A short essay by: Bo Cook

I’m sitting in the back row of some writer’s conference at Vanderbilt University and I start talking to this amazing redhead who looks like Lindsay Lohan off coke. We hit it off and I wind up meeting her later at some bar called 3 Crow that she recommends on east side of town. While we’re there, she asks me what my real reason for coming to Nashville is for, and I say, “To hear a band called ‘Wess Floyd and the Daisycutters’.” She asks, “Who are they?” I say, “Well, that’s a loaded question, sweetheart. I’m going to need some follow-ups.” Then the barrage comes. “Do they sound like ‘Panic at the Disco’?” “Oh my God, is that the band that’s opening up for ‘Death Cab’ this weekend?” “Do they have really cute names like ‘Ezra’ and ‘Rostam’?” In other words, are they young, clean-shaven, hipster douchebags whose whole musical existence is based on the adoration of people who don’t know shit about music and chicks that don’t do cocaine anymore? “No,” I say, and walk out.

It would be easy to say that “Wess Floyd and the Daisycutters” sound like a modern mixture of classic rock bands like “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” or “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” (you remember…back when the cool guys were getting laid), but what does that mean anymore in Young America where the real music fans constantly find themselves trying to explain what exactly a “Born to Run” or a “Damn the Torpedoes” is? It means you have to work a little harder. You have to put up the money yourself for an album, even if that means going without food for a couple of days. It means that, when you play a show, you have to leave all the hate, the hunger, the heartache, and the redemption you feel on the stage of every dive bar and juke joint from Kansas to Florida, because there are few places left anymore where real feelings truly belong. It means you have to bend the string a little more on a song called “Breaking Out”, beat the snare a little harder on “St. Paul”, or scream a little louder on “Record Player”. It means that you have to start something great in order to make people remember what American rock n’ roll really is all about, something that says that the few Young Turks that are still around have become tired of the bullshit, and then you have to call it “Blood Sworn Enemies”. P. S.: They’re coming after your daughters first.