Jacob Young is the guy who introduced Jesco White aka The Dancin' Outlaw to the world at large. He also did an equally awesome documentary called The Wild and Wonderful World of Hasil Adkins. Honestly, I don't think either of those dudes would have had the cult popularity they had in the past 20 years if it wasn't for Jacob Young's documentaries (although The Dancin' Outlaw 2 is pretty terrible). Oddly enough, these DVDs are hard to come by, leaving me rigging my shitty Farmville pawn shop VCR into the hi-def super TV my bro-in-law got us last year, turning coaxial into RCA cables somehow, with homemade splitters held together by masking tape, and watching Jesco get all, "you best stop makin' them sloppy slimy eggs" inspirational in fully blown apart super pixelated effect. Fourth or fifth generation VCR dubs don't blow up well to the wide screens of today cyberhappy world. Man, I miss them days, hooking up two VCRs and making mix videos of retarded bullshit. Now it's all on Youtube, which is easy I guess, but there's something heartwarming about having some weird mongoloid punk rocker from Ohio mail you some weird offbrand blank VCR tape with Larry Williams giving directions that just typing "Larry Williams directions" into the youtubes doesn't give you. I know that sounds old manly of me, but shit man, it's true. I'm all for technology making our life easier in some aspects, like being able to take money out of the bank at night through their robot machines, or not having to stay up until 11:10 at night to see what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow morning and whether I have to get up 15 minutes early to warm up my lazy ass truck.
Anyways, Jacob Young also, before he did the Jesco White and Hasil Adkins things, made a short documentary called Appalachian Junkyard, about junkyards in West Virginia. I am a big fan of junkyards, love walking around them, especially the permanent family ones where they don't recycle stock, so once you find your make and model in a far corner down in the bottom where the old potato chip truck painted to say SLUTZ is at, you know it's there, and has most everything you need that you didn't already cannibalize off of it. Sadly, two summers ago, when scrap metal prices went sky high, a lot of old junkyards sold off their stock, thinning down the beautiful expanses of junk cars rural America once had. Even the Mahan junkyard down in Farmville sold off a bunch of their shit, from what I heard. That place was where my love of junkyards started, being a kid and tagging along with my dad to go look for shit, being a teenager and getting drunk in the treehouse and trying not to bust my ass coming back down the ladder steps. Tell you what though, that's a beautiful ass junkyard, with a full-sized muscle car buried in it, as well as Big Pug himself. In fact, oddly enough, there are two junkyards in Cumberland County, Virginia, where I went to funerals at. And I guess that's why the nonsense from the documentaries about Jesco White and Hasil Adkins spoke to me and still do. It's not so much a "haha, look at them, they crazy," thing, as it is I can relate to weird ass people like that. Southside Virginia got punked out by progress though, and them wild ass good ole boys all got replaced by short hair responsible Toby Keith fans. Fucking sad.
And where I live now, man, it's nothing but short hair responsible ass police-respecting Brad Paisley-loving assholes. It sucks. I want a rural world where the Jescos and Hasils can still flourish and people still fight chickens and they’ll never pave the roads and the cops don’t even respond to calls in certain parts of the county until the sun comes up. The road we’ve lived on for ten years has always been paved in our time here, but apparently only got paved like twenty years ago. Now it’s nothing but McHouses and well-to-do people cutting their grass four times a week, and our home insurance company just sent us a stupid letter saying we had to move the “unlicensed vehicles” from our property and the furniture off the front porch (I hope they don’t mean the freezer too, because that’s the best place for it) and unhook the extension cord running from the side window to the camper in the backyard. What the fuck kind of world do we live in? The fucking assholes have obviously won.
2 comments:
Thanks for your interest in my work. There are a few inaccurate things in your post, however. I did produce and direct Dancing Outlaw and Jesco Goes to Hollywood. The first show I had months to work on and the second show was shot in three days, thus the difference in the quality. The Hasil Adkins doc was made by Julian Nitzberg, not me. I've made many documentaries and they are all available on high quality dvd at dancingoutlaw. com. You can get Dancing Outlaw there too. Thanks again for mentioning my work.
____Jacob Young
Hopefully you come back and see this question... what about Appalachian Junkyard? Being from rural Virginia, and having spent a lot of my teenage delinquency years in a junkyard, I'd love to see this as it sounds like something I would've wanted to make.
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