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Named Jackson Thomas Smith by my politician father, I suppose I was to be another southern lawmaker sipping sweet tea in the sweltering heat of the Tennessee summer - but something went wrong. Something somewhere around 91, I was hanging with my cousin watching music tv and this strung-out bleach blonde cat with a ragged looking axe shows up on this video singing about how he's so happy, cause to-day he found his friends...and I was hooked. Fast forward a few years - I see the same guy sitting in the middle of a bunch of candles and lilies with acoustic guitars playing his punk/metal hybrids like they were folk songs - it was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard or seen - it was the closing song though, an ancient blues relic, that put me on this road. It would be five more years before I got a guitar, but the first song I learned was Nirvana's version of 'In the Pines'.
I got sucked into the workforce not long after I got my guitar and it became a cheap way to pass my time. I worked first as a computer guy in a big corporation, then as a video store manager, then a call center associate, then a cook. After all that came, the printing factory. It was my time there - night after night of standning in the same spot, doing the same thing, looking at the same people, taking my break at the same time, that really brought my focus onto music. I started jotting down little rhymes, and singing to myself on the line. Somewhere in the middle of one of those stupid tunes it hit me - I was trading my life, hour by hour, for the money to distract myself from the fact that I hated my life - and by standing there in that factory, I was fueling the system that makes life easy to hate. I dropped my stack of books, walked out the door, and sang what would become 'Blue Collar Blues' to myself on the way home.
