Hi Everbody;

First off, about the kidney stones. I have twins, two one-millimeter stones. And you know what the urologist is going to do about it? Nothing. Nada. Zippo. He said they should pass “no problem”. Those were his words. “No problem.” I’ve gotten out a ruler and looked at how wide a millimeter is, and then I’ve look at the slit on the front of my penis, which closes tight like church doors. Pass “no problem”? No problem, my ass. Let’s see how nonchalant this doc would be if it was HIS dick set up to be a gravel convenyor. So, I don’t know when they’re going to pass, but when they start to, you bet your ass I’ll be on the phone to somebody toot sweet, and I’ll be demanding, not cajoling, no sweet-talking, hoping-for-the-best asking, DEMANDING some serious-ass hydrocodone, demerol, oxycontin, whatever! Oh, they’ll offer me 500-milligram Ibuprofen. “But it has no side-effects and it’s not habit forming!” the nurse will say. Why do they always say that like those are selling points? I LIKE those side effects, and when you get a legit medical excuse to feel said side effects, you carpe that diem with both hands. Gravel down the dick? That’s a case for the good stuff, right there And I WILL assert my rights to narcotized oblivion as long something hard (and spiky, from what I hear) is travelling down my willy.

Okay, to totally change the subject. But what IS IT with JonBenet and the never-ending NEW FOOTAGE that pops up every time she’s in the news?! Every time she comes back in the news, there’s some new piece of beauty-contest performance footage noone’s ever seen before! How much camera time did this poor girl log? And I swear to God, look at some of this footage, some of these photos. She gets older. I swear.

Oh, and to steal a riff from Bill Hicks, if you’re a parent who puts your small baby girl child in beauty contests, kill yourself. You sick fucking bastard. No child should ever be in a beauty contest. Ever. Children should be on swingsets, or on the couch with me, learning how to bluff properly during five-car draw, or watching Dora the Explorer. Dragging a kid around the country, dolling her up, making her dance. Parents who do that to their kids should not just be shot but clubbed to death like baby seals. There’s one thing and one thing only that should be part of a kid’s life, besides parental love and guidance, and that one thing is CHILDHOOD. Period! You want your kid in show business? I got two words for you: Michael Jackson. If you’re a parent who puts your daughter in beauty contests, PLEASE e-mail me, so I can tell you in even more graphic language what a sick, abusive, life-scarring cunt you are. Yes, I used the C-word. It applies to such parents. Those contests are almost as sick as kiddie porn. Ever since I had a kid, I’ve been hypersensitive to child-abuse in even it’s most innocuous-appearing forms. A five-year-old has no business being dolled up like a trollop and forced to learn a dance routine and be judged like a prize steer. Despicable. Once again, if you’re one of these parents. Stop reading this site, get a bed-sheet, and hang yourself. Right now. The child will be traumatized by that for sure, I’ll grant, but it’ll turn out at least less tragic in the end. Not by much, but less is better. Still reading? Not killing yourself yet? Go to it, you lousy parent. You disgust me as much as George W. Bush, and that’s saying a lot.

And now for something completely different…

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail I just sent to Kimbrough about the great gig this weekend at Eddie’s Attic with Marshall Chapman and Ellis Paul. It was one of the greatest gigs of my life. And rather than write it out twice, I’ll wipe some personal stuff between me and him and also explain - as some e-mailed inquiringly today - why I refer to Todd as Todd but to Will as Kimbrough.

(We now join this e-mail in progress…)

Yeah, Will, Atlanta’s a tough town to break, we both know from 20 years of trying, and I really felt I turned a corner there.

Unbelievable love from the crowd. Going into it, I knew I was the dude to
prove himself. I had some fans there, but of course Marshall had legions, as
did Ellis, local hero and all. But man, from the beginning, Marshall’s
first song I just started playing Chuck Berry fills over what she was doing
and then tore off one of those leads I get every now and then, where I wail
and bend just right and then travel down the chord-melody scale into Tommy’s happy-accident high-risk/high-reward fretting technique, and throw
something in by accident that’s just Terry Adams insane with
some note that don’t belong at all, but I make it look like I meant to do it, pull it off, get an ovation, and Marshall said, “Well, that there made my night on the first song!” From then, I was her
lead guitar on every song, either playing blues licks or Luther country 1/5, I
did good on some of Ellis’s too. I did this Garcia type scale chasing
during one of his pretty tunes with lots of ascending minor sevenths and sus
chords (gorgeous shit)and it was beautiful. I was just fucking around in E
but God was guiding my hands. Another ovation. Man, Will, I’m sure you get ‘em every
night, but when I get an ovation for my guitar playing, my esteem just gets
this boost that’s like a speed and a valium at the same time. I get ‘em more often that I used to too, so I must be learning something.

