JD's an interesting study to me...multiply the sheer effort and energy he invests in every show by the number of shows the band has played, and he's expended enough calories not only to be NOTHING but a bag of bones, but to have lit up half the western world.
He ought to be a star star STAR.
But of course he's expended it on an original catalog of music that to most listeners, I suspect, is uncompromisingly bleak and even grotesque. There's a divide between the effects of the band's live and recorded output: the live band is a white-hot blast of no-holds-barred polycultural boogie, all thump, rasp, adrenaline, and electric howl. The records rock just as hard, but are layered with acoustic textures, polychromatically orchestrated, and rich with a nuanced variety of vocal and harmony arrangements and approaches.
JD's lyrics, his images, and his stories are the common thread (along with the bones of the song structures) through both incarnations. Those lyrics embody a thorough and diverse view of the religion, culture, and psychoses of a particular historical/sociological layer of the American south - which I suspect is lost on many listeners who respond to the sheer force of the band's groove, and the subtexts of which are lost on many who get some of the lyrics but are attracted mainly to the extreme images and apparently outlandish attitudes.
In any case, here's a top-shelf none-better songwriter/American voice so committed to the artistic evocation of a particular vision - and the unusual way he's found to put it across - that he's been willing to toil at it, expend that much energy, for so many years, without the kind of widespread popular success many lesser writers and performers have achieved with much less effort. I suspect he knows that, given the content of the material and the otherly way in which it's delivered, he's unlikely ever to have Bruce-level recognition.
I admire that he perseveres, isn't afraid to appear grotesque in the psychological theatre of the characters he wears when performing, and that he barks, howls, and spits out his stark and extraordinary narratives not only on record but in galvanizing live performances where for most bands, any nonsense party-hardy or stereotypically badboy lyrics would do.
The Shack Shakers and JD's writing have got me charged up over rock & roll in a way no new band in the last decade or more has done - with the sense that here's a new and distinctive voice, someone who's discovered something new to do with music, a new equation.
As an American songwriter, the guy stands near our great storytellers - Dylan, Springsteen, etc; as a wordslinger and southern chronicler, he carries forward the traditions of Faulkner and O'Connor. That he does it with music stirring seemingly incompatible genres - and makes people who pay little attention to his storyline dance like demons - is another dimension of the phenomenon.
Though I do wonder what he thinks of his audience, or if it discourages him that the words he marries to the locomotive energy of the live gigs can barely be heard and must fall like the dead embers of fireworks on those dancing St. Vituseseseses.
I assume JD's making a living at this, and of course that's one motivation. But you can't see what he does at every gig and think he does it only for the money. If it was making a living he was after, I've no doubt he could be the publisher of a lucrative little newspaper somewhere in the midsouth if he wanted, working on short stories and the next great southern novel on the side.
Instead, he orchestrates these cathartic rock & roll exorcisms.
He must do it because he believes in telling his stories, because he knows there are people who need to hear them – maybe because he still needs to hear them. That makes him both a frustrated romantic and a cheerleader for individual human will and rationality in their struggle against the superstition, ignorance, societal and familial dysfunction, and inertia for which his southern gothic imagery is both setting and metaphor.
Here in "No Such Thing," an uncompromising realism (sounding a bit like nihilism) rejects folktale and fantasy, the certainties of both religion and science, the likelihood of simple good luck, the random pleasures of nature, Disnified pollyanna cheer - and even the nostalgic yearning for love (his raven-haired girl) – all in an insistent meditation on the inevitability of the stalker death.
Yea, though he leadeth us to the slough of despond (as plenty of (song)writers delight in doing), JD slyly slips in the indomitable (if discouraged) persistence of his own wry romanticism: "I might have a soul but it ain't got a mate / So just water my weeds Decoration Day / I guess I never learn / There's no such thing."
He knows it, but his heart won't let him buy it, and he adMITS it. The ultimate futility of everything isn't enough to keep this boy down - and where the silly heart hopes against all despair is where the human spirit stands defiant.
No Such Thing
Is that a 3-dollar bill just a-lyin' in the street
(No there's no such thing)
Is that a rainbow shinin' through the storm I see
(No there's no such thing)
Is that the face of the Lord in the wood of a door
(No there's no such thing)
Is that a toad in a stone 2 million years old
(No there's no such thing)
There's no such thing
No such thing
Well the blade in the pit is danglin' by a thread
There's a buzzard on my bed wants the bones in my leg
The dogs are barkin' at the voices in my head
When will they learn
There's no such thing
Is that good news ringin' on the party line
(No there's no such thing)
Rapture divine from the kingdom on high
(No there's no such thing)
Is it a free giveaway of a black Cadillac
(No there's no such thing)
The tooth fairy wantin' all his money back
(No there's no such thing)
There's no such thing
No such thing
Well believe it if you want it don't matter to me
The tree trunk waits in the dead oak tree
The scaffold-board is squeakin' every step of the way
When will you learn
There's no such thing
Is that a bluebird singin' in the canopy
(No there's no such thing)
The last ray of hope beatin' down on me
(No there's no such thing)
Is it an old-fashioned girl with a dark raven curl
(No there's no such thing)
The sweet sour song of a long-lost world
(No there's no such thing)
Well the core of the earth is a heart full of hate
I might have a soul but it ain't got a mate
So just water my weeds Decoration Day
I guess I never learn
Well there's no such thing
There's no such thing
No such thing
In the extraordinary Volga chant "Down and Out," he makes something like the same point much more explicitly:
Down and Out
Down down down down
Down down down and out
Down down down down
Down down down and out
You don't have to sit around
Complainin' bout the way your life has wound up
Think of all the time you wasted
Times you seemed to let just go
Sure you hit the bottom
But remember you'll be building from the ground up
Every day's another step
That takes you even closer to the sky
Give it a try
You don't have to sit around
Depressed about the way that life deceived you
Fortune sailed away you missed the boat
And found that you've been left behind
Well fight and fight some more
Till you know the world is ready to receive you
Lady luck is fickle
But a lady is allowed to change her mind
Give it a try
You don't have to sit around
Complainin' bout the way your life has wound up
So be a man you know you can
Be certain you will lose until you try
Give it a try
We as one shout
Up up up and out
We as one shout
Up up up and out
That JD, for all his spitting vitriol, his grotesquerie, his distasteful (and hilarious) images of dysfunction, disease, death, and disaster, his anger and his cynicism – he's always trying to teach us something.
It's a bit like the old True Confessions magazines, where at the end of the salacious, lurid tale, there's always a moral to the story.
Or maybe it's the Sunday School of The Church of the Purely Human, taking full account of the way the cards are stacked against us, but suggesting we can win anyway – or at least snatch away enough to make it all seem worth the while.
SHOCK!!........duane playing a 175?....... still got the hiwatt though...he,he! we'll have to get him a 5160 at some point!,ha! 
