A pact with the Devil, a pact with the Christ.

Any religious scholar will tell you that this world is doomed, but, that it'll all be okay so long as you accept Jesus into your heart and all that ooey-gooey stuff.
But what if they're wrong?
Such was the conundrum faced by a young Jeremy Owen when he went out to the crossroads and sold his soul to Jesus. He came away from the bargain with a red guitar, 3 chords and the Truth, but felt uneasy nonetheless.
Never one to put all his eggs in one basket, Jeremy sought out the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, etc, and made another deal. No longer having an immortal soul with which to bargain, he offered instead his heart -the very symbol of his mortality. The Devil accepted and gave to Jeremy a battered fedora, a walking stick and a briefcase, inside of which was a book of songs.
That which we now call Gutter Folk owes it's origins to these two, seemingly contradictory, contracts.
In the mortal world, during waking life, Jeremy Owen was the Devil's man; doing the Devil's work in everything that he did.
But when he slept, and when he died, Jesus would claim him and put him to His own works.
Said Jeremy in a 1982 interview:

"Yeah, it was pretty confusing, being pulled one way and then the other. And a lot of the time my work of the day would be to undo what I had done the night before and vice versa. It was like playing a game of Chess by oneself - no matter what, you're guaranteed to lose. Eventually, however, an equilibrium was reached."

Just how, exactly, this middle way was discovered or implemented, scholars and historians can only guess. What is known is that in 1963 -around the time a young Bob Dylan was making a name for himself- Gutter Folk emerged on the scene as a serious contender and an upset to the pre-established order. Nothing would ever be the same again.


-From 'Reflections on the Void: How Music and Nothingness conspired to save the world' by Gypsy Crow. Pub. Longman, London, 1805.

Science V. Magic

"One of my earliest memories of any substance or context is of Kindergarten or daycare, making me four or five at the time. And the teacher/supervisor/lady-person says to us all, "We are going to make clouds today." And I can remember being really excited by this, because -let's face it- clouds are cool; what's more, at four or five they're downright amazing. In fact, the only downside to clouds at that age is that they're so high up, so what this lady was proposing seemed really ideal to me. And then she proceeded to gather us around a stove where she boiled a pot of water. When the water was sending up great veils of steam she held a frying pan about a foot over it and made us watch as water condensed on it's bottom and dripped back down. That, she said, was exactly how rain was made; the steam was clouds.
Inarticulate as my thoughts may have been at that age, I can recall their substance: which was that I didn't know what, exactly, had just happened there, but those were not clouds. All of it was like a cheap magic trick and I remained unconvinced by it. I still am to this day. Clouds may well be condensed water waiting to fall back earthward, but they are also magic, and they have nothing to do with frying pans."

- excerpt from Introduction to The Magic of Music by Jeremy Owen (pub. John Murray, London 1807)