Party: Jerry Joseph & The Jackmormons AND Bloodkin return to the Lincoln Theatre!

Party: Jerry Joseph & The Jackmormons AND Bloodkin return to the Lincoln Theatre!

Jerry Joseph has worn a lot of hats over more than three decades in the music trenches – righteous rocker, hyper-observant cultural observer, spiritual & political firebrand, force of nature live performer – but the bedrock of what he does has always been songwriting of the highest caliber. Joseph is a kindred tunesmith to sharp, craftsmanship minded pros like Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon and Nick Lowe, where the resoundingly sturdy bones inside their compositions shape things no matter what’s draped over them. It’s a dedication to fundamentals and classic singer-songwriter standards that’s increasingly rare and welcome in a music environment that emphasizes texture and mood over substance. While Joseph has made acoustic albums in the past his new self-titled record (available 10/31/13 on Cosmo Sex School) is his most exposed studio effort to date, the man, his guitar and songs standing in the spotlight with an open invitation for listeners to sit at his heel as he explores some of the strongest, finest reaches of his rich catalog.

“It was hard to do,” says Joseph. “It’s like that dream where you’re naked at school except I’m naked in a circle with my favorite songwriters. Nick Cave, Aimee Mann and Robert Wyatt are there and say, ‘You play one, Jerry.’ What the fuck do I play? Well, I play ‘War at the End of the World,’ ‘Cochise’ or ‘Spy’ and hope they don’t laugh me off the stage. In the end, the point of this album is to get in that circle and show what I’ve got.”

With clear, pleasantly immediate production from longtime collaborator Gregg Williams (Blitzen Trapper, Dandy Warhols), Jerry Joseph draws out hidden gems from his writing for Stockholm Syndrome, The Denmark Veseys and earlier overlooked solo releases to explore the soul floating inside his work. It’s an intimate, passionately delivered, patiently rendered portrait of a serious songsmith laid bare akin to Chris Whitley’s Weeds, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Michael Hedges’ Watching My Life Go By, Tim Bluhm’s California Way, and Patty Griffin’s Living With Ghosts. It’s an album that sighs and laughs in real time, the emotional core lifted to the surface, the truths inside the songs as shiningly visible as their creator in this special setting.

“We recorded about 30 songs chosen carefully from the whole catalogue though consciously less from more recent records,” says Joseph. “What ended up on this album represent, to me, pretty good songwriting presented in a super intimate, completely unaffected way. We tried for perfect takes early on and figured out quickly that we just needed to let the tape roll and let each performance be as honest as possible.”

“They’re not my children, but I feel like I owe it to the songs to explore possibilities and reflect on them in a different light,” says Joseph. “With this record we wanted to leave every verse in, let the songs breathe a bit like early Dylan albums – clean, recorded with really good mics, versions that mean something.”

Joseph first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with still-beloved cult band Little Women, a reggae-rock proto-jam band that dominated the Rocky Mountain club scene for nearly a decade, and notably helped break jam giants Widespread Panic, who looked up to Joseph and opened for his band before rising to prominence. To this day, many of Panic’s favorite concert staples were written by Jerry Joseph, including such blazing epics as “North,” “Chainsaw City” and “Climb to Safety.” Today, Joseph neatly describes Little Women as “a mash-up of Burning Spear and the Grateful Dead dressed up like the New York Dolls.”



“Bloodkin are prolific, determined and strangely unknown. [ONE LONG HUSTLE] is a deep account of Bloodkin’s pursuit of a cutting Southern-life storytelling with an electric lingo also drawn from Neil Young and the Replacements…while the dead reckoning in ‘God’s Bar,’ at the end of the set, proves this tale is nowhere near over.”
-DAVID FRICKE in ROLLING STONE

“I’ve been very lucky…to work with genius songwriters like the guys in Widespread Panic, Vic Chesnutt, Jerry Joseph, Danny Hutchens, and Todd Snider. Their ability to render their emotions in words blows my mind on a daily basis.”
-DAVE SCHOOLS in POPMATTERS

“You should buy the ONE LONG HUSTLE box set from the band just for the amazing liner notes. The music is, of course, worth every penny.”
-SLOANE SPENCER in COUNTRY FRIED ROCK

“One of the more criminally underrated bands of their generation.”
-JEFFREY SISK in the Pittsburgh DAILY NEWS

Daniel Hutchens and Eric Carter met each other when they were eight years old. They solidified their early friendship based on a mutual love of baseball, comic books, and rock n roll music. They grew up in West Virginia; much time during their high school years was spent on Skull Run Road, where Eric’s family lived, a few miles outside Ravenswood. The boys recall that road as being the site of their first garage band practices.

After high school, they started getting a little more serious about their blossoming songwriting partnership. Their road wound through Huntington, WV, and eventually on to Athens, GA, which they soon came to call home. They continued to concentrate on their songwriting, and by the early ‘90s they had a catalogue of over 300 compositions. By this time Hutchens and Carter had given their musical collaboration a “band name”: Bloodkin.

People started to notice, and some even started covering some Bloodkin compositions, most notably Widespread Panic, who wound up recording three Bloodkin songs, and who continue to play those and other Bloodkin songs live. Panic’s cover of “Can’t Get High” peaked at #27 on the Billboard AOR charts. Other songs in Panic’s regular rotation are “Makes Sense To Me”, “Henry Parsons Died”, “End Of The Show”, “Who Do You Belong To”, and occasionally “Quarter Tank Of Gasoline”.

Daniel also wound up playing with ex-Velvet Underground member Moe Tucker in the early-to-mid ‘90s; he played on three of her albums and several of her tours.

In 1994 Bloodkin released their first official CD, GOOD LUCK CHARM. The project was produced by Johnny Sandlin (legendary producer of the Allman Brothers, Eddie Hinton, and so many others). Bloodkin recording projects over the years have also featured producers John Keane (R.E.M, Cowboy Junkies, etc.) and David Barbe (Son Volt, Drive By Truckers, etc.). All the while, the Bloodkin boys have continued to play live all over the Southeast and beyond.

Daniel and Eric have shared the stage with different lineups throughout Bloodkin’s history, but the last several years have cemented a familiar band: Daniel on vocal and guitar, Eric on guitar and backing vocal, Jon Mills on bass, and Aaron Phillips on drums.