new Howling Hex / Neil Hagerty brings the funk!

In the Patreon, Neil shared a pretty heavy story about his childhood, and how the incident shaped his character. I guess I won’t repost it here (even though he gave his blessing to the sharing of audio files and stuff), out of an abundance of caution.

Oh snap — his latest upload (from “the cassette vault”) is a 1986 track from the mythic Jet Boys of N.W.!

(...sorry, Jet Boyz)

(...) I must now go all the way back to the first band I had back in DC, Jet Boyz of NW— the band that I put on hold so I could do 1 tour and 1 record with another band— but one thing after another and now it’s decades later. The band name comes from a NY Dolls song with our local info attached; it was a great name because crackers would think it was some “gay” thing when to others it was a dig at private school kids. And everyone always finds it easy to dismiss and gain pleasure from dismissing “rock and roll” so it was a very uncool name, lots to clown with.

In Denver I LIVE in NW so it all fits, and the same kind of folks still plague me personally and professionally— so the mission is ongoing. We will see what the future brings. My only other next move after PATREON is playing on the street, if the city has a system to let musicians do that. If that happens I’ll be painting the Jet Boyz logo on a guitar and getting out there, hopefully get a band together that way. After all the false starts and dead enders I can finally get back to where I started and do it right. (...)

Cross-ref from the RTX thread:

(....)1 year ago, after they torpedoed the trux thing fat possum came back and said they'd let me do a record to come out in the fall of ’19 and they would back the record up with tour support and so on. They buried the record this may I think and still owe me 17K in unpaid invoices for travel, show expenses, sessions, musicians, artwork. The publishing company offered me 0$ for it. That’s 0$ I came away with for all the songs I wrote for the trux record and the solo record.

This is the work that I do and I don’t get to choose the 2 bosses who i work for but if things go bad they blame the musicians & listeners have no sympathy. Things get contorted.

All I know is to stay on the path my father set me on, keep working to get very good at a few things, don't listen to white lies, you can't go wrong with a song-- no one else ever had better advice for me.

A friend had an extra copy of the Hagerty-Toth record that he gave to me this weekend and totally killed me. Singing a little wonky in a few spots, but awesome guitar and fun grooves.

^I was just thinking about that record the other day - would like to revisit it...