The Morons of Oxy

The Wineskins

The first time we played live a big fat guy came up from the back of the
club and turned the juke box on. He stood there with a pool cue in his
hand staring right at us. Then our drummer jumped off the stage and
started beating the crap out of him. Or he would have I guess, if we’d had
a drummer. But we didn’t, we had two acoustic guitars and a mandolin. So
we just kept on playing, miming to a really loud version of Alabama’s
“Whisper To Me Softly”. It was kind of sad.

A year later we got a better gig at a club overlooking the Cumberland
River in downtown Nashville. The club owner was a skinny old hippie that
wouldn’t allow any amps or electric instruments. So we added the biggest
ones we could find, cello and string bass. The next thing you know we were
up and running, thumping away to a packed house every weekend. We would
practice and write songs during the week and then do our show on the
weekend. The Wineskins had arrived.

Any musician in Nashville will tell you that supply is way ahead of
demand. It’s always been that way. Thus getting a descent live gig is
tough if not impossible, but recording……….well now that’s a different
story. We had access to the best studios, engineers and players, and
quickly we began to learn how to capture the acoustic sound of The
Wineskins.

To us though, success meant getting a record deal, and we put a lot of our
energy into courting various labels and management companies. That’s when
it started to suck. Nashville can be one of the worst places to develop as
an artist, because you’re always in the shadow of the music industry, and
industry and art is an oxymoron. So we changed our name to The Morons of
Oxy (not really) and we fizzled, we flopped, we despaired, we moved back
to Mississippi.

But still, the founders of the band, the guys that once mimed to a juke
box, kept writing, and writing, and writing and eventually something
happened, an epiphany. We began to write songs because we had something to
say. It sounds simple, but it can be one of the most difficult things for
an artist to remember, to tell the truth, to use your talent as an
expression, to heal yourself with the things that you create. The world is
cluttered with good, but everything great is made this way.....Jeff