My first tune was Up Memphis Blues, playing it safe, warming myself up,
and I’m used to two lines, maybe three, getting laughs, or hoots, all the
way through that song. But this crowd (and it was packed) they laughed and
hooted and hollered for every damn line, to the point where I’d have to hang on the E chord long enough for the hooting and holler to die down so I could continue. I just got the feeling early on that
this was going to be more than cool tonight, into something spiritual. My first song out of the way and Atlanta likes
me.

They soon grew to love me, I daresay at the risk of bragging. My second song was “Cockroach After the
Bomb” and I had to pause after the first line to wait for the laughter to
die down, before I could proceed with the second line. Ellis commented
that “What if Monet was just near-sighted?” was about the best thing he’d ever
heard. I gave you props there, Kimbrough, saying you came up
with that theory at a restaurant and I wrote it on a napkin. So Ellis asked what
YOU, Will, get out of that and I retorted (hope you don’t mind) “Kimbrough’s got Buffett, I
got the goddam napkin, don’t worry about Kimbrough!” and that got a great big
laugh.

I almost felt sorry for Ellis. He went over great, and had a lot of fans
there, but his stuff is so delicate (and beautiful. I loved him!) that it
had a dignity and serious tone a cut away from the the raunchy rock and roll that Marshall and I were doing. At times Elliswould just laugh half in joy and half in consternation and say things like “God help me” and then he told me once on the mike “I’m never
following you again!” (Because he was always after me in the round.) But I tell you, I’d give my eye teeth to play and sing and come up with melodies like Ellis Paul. He’s brilliant. A couple of his tunes had me near tears. I was honored to be up there with him.

I did “Nice Day” next with a young fiddle player who’d just accosted me
before the gig and wanted to sit in, Rebbeca Zapin. Eddie (Eddie Owen, of Eddie’s Attic) vouched for her chops, she’d
jammed with Vassar, so what the hell. I got together with her beforehand, went over her cue line before her
lead break, told her to lay low during the lyrics, hummed her the melody line that
doesn’t change, and by the second verse, she got in
the zone and it was so great that Ellis and Marshall kept her up for their
next two songs as well.

(Gig after gig. People are constantly coming up to
me anymore about how deeply “Nice Day” affects them and now my first
question back always, after saying thank you, is “how old is your kid?” They
always have kids. That’s a song you get only after you have kids, must be.)

Then “Ronald Reagan” killed them (and sold out my Daddy stock!) and then we
took a break. Before “Reagan” I did about a ten-minute, apparently
hilarious, stream-of-consciousness tribute to the value, especially in my life and career, of good friends, first Ann
Witzany (who was there, and who told Eddie Owen I was an author and is the
main reason I got invited to the festival in the first place) and then I paid long tribute to MY BEST FRIEND, YOU, MR. KIMBROUGH, and your work-ethic, how
it only compares to one professor I know,
and how every time I’ve ever played guitar with you I felt like I owed you
$25 for the damn lesson.

And I pointed out that you had a weekend off -
when we did the Daddy record - and I asked the audience “Do you know how
rare it is for Kimbrogh to have a whole weekend off? It’s like hitting the
Powerball! He could have taken that weekend off, relaxed on the couch, read
a book, CUDDLED HIS KIDS, but he made a record with ME. Not because he felt sorry for me -
there’s plenty of people in Nashville to feel sorry for, you don’t make
records with people for just that reason though - but Will hears, and
I hear, something we just have together, on the guitars, on the vocals, all
over the music.

