Almost everything we know about Grant Peeples we learned from perusing his website and browsing the Internet. But we saw enough there to get us out the door and over to Lake Worth's South "F" Street tonight to pick up on his quirky, folkie tunes and wry, very political attitude.
We sure do hope we'll get to hear him reprise his song "Gay and Lesbian Sons and Daugthers of the Southern Confederacy," for one. Or his cover of 80s post-punks Shriekback's sweet "Gunning for the Buddha" (the man has range).
And besides, the shindig is gonna be on the grounds of a private home inhabited by folks with anarchist leanings -- kinda wild and wooly and with room for a fire pit and for the chilluns to run around -- so the ambiance is that of our old sixties commune. No admission charge, natch, though the hat will be passed for the benefit of Earth First! Journal, the radical environmental publication based in ElDub.
Looking like a balder version of Louis C.K., and (as his bio reflects) sharing the comic's gleefully acerbic sensibility, Peeples is a Tallahassee boy and:
a self-described LeftNeck, whose muse is the scrubland of the Florida Panhandle. That land; those people. I wrote a song one time called "Liberal With A Gun." That's pretty much me. I'm a treehugger that'll take a swing at you, a vegetarian that watches NASCAR. I lived on an island off the coast of Nicaragua for eleven years. I grew up on country music, and can't stand the crap that's called contemporary country music today.
At the age of 15, Peeples was turned on to Bob Dylan, and as he tells it:
After that, everything -- I mean every Goddamned thing -- was different. Especially me.. .I saw ideas as the mortar mix of my inner identity, the defining components of my soul. Activities, actions, were the bricks this mortar held together, forming walls that separated the good from the bad, truth from lie, redemption from oblivion.
The road since then took him through Nashville and on into a life in music, where he's a regular on the folk-roots circuit coast-to-coast. Tonight's gig is a rare chance to see a unique and accomplished performer -- as well as local poet/tunesmith Autumn Springs, a budding visionary -- in as intimate a setting as you'll find outside your bedroom.
Grant Peeples, at 7 p.m., on Friday, October 25, for Earth First! at Journal House, 701 S. "F" Street, Lake Worth.
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