russ walton

you gotta wonder about the fweakly's music awards criteria when a band like the theater fire keeps getting nominated in the "avant-garde experimental" category, while russ walton consistently shows up in the "folk-acoustic" stakes. likewise, you gotta wonder what the crowd at the ridglea wineroom made of russ' approach when he opened for darrin kobetich there last week. i mean, sure, russ calls himself a singer-songwriter, but in performance, you're as likely to find him using the whammy bar of a strat to control the clouds of feedback emanating from his amp as you are to hear him strumming idiosyncratic patterns on his acoustic. like alexander "skip" spence's, syd barrett's, or jimi hendrix's, walton's music's really nothing more than good old-fashioned psychedelia, whether electric or unplugged (and that has nothing to do, by the way, with whether or not ol' russ has ever, um, been experienced: psychedelia's in the ear of the behearer, after all). listening to his eighth and tenth cd's (copies of which russ handed out at the wreck room the other night, each one stuffed with photocopy reductions of articles from the fweakly and sample press which someone, it appeared, had painstakingly cut out, folded, and stuffed by hand), my initial reaction was similar to a friend's on recently being introduced to the music of captain beefheart: "part genius, part shitty." but i can't stop listening to the damn things, and their creator has an undeniably unique sound and vision. and at the end of the day, isn't that really what we're all looking for? wanna hear more. will hear more.