White, Jim
Wrong-eyed Jesus!
It's the 25th anniversary of 'Wrong Eyed-Jesus!,' the debut album from that erstwhile druggie, drifting, storytelling, taxi-driving, recovering Pentecostal maverick talent from Pensacola, Florida who took alt country by storm in the '90s... and so Luaka Bop has been putting it back out into the world in a beautiful new gatefold jacket. 'Wrong-Eyed Jesus!,' or 'The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus!' (1997) revealed Jim to be a spiritual anatomist of the South on par with Flannery O'Connor and Tom Waits. His music was a conduit for all the crazy stories he found himself at the center of... for no good reason other than that the South is a crazy place. Fans of alt.country called it a masterpiece. Jim found all the attention pretty hysterical: "For 20 years I'd written these dark little songs," he said. "Every once in a while I'd play them for someone and they'd shout, 'Stop! That sucks so bad it makes my ears pop!' Then a thing called alt country came along and, boom, all of a sudden everyone's hollering 'Jim, you're a friggin' genius!' I mean, what happened???" Twenty-five years after the fact, it's a lot easier to see what happened. (By the way, if you haven't seen his BBC documentary, 'Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus,' an award-winning road-movie exploring Southern culture, do.) May 'Wrong-Eyed Jesus' give you a shot at redemption.