Plus Tapes

Look what you’ve done. This man was trying to explain it all to you. And you cast him away, threw him to the bleached white tar pits, wrapped in rusty guitar strings, this man, He Who Shall Not Be Constrained, the one true Avatar of attrition. One song he has written, but it is three, and three of this one shall come in the night, returning home through the white tar pits of broken hedonism, explained in flashed memories, loves of childhood barbarity, you who cast him out, cast him onto the endless road to drift, drift, drift among the listless ghosts of Harry Smith and Toussaint McCall (‘oh, but how his hair is growing thin’), conquests which only bring melancholy, and oh, where shall the spoon-fed troubadour conduct his quest for self-gratification? Here? Nay! This man has expunged corporeal shortfalls, re-entered the shifting grains of elemental chaos, facing to center and turned three times to face the white tar pit, biting through, unshackling, time! Once the six have become three, the three have become one, and the one is cast off adrift into the white seas, then shall all white-knuckle androgynes and dazed children wander into the new glory, wander toward Kohoutek’s fading trail, visions of comely vagabonds and jailbait duchesses ascending, unbidden, towards this man…this man who was trying to explain it all to you.

The ever-mysterious Shadow Drifter uncorks his magnum opus for our latest release, a concoction that’s been fermenting since 1968! “Ol’ White,” first penned in the waning years of the Summer of Love and updated sporadically into the 2000s. Sung with only a rugged guitar and a lonely room for accompaniment, “Ol’ White” is presented here in three epic iterations from different points on the historical timeline (recorded between 1968-2002). The Drifter’s affecting free-association blues concerns life lived on the fringe of society, and it continues to compound – Exquisite Corpse-style – with each new version, though always drifting back to a world of private memories. Two versions of another S.D. classic, “Wooly of the Wild,” are included for you to compare and contrast, as well as the haunting miniature “Rose of Silence.”