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You are born in the South of William Faulkner, on the southern border of Georgia. The great Okefenokee swamp, the plantations, and the small town of Valdosta. It’s the 1950s; your family is poor. Whole days without eating. A little girl offers you candy. You’re a four-year-old, and you gobble them down with joy and greed. She smirks, they were chloride crystals used for photo development. After scraping your vocal cords, you have to relearn how to speak. At six, during a scuffle with a peer, you lose an eye; you get a glass one. During the harvest season, you joined the workers in the fields: they worked mimicking Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry. Your mother Mary Alice Joyner, married three times and widowed twice, starts a bar where a shining Wurlitzer 2000 Juke Box reigns. You adore Buddy Holly. Mom supports your rockstar fantasies. However, at 19 you get involved in a damn car accident. You break your spine. Legs and arms shattered. During a desperate surgery, you’re even declared dead. An irreversible coma. Yet you come back to life. You heard your mother cry desperately. And you no longer had the rush to leave. For her, Buddy, Roy Orbison, and the swamp crickets. But in high school, you played like a maniac. And now you have to go on stage with crutches and will always perform sitting down?
Bruce sees beyond.
From the provincialism of the Stroke Band, a basement pop-rock album, and quite a reputation as troublemakers, you move on to the Unknowns. The other half of a greater unit is Mark Neill, a melancholic and talented guitarist. The rhythm section includes Dave Doyle and Steve Bidrowski. The reputation that your “San Diego band” soon gets is “smelling like a hay wagon.” But live, you're incendiary, oozing pure rock'n'roll. At the Skeleton Club, Ray Manzarek notices you just before, during one of your performances, the place gets seized. It's time to move: from Georgia to Los Angeles; you set out in a twenty-year-old sedan. In the City of Angels, X, Blasters, Weirdos, Dils, and Zeros are all the rage. You get the chance to record an EP for Bomp. In the director's chair, Liam Stenberg (who will sign “Walk Like an Egyptian”). Only he wants you to sound like Sparks and Devo. So how to compress your raw, crude energy, the violence, and the force of your live shows? You record in an airplane hangar; with results that aren't despicable at all. In fact, “Dream Sequence” (1981) is a mini-LP, with six original Joyner/Neill tracks that over time will become an underground archetype, a sort of inevitable fetish. As much as you declare yourself unsatisfied and feel betrayed, there's a lot of your visceral, aggressive, hypnotic, garage rock here: a feverish, impulsive, primal, hieratic force. Rockabilly, punk-new wave, surf. Noir atmospheres, gangster imagery, melodic vocations, hallucinatory shifts, literary flashes. In short, real nervous, burning rock'n'roll; precise twang guitar sounds, velvet or acidly glazed. Your basic keyboard thickens the sound. You painted it as “realistic music, close to the working class.” There's that distinctive trait: “The Unknowns play only Mosrite guitars”, the persistent refusal of Fender guitars! Reverberations that attack you. They run down your spine. The harnessing of the tremolo. And your intact and combative singing. Your paranoid howls, especially in the magnificent “Dream Sequence”, earn you the title of “Bryan Ferry mewling like a cat in heat.” Admirers compared you to the Cramps. Detractors would point to you as poor precursors of Chris Isaak. The following year the eponymous LP will arrive, but coinciding with the band’s breakup. A disdainful, hallucinatory, wild, murky, and mysterious album; still full of sixties references. It’s excellent! And yet you’re so unsatisfied with the mix that Invasion withdraws the work from the market. Ed Stasium is in the pillory (producer of Talking Heads and Ramones!). Can you believe it?
Bruce sees beyond.
You launch a solo career, accompanied by temporary bands (The Plantations, The Tinglers, The Reconstruction, Atomic Clock). You work mainly in France, your true artistic homeland. The collaborations are illustrious: Steve Wynn, John Doe, Ray Manzarek, Sky Saxon, Peter Buck, and Stan Ridgway. Nine albums in twenty years, amid frequent hospitalizations for always precarious health, and two failed marriages (miscarriages wore out your first wife, drug addiction gripped the second). And you've returned to Georgia; perhaps to finally get to where you've always been, but only after leaving? There’s also an unexpected reunion with the Unknowns in 1991 (the LP “Southern Decay”, direct and clean twist rock'n'roll).
“Where I grew up, cotton and peanuts reigned / Every spring, the little farmers were let out of the school I attended / my friends and I grew up on the other side of the tracks / we worked together and grew up, yes, that’s right / we ate pea soup and drank iced tea / we thought we were all American in the land of courage and freedom / we went to different churches but sang the same damned songs / we grew up and left town, we didn’t stay there slogging it out for too long”.
Today this fighter is 64 years old and still has much to tell. He lives again by the Okefenokee swamp. He says that “The swamp is like the moon; it’s there, it exists, but we cannot tame it. The water and humidity protect Valdosta from the modern world.” His is an honest story, which reassures. And “Dream Sequence” is ideal for approaching these illustrious unknowns. Underestimated. They were “one of those superior live bands. One of those real bands that make rock'n'roll true.” Indeed, authentic r'n'r. That is, “the expression of our daily life, of malaise, of our frustrations and above all of our rage to live.” With all that happens within two precise distances: the moon and a swamp.
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