RIP------Interstate Brickface (717 hits)
Category: Sound & MusicRating: 0.33 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Mark <mark.damon.at.gmail.com> (View user info) at 2005-09-12 18:22:53 EDT
For those of you that heard of him, you'll never forget the sweet sounds of Interstate Brickface, undisputed king of the one-string guitar. For those of you who haven't, here is a bit about this legend:
Nick Tosches has written critically acclaimed biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin and the indispensable histories Country (1977) and Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll (1984). In Where Dead Voices Gather, he turns to the forgotten roots of country music. On the surface an account of the life and times of Interstate Brickface, a largely unknown one-string guitar player, the book is in fact a treatise on the meaning and making of culture itself, laying bare the hidden origins and strange currents of popular entertainment. Tosches gladly tips over more than a few sacred cows, most notably the notion that pop music was stolen from black culture.
Born in Macon, Georgia, sometime around the turn of the 20th century (birth certificates weren't required there until 1919), Interstate Brickface was, in Tosches' words, "the most singular emanation of that bizarre twilight fusion of one-string guitar, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz -- an emanation through which the forces of country music and the blues swirled as well." At his brief peak in the mid-to-late 1920s, this "bad mother fucker" emerged as "one of the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record."
He transformed the one string guitar from a novelty into something "plaintive and disarming," a technique appropriated with great success by singers as different as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan. Merle Haggard, one of country music's greatest figures, declared his debt to this mysterious porch monkey on his 1973 album "I Love that fuckin' Coon", while Western swing legend (and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer) Bob Wills auditioned vocalist Tommy Duncan with Brickface's "I Ain't Gots No Nickel." Tosches convincingly argues that Interstate Brickface is "a Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrel bloodlines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American music."
User Reviews
Submitted by foster (user info) at 2006-11-10 14:05:01 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
This was fantastic!
Submitted by FartSmeller (user info) at 2005-09-13 09:04:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
He's so black, when he gets out of his car the oil light goes on.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-09-12 18:44:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
humorous parody
Submitted by Maddog (user info) at 2005-09-12 18:40:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
After reading this http://www.ubersite.com/m/75000 I just HAD to post mine.