's still time for songs in the works we haven't heard yet to debut, but for now, let's fiddle around with what we've got. Knowing what we know about them, we're going to take seven songs (technically eight, but seven numbered) currently in mostly heavy (sometimes occasional) rotation and rank the likelihood of them being on the next studio album on a painstakingly calibrated scale of one to five pixelated cheese wedges, one indicating a slim chance and five being a mortal lock. Songs are listed alphabetically. 1. "Beautiful" Co-written with Chris Berry of Panjea, which is important because it always brings Kang's game up a notch when he works with a collaborator. "Beautiful" hasn't gone anywhere since it debuted 4/25/14 in Oakland, and I would imagine it's probably on for the long haul. One of the few songs in the SCI catalog that sounds better the dubbier it gets. My guess would be it turns out to be the "Rosie" of the album, that one track where they all agree to go all in on the crazy noises and knobs and wubs that used to make them fight with each other. Rating:
2. "Bollymunster" In case you're not aware, "Bollymunster" takes an old Irish melody called "Star of Munster" and puts it in a blender along with about five minutes of Indian and electronic canoodling. It's not the first time String Cheese has pulled a stunt like this; "Valley of the Jig" is basically "Red-Haired Boy" with a thick layer of trance on top. The difference is that "Valley of the Jig" is a good song that actually evolved over the course of several years, whereas you can pretty much pull any given performance of Bolly out of a hat and know exactly what you're getting. Often referred to pejoratively as "Mollydumpster", because the only people who really like it a lot tend to be wooks. If you ask me, the band needs to either defibrillate this song somehow or shelve it. But, it's been in heavy rotation since it debuted, and they seem to like playing it, and it knocks out a lot of birds with one stone—it's electronic, it's grassy, it's got fiddle, etc.[1] "Bumpin' Reel" is much better but, I hate to say it, less likely to make the studio cut, if we're being honest with each other and ourselves. Rating:
3. "Here to Stay"
I'm not going to pretend I ever understand what Travis is talking about in his lyrics. Straight up, I don't. His songs never last long enough in the rotation to get really acquainted with them anyway. But, sometimes they'll throw him a bone and put something he wrote on a studio album. It's a slick move: they get to add one more author to the list of people who have material on the album, and they get to play up the ensemble aspect some more. It's a bit hard to gauge this one. It's only been played three times so far, but I'm going to be optimistic about it. It sounds really cool at least, so I'm pulling for it.
Rating:
4. "I'm Still Here" This song's only been played five times so far but it's come around pretty well in the ten months it's been around. I wasn't a fan at first since the way it's sung is WAY outside Billy's vocal abilities, but they seem to have rectified this by having Travis sing it in the most recent performance (Eugene 1/19/15), which is a much better fit for the range and style involved. This is a really weird song, almost in some ways very un-SCI-like. It almost seems at times like it could be a Honkytonk Homeslice[2] song, until they get to the really crunchy stuff, like after "yes it could", and then who knows. It feels like it could have been on Untying the Not, which is a compliment. It's hard to say at this juncture where it fits into the overall Cheese mythos, but if they keep developing it, it could be a monster in second sets when they bring the tempo down in order to create a mood. Whatever happens to it, I hope they treat it better than "Cats". Rating:
5. "Just One Story" Kang relied on old material for his contributions to Song in My Head. "Betray the Dark" got its rightful proper treatment after the disgusting limp noodle version that appeared on One Step Closer, and "Stay Through" debuted in 2005, though that can be hard to remember since it only got played three times before it got shelved, seemingly for good, before reappearing suddenly in the lead-up to the new album, since which it's been played at least semi-regularly. If he repeats this move for the next album, I think this is the one that'll make the cut—yes, even over "Desert Dawn" (I think the window on hearing a studio version of that song has shut, though I could, and always hope to, be wrong). I realize this is a bit of a stretch, but we're all just spitballing here, and good luck ever getting "Tamba" or "Solution" on a record. Rating:
6. "Sweet Spot" The number one definite gotta-be-on-there so far. If this doesn't appear on the next album, I'll eat my SCI bucket hat, especially since the only Moose-led track on Song in My Head was on the melancholy "Struggling Angel". Moseley isn't the most prolific member of the group, but when he sits down to write something, he makes it count, and the fan response to this song has been nothing but positive. You can hardly go wrong when SCI starts going deep in the pocket. Rating:
7. "Until the Music's Over" Before this winter, this song had been played live exactly one time since appearing on One Step Closer in 2005. Then, it showed up pretty much out of nowhere during the 2014 New Years run with a fresh coat of paint and a jam space you could fit a Carnival cruise ship in. Could another polish job á la "Betray the Dark" be in the pipeline? A lot of songs from that black sheep of an album, e.g. "Give Me the Love" and the title track, have made triumphant returns and significant evolutionary strides post-hiatus, and the Barefoot Boys have shown they're not afraid to re-record material. (See also the Honkytonk Homeslice cut of "Just Passin' Through", which restores the crucial instrumental coda to its rightful prominence.) Of all the tracks from OSC to poke their noses out of hibernation, this one's quickly shaping up to be the most exciting, and if the band stays committed to it, this one's got a puncher's chance. Rating:
I have to be honest: I didn't expect a song called "Duck Farm" to be the most poignant song I've discovered so far in the still-young 2015. Frankly, I think it's asking a lot for a song with a title like that to meet a baseline minimum of "good". It sounds like a lesser Weird Al original. I reserve the right to continue thinking the title is stupid until I discover or am told what it has to do with the song, but despite the strange name, the song manages to get to the heart of something I consider essential for living a happy life. In the liner notes of the String Cheese Incident's 1996 album Born on the Wrong Planet[1], the song of the same name is described as a "misfit's anthem". The word "anthem" seems to suggest something slightly more soul-stirring than the shoulder shrug it turns out to be. I love "Born on the Wrong Planet", but overall it's a somewhat noncommittal, even at times glib song. "I guess I was just born on the wrong planet." Oh well, what can ya do, right? "Duck Farm" is of a piece with that song, but it's much more keenly felt; both the highs and lows of being that eccentric person and having that off-kilter taste are captured in both the music and the lyrics. The first verse evokes the melancholy that one can often feel living in that misfit skin: "One of those days that kind of fade / wishing I could hide away". It's not a sadness or a depression, per se, but it's a feeling familiar to my heart. When I was discovering jam bands throughout my senior year of high school, I was exploring new musical territory alone, in the midst of a family that shared neither that interest nor my interest in that interest. I got told to "turn down [my] dirty hippie music" a lot. Many's the day it would indeed have been "so serene to wake up / in a dream". Living a sustained existence outside a consensus view of "normal" is a hard row to hoe sometimes, and the song doesn't shy away from it. There's a bit of a musical sigh after that first verse, a short period of cool-down before things start to get a little happy again with the guitar. After that's when things start rippin'. "Exuberant" isn't really a word I feel most people would associate with the general vibe of synthesizers, but I feel confident saying that what follows the guitar solo is the most exuberant synth solo I've ever heard. It's the other side of the coin; the happiness you can't contain after setting foot on that journey. It all builds toward the words that finally come in and hit home for me:
When the moon shines on the disco ball
We gather 'round and we get that feeling
You feel the love no matter big or small
Why would you stop if there is no ceiling?
The hate is gone, there is no wrong, you are in paradise
I think it's the message in those lines that's important. The "Born on the Wrong Planet" narrator is content to be who he is, but The Werks elaborates on that ownership of self with a crucial call to action: find your people. There's strength in numbers, and that strength is the happiness that comes from finding those kindred souls and feeling the energy of a moment in fellowship with each other. I love the last line as well. "The hate is gone; there is no wrong; you are in paradise." I think "the hate is gone" is more a specific feeling endemic to the jam scene and the vibe they cultivate than something that can be applied generally; I've counted myself among a few communities where the hate wasn't gone just because everyone was united under a common banner (looking at you, gamers). The real liberation is in the fact that "there is no wrong"— once you embrace your truest self and cast your lot with it, you arrive at paradise, where there is no wrong way to manifest the way the belonging makes you feel. The Hammond organ hits the highest highs here, sustaining the ecstasy with the perfect tone for the mood, carrying it to the end of the song. When I first started getting into these sorts of bands and songs, the initial draw was the training of the self to think of a 20+ minute jam as a journey rather than as a very long way to a destination and to lose myself in the groove. What kept me around was the people—unfailingly sweet, kind, and never living anything less than their truest selves. I could enjoy my Cheese and my Phish and whatever all else in my own private sphere, but it just wouldn't be as good or as fun as communing with others who get it, who know exactly what the moon shining on the disco ball means and why it touches and nourishes the soul the way it does. It's good to have a song within my reach that helps me remember what that's all about, to remember not just that you were born on the wrong planet, but that plenty of other people were born on that same planet as well.
___________________________________________________ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ [1] To this day, my favorite liner notes of any album ever—beardless Billy posing with a cardboard cutout of Miss New York; the band's own description of their sound as "Afrojazzadelic funka-Latino bluegrass"; authorship of "Johnny Cash" attributed to "it wasn't me"; and so on. It seems weird to mention him in passing in two different and totally unrelated ways, but it was a different kind of weird than someone like Weird Al Yankovic, an important distinction for me to have to learn to make, where the weirdness came from the truth inside rather than from a carefully cultivated persona.