AND THEN I said something semi-coherent (I was rambling 90 miles
and hour by them, totally sober too, no pot, no nothing, just me in high
manic gear, so jazzed on the show) about how much it’s sustained me that
somebody like Kimbrough (and I call you by your last name a lot, I don’t
know why except I think it sounds kinda cool, kinda macho. Kimbrough’s a
cop name, kinda. Kimbrough, PI. Rips off the tounge better than Will,
which comes out Weeel like I say it, and there’s something about calling you
Kimbrough that just, to me, implies a deeper comeraderie for some reason,
like cop partners or soldiers in a foxhole I guess, hell I don’t know,
anyway, enough of that - my point is…) I told folks “Kimbrough took a free
weekend, and made a record, with ME, and shit like that sustains me! It
helps me look in the mirror and say to myself ‘Womack, for whatever
unleathy fuckup you are, somebody as smart and good as Will Kimbrough sees
something in you! So find it in yourself and work on it!’ and I talked - at length, further, but fortunately
keeping the laughs coming - about how that always helped me keep thinking
that there must be something to me that I don’t always see in myself, and if
I can’t see it, or hear it, Kimbrough can, and that’s reason enough to go on
one more day, and keep believing.

Second set: I started with blues again - figured it worked once, it’ll work
again, and I was very right - and “Fluorescent Light Blues” got even more
hoots and hollers than Up Memphis did. (Marshall and Ellis danced during it
and I tore off all sorts of E7-related chord slides and rips all over the
neck. It was hot!) We were all so super hot. All three of us.

I was impatient for a while because I knew
it made sense to do “Betty Was Black” next, and give Todd props, and I just
find myself sleepwalking through that one sometimes anymore, having played
it so much, but I was mature enough to accept that it was time for something
the audience knew - or had a chance of knowing, at least (and since I’d done so much brand-new unreleased stuff up to then), so I did the right thing and played it at that time, and it went down a strom.

But
I couldn’t wait to get it out of the way because I was so excited about
sicking “Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood” on them my next turn at
bat.

My God! It slayed! (It hasn’t NOT slayed yet!) I looked into the crowd while I was singing
Alpha, with my glasses on, and I saw the jaws dropping, the people listening
carefully, laughing and suddenly stopping so as not to miss the next
blizzard of verse, because it just gets relentless, like “It’s All Right Ma”
or SHBlues. Blink and you miss something. When I was done, I got a
standing ovation. Eddie’s Attic, packed to the gunwales. Standing
ovation. Besides being moved, I was thinking “I may not have broken
Atlanta, but I’ve bulldozed one or two or maybe two hundred doors down now.
This is definitely a corner turned.

The other two felt there was no following that but we gamely soldiered
through it for another round, and the muse didn’t let me down. I did “Somewhere Between” and
it was the perfect mellow coda, which ends with the lines “Saying Goodbye,
saying goodbye”, and I added “Goodbye Everybody.”

Our encore was an acapella “You Are My Sunshine” and then we socialized and sold tons of shit until closing time. We made 6 bills an artist just from the door, and over the whole book festival (and the reading that afternoon - I read to a 2/3 full Eddie’s Attic for an hour - was incredibly fulfilling. I definitely want to do more of that. The audience was so cerebral, I feel like such an intelligent motherfucker.) between book sales and records I bested that six bills. I made almost as much at the Decatur Book Festival as I do in a MONTH at Vandy, after taxes.

John Wesley Harding saw our show and dug me. Told me so, which put me over the moon because I’m a big fan and had never met him before. Tom Kimmel was there. (I caught Tom’s reading the next afternoon and it was really beautiful.) Just what a great gig. As I said in the mike at one point “Who’d've thought that seeing myself on Letterman WOULDN’T be the highlight of the weekend!?!?” That got a big round of applause.

Damn, it’s late. I saw Guy Clark tonight and it just energized the shit out of me. I hear you’re going to be with him next Wednesday. Too bad I’ll miss it. Freedom Sings at the ‘bird.

Yep, pal, we’re definitelty turning a corner. It’s not just wishful thinking. Numbers don’t lie. They’re up. Full houses don’t lie. If we can just keep plugging at it (and I don’t drop fucking dead too soon), we’re going to get there.

Love,
Womack

Gotta hit the hay. Night night. Irving Texas with Todd Friday night. Hope to see you there.
love,
t