Gutter Folk, as it has come to be called, has been influenced by numerous artists and genres, from Country & Western to Grunge, from Marilyn Manson to Michael Bolton. But the secret ingredient as it were, the hidden influence that no one talks about is a forgotten school of music called 'Water Jazz'. That no one talks about it is a sign of how completely forgotten it has become, for it was practiced at only a single location for a limited period of time, by a man whose name not even Google was able to recover.
But it existed, it surely did, and it proved to be the quickening agent for a young Jeremy Owen, then Gypsy Crow, as he struggled to find his own musical identity.
Recalls Owen in his 1967 memoir '
The Way of the Road':
"I saw this guy on Granville; a scruffy, disreputable sort, banging away at a dirty, 5 string guitar. He was all over the place with his timing and the guitar was so out of tune it sounded more as though he were torturing the instrument, rather than playing it. But despite a total lack of aesthetics, the man had a hat out and a battered sign beside the hat. The sign read: Water Jazz, and it was enough to intrigue me, though the briefest of exchanges proved beyond any doubt that the man was a total lunatic. Nevertheless I came away from the encounter with a sense that he was on to something. He was a genius, though the loss of his reason had also robbed him the ability to focus that genius. I thought perhaps, if his lunacy and abandon could be wed to my own style and purpose... well, then we might have something."
