Joe Toe-Rag

Joe Toe-Rag was a rag-time nobody with two strings on his six string and a harmonica solo in his tanglewood hair. He'd do a 12-bar crawl and sing for his beer and sleep in his flat-tire car. The world was built out of dictators, money-lenders and racketeer politics but Joe just slid underneath their understanding and turned his poverty into a pentatonic harmonic. He built his wooden shack utopia on the edge of some dark dimension and slid up to the 12th fret whenever the rent was due. "You gotta strike 'em weird' said Joe, 'or else they'll drain your self-esteem.' Joe was no dinosaur despite the scales all over his guitar. He bent the rules like he bent the strings and escaped along his endless bass-runs whenever the authorities called. Joe wrote his own world, and sang it differently every night. He'd hook them on the chorus and stump them on the verses. Joe was nobody's fool and his one and only very best friend.

Text by Trev Teasdel

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