Hotwalker Charles Bukowski A Ballad for Gone

Product Description Tom Russell's Hotwalker CD is a portrait of a segment of American culture in a time gone by. Through original songs, narration, and the actual voices of literary and historical figures, Tom constructs a recollection of the outsider voices of American popular culture, literature and art of the 1960's. It is Tom Russell's second foray into photographing a piece of America's past, the first being the critically acclaimed The Man From God Knows Where CD. Amazon.com Veteran troubadour Tom Russell's most conceptually ambitious (and audacious) release to date is less a collection of songs than an intensely personal travelogue through a bohemian America that no longer exists. It's like a postmodern spin on an old-time supernatural radio series, conjuring ghosts from thin air. With Russell as tour guide and circus midget Little Jack Horner riding shotgun, the narrative channels the voices of , , and , while connecting the cultural dots between the Greenwich Village of folk legend , the Bakersfield of , the American southwest of environmentalist , and the border cantinas of Tijuana. Russell subtitles the album A Ballad for Gone America, and it's plain he means "gone" as both the highest hipster's praise ("real gone," "outtasight") and a celebration of a wild strain of outsider artistry that has disappeared. By reminding the culture how much it has lost--how safe and homogenized it has become--Russell enriches the creative spirit with these echoes from the underground. --Don McLeese