Mark Stuart formed the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash on a whim, by accident, by chance, by fortune. He'd been in a punk rock band but that was done, over, finished, and it had nearly finished him. He had a dream one night, and out of the dream came a band name: the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash. The new name was a joke, sort of. And yet, soon enough, it wasn't a joke anymore. Soon enough, it was a band, and soon enough, it was enough of a band that Johnny Cash himself gave them his personal seal of approval, and Johnny Cash's own legitimate son helped produce their first album.
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----------------------------"I kinda got the calling to play Country Music like one of those Pentecostal preachers gets the calling", Stuart says now. "It came like lightning out of the sky and burned into me deep. And Johnny Cash coming to me in my dreams wasn't weird. It was just that I had these dreams, and the dreams led to a body of work, to a bunch of songs, and they led to all of this."
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For Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons, the last ten years has been a blur of miles and markers. BSOJC hit the road and kept on going, and they've done it the hard way, piling their own gear into their own van, and then heading off into a dark night thats just a couple of hours away from day. A lot of Indie bands have done a lot of this, but not many have made the long haul across an entire decade. And amidst that grueling schedule, Stuart has managed to keep writing, delivering two previous records, Walk Alone and Distance Between, that built a hardcore fan base for the band and achieved a critical recognition most artists would kill for. It was an enviable position, as long as you didn't have to do all the work that went with it.
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--------------------------------Mile Markers, their latest cd, is pretty much what the name says: a set of signs posted to guide the way home, or maybe point out the direction that has home in the rear view mirror. Set in the West, it rambles and wanders and aims the steering wheel out at the endless horizon. A halfway unfolded road map, it passes through Austin and Tucson and San Ysidro and Los Angeles, through the badlands of both South Dakota and New Mexico, from Oklahoma and the windy Panhandle country around Abilene all the way to Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley. But Mile Markers is a spiritual voyage as much as a mere travelogue, a set of tales that turns into a single song of journeying forth.
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-----------------------------Its like a Western, in a way - its set in a contemporary West divided by white lines and asphalt, and settled by Truck stops and parking lots. Its a landscape of big skies and long roads and endless Mile Markers flying by at the edge of your vision. And like every true Western ever, contemporary or not, its a story of drifting and settling, of setting down roots and then having them torn up again, of learning that you don't dare settle down when you're just going to be forced to hit the road again.
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------------------------------What Mile Markers is, what the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash are, above and beyond it all, is nothing like an imitation. What Mark Stuart has managed to do on Mile Markers, is to come up with something that manages to be fresh and deep-rooted both, to be old-fashioned and brand new at the same time. There are bands out there that dress more authentically than the Bastard Sons, bands that have more (or less) tattoos or use vintage amps and guitars that pointedly predate Leo Fender and Semie Mosrite and Paul Bigsby. Maybe thats their version of a time machine that will magically transport them through time to a land they never will really ever manage to live in. Mark Stuart pays his tribute to the giants who have gone before by writing the finest, fiercest songs he can about the moment were all stuck with. Thats the present and the past, with the future looming up just ahead on the horizon, just down the road.-------------------------------------------------------
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