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Jeff Black

We were lunching at the L&J in old El Paso, a family cafe that serves the best hot sauce and steak tacos this side of the border and which is situated by the old Concordia graveyard where John Wesley Hardin is buried in the sand, and on the wall was a bunch of pictures, and there above the table was a promo glossy of Pissing Razors, you know, that famous group that saved rock and roll?

Pissing Razors. Remind me to care sometime. In the by and by we're back in the pickup truck with the Jeff Black discs, B-Sides and Confessions Volume One and Birmingham Road, on which the music rolls through the ages with a grandeur recalling Van Morrison at his most giving and any number of kindred spirits you care to keep warmed inside, and out past the edge of town we are bound for glory with that music, outrunning the laws of time under the desert moon.

Jeff Black: Born in Kansas City. Lives in Nashville. Comes to the Mucky Duck September 11. Writes songs. Writes alone, which they don't do very much in Nashville because it's a committee over there with so much on the line but he does so anyway because the songs sound good enough just as they are, songs by a loner standing in our very own shadows.

In Houston, because we can't vouch for the future, he might sound like Pissing Razors or maybe he'll sound like a man who makes you smile and break and feel a little blessed that he came calling. He'll sing songs that wash like a river over your dreams and yearnings and you might recall some dark old memories that can now roam in the light of years passing, because this is a wild and unknown life and it leads to here, where it sounds so right.

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Marty Racine