Joe Shit the Ragman, or: Roux goes to a festival

“Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs.” - Virgil, Aeneid, song II

One of the perks of writing for ROUX, the greatest stopgap on this side of Luxembourg’s cultural landscape, is that you get free stuff: tickets, mainly, for concerts, plays and exhibitions. One of the drawbacks of writing for ROUX is that you get free stuff: tickets for concerts, plays and exhibitions, when you had imagined a different course for your weekend. Now, the upsides do outweigh the downsides tenfold; but sometimes comes in the mail an invitation to an event that doesn’t inspire much confidence (to remain polite) and, sometimes, even those have to be honoured. Sometimes, finally, you lose a round of rock-paper-scissors.

This is how I ended up attending, in early December, a festival called FTF (and catching covid in the process). I must admit that my enthusiasm for the thing was so low that I never bothered to check what FTF stood for. Female To Female, maybe, or Faster Than Fast-food? Fuck The French? I have no idea. For all I know, it could stand for Flush Toilet Festival, because the music was, indeed, not very good – sorry for the spoiler.

Of course, it was in Belgium, near Waterloo (not my favourite ABBA song). Like in 1815, rainfall had turned the field into mud and, since we’re at the date of the battle, I’ll say for the readers of The Charterhouse of Parma that I found myself as confused and disorientated as Fabrice del Dongo. For those who don’t get it: congratulations! that’s the feeling I’m trying to convey. Smoke, noise and people shouting in a strange language – and I do speak French. Lunar landscape and lunar atmosphere, and by that I mean that it was crowded with alien-looking people. In terms of cultural events, Belgium is to Luxembourg what Mad Max is to the Atacama Desert: a little less barren, and with more loonies. At least – I told myself – the social entomologist that I am would have a field day.

The

The festival was surprisingly large. Unfortunately, I lost the poster containing the line-up. From the top of my head, here are a few of the headliners: The Babyshakers; Groovy Funky Warden & the Electric Inmates; The Schopenhauer Suicide Prevention Hotline; Big Black Cow; St James of the Bordello & the Kickers Against the Pricks; Just Another Sucker on the Vineyard & the Gin-soaked Boys; Ike Bravado & the Ip-Dip-Dogshit Rock'n'Rollers; Gang of Gin; Dennis the Dainty & the Lackadaisies; Miss Jen Durd & the Misgenderers; The Poptimists; Half-the-quarter-of-a-man & the Twice-as-much-of-nothing-at-all's; Rainer Fiebersprecher & Spam!; The Shaken Babies; Anne Dee & the Andy's; The Thirty-seventh of Sebaste & the Thirty-nine Others; Lars Moriendi & the Cadaveric Council; Sunshine High & the Singers of Sad Songs; Joe Shit the Ragman & his Skag-and-bone Band; St Vincent & the Grenadines; The Great Fuck-all Fireballs; Enrico of the End & the Scatological Eschatologists; General Smuts & the Pulp Enjoyers; The Martini Police; Jack the Fatalist & the So-be-it Union; The New Unoriginals; Baby Whinealot & the Sad Cunts. I might be misremembering some of them.

No band was good that weekend, but the worst one I heard was Dennis the Dainty & the Lackadaisies. The Lackadaisies were: Marty Milquetoast, Quaintin, Fey Freddie Feckless, Mild-mannered Clement and Peter Softbollock. Nothing special presentation-wise: just run-of-the-mill, cheesy dudes in T-shirts with ties printed on them. The performance itself was poppy-sloppy, folkyyolky, acoustic stringy-strangy, creatively bankrupt and played at molasses speed. Don’t-wake-the-cat-up-core. The singer proved that you could be a eunuch without necessarily being a castrato. Music for flightless birds. Let’s move on.

I’d like to take the rest of this review to talk about my only marking experience at this festival: Joe Shit the Ragman & his Skag-andbone Band.

Calling Joe Shit’s voice whiskey-soaked would be an understatement. Tom Waits on “Jockey Full of Bourbon” is a whiskey-soaked voice; on “Big Black Mariah”, it veers into screamed-in-a-pillow territory. Joe Shit’s voice, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the dull rumble of scraping a heavy sideboard along the ground, with the texture of barbed wire. To account for the voice cracks, imagine the sideboard still filled with porcelains and cutlery. I seemed to hear the influence of Captain Beefheart in his tired lawnmower intonations; and, indeed, the crowd went mental when he launched himself into “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes I Do” and followed it up with “Ella Guru”. His set lasted roughly an hour, during which he burped and gurgled two dozen ditties about crop circles and the state of his liver.

As for his Skag-and-bone Band, there’s not much to say, I’m afraid: it’s all in the name. One of them is called Melvin, I think, and plays the washboard, when he’s in a state to do anything at all. This last remark is applicable to all the band members.

Joe Shit and his band performing on stage Wellington. Shot on iPhone.

I met Joe Shit on the festival ground, by chance, on the evening of the day he performed. We grabbed a drink and started talking (I didn’t even need to use the little “open sesame” that is casually mentioning that I’m from ROUX). He’s an “original mind” for sure, but very affable, in spite of his breath. I have a few things to say about this tête-à-tête.

My dear colleague sofiya_10billion conducted an interview for this issue, titled “An artist needs to be hungry!”, and no one exhibits this better than Joe Shit the Ragman. He has plastic bags (non-biodegradable) for shoes and a cardboard coat. He usually hangs around gas stations and blames his alcoholism on a tack piano in downtown New Orleans. He’s the drifter kind, a pilgrim of the American highway network, forever on the road like an illiterate Jack Kerouac; generally westbound, as if the Holy Sepulchre were to be found somewhere in California. Or is he just a godforsaken Cain, who lost his way even to the land of Nod? He told me that everyone is searching for the idea they’re ready to die for, the tomb in which to lay, at last, their weary bones. As long as they haven’t found it, they’re like the clouds, a plaything of the winds, which change every day. His speaking voice sounds like purging a radiator. Did Joe find his faith and was it at the bottom of a bottle of wine? I didn’t ask him the Gretchenfrage.

We stayed together until well into the night, seated on foldable camp ing chairs, conversing around beers and some card games he probably made up, such as figs and Formosa, skin the fox alive, who-loses-wins and saint-Cosmas-I-come-to-adore-you. We talked fishing rods, lightning rods, dowsing rods, King Herod’s massacre of the Innocent and Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto #3 in D minor.

Joe Shit likes angling and songs with hooks. He showed me a few of his catches. Some of them were truly impressive. The one he was most proud of was an authentic US army standard issue M-42 service boot from 1944. The thing was huge: at least size 48. A responsible fisherman, he returned it to the wild after taking a picture. I commended him for his skills as he put the photographs back in a small wallet bound in snake skin. He probably killed that snake himself, because only posers keep the DIY attitude confined to their music. And if there’s one thing you can’t deny about Joe Shit, it’s that he’s the real deal. Perhaps not a very good deal, but definitely a real one.

And this is how this pathetic festival experience ended on a strange and pleasant, a strangely pleasant note. In the morning, Joe Shit left in a camping car with all the band members he managed to find. I’ll interview him for the next issue of ROUX, provided he doesn’t die.

by Valère Gaube

(Remark: This story is freely invented. There has never been a festival called FTF in Waterloo and all the bands are fictional. Any resemblance to an existing musical group is purely fortuitous.)