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Can‘t remember the yr but we went to one of the picnics on the riverfront near the arch in St. Louis, MO.Jack you sent me down a rabbit hole!!!!!!
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Can‘t remember the yr but we went to one of the picnics on the riverfront near the arch in St. Louis, MO.Jack you sent me down a rabbit hole!!!!!!
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T shirt paid off.
I last saw DAC in a little club in Memphis in 2015. He was sporting a little fedora and put on a hell of a show!
John Lofgren Monkey Boots Shinki Horsebuttt - $1,136 The classic monkey boot silhouette in an incredibly rich Shinki russet horse leather.
Grant Stone Diesel Boot Dark Olive Chromexcel - $395 Goodyear welted, Horween Chromexcel, classic good looks.
Schott 568 Vandals Jacket - $1,250 The classic Perfecto motorcycle jacket, in a very special limited-edition Schott double rider style. Excellent, not many people could pull off a sombrero but John Hartford might be the exception.
RIP David Allan Coe
I last saw DAC in a little club in Memphis in 2015.
Here's a good one from Sonoma County, California (just north of San Francisco) by Tim Graham, February 10, 2026:
"Tom Waits Insists Royalty Checks Be Delivered by Raven Wearing Top Hat
Sonoma County, Calif. -- Eccentric singer Tom Waits demanded all correspondence be brought to him in increasingly unorthodox ways, frustrated couriers confirm.
“The record company wants to send me checks in the mail—that’s just boring, man,” said Waits while feeding a tortoise that lives in a rusted Studebaker. “Their jobs must be incredibly dull, so I like to liven things up a bit for them. These days my checks are delivered by a big ol’ raven named Lloyd who wears a little top hat. Every time he drops off a check I give him some seeds and a shiny steel wartime penny. I used to have them fly a pedal-powered dirigible over the house and put the check inside a Burma Shave jar which would safely float to the ground on a tiny parachute, but I guess the FAA didn’t cotton to that so much.”
The raven’s owner says it was challenging to train the bird to deliver the checks.
“Lloyd is one of my smartest ravens,” said Ricky Llywelyn of Llywelyn’s Bird Academy. “Even so, I had a tough time getting him to conform to Mr. Waits’ seemingly arbitrary rules. For instance, the raven is to arrive after sunup but before the sunlight illuminates the pile of vintage spittoons in his yard. And if it’s raining, Mr. Waits insists Lloyd wears a tiny Mackintosh coat that once belonged to a 1930s circus monkey named Pipsqueak. Lloyd will wear the top hat and coat just fine, but he rejected the monocle that Mr. Waits had also requested.”
Longtime record industry executive Carlton Sweat says some artists seem to enjoy making things difficult for the administrators in the business.
“They resent the suits and often see us as impediments to their artistic expression, even though we’re the ones that get them paid—after taking our cut, of course,” said Sweat. “Sometimes they take it out on us in creative ways. For example, for a time Axl Rose would refuse to go on stage unless he had a fresh piece of straw to chew on like he did in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video—and it had to be from his hometown in Indiana. We wasted a lot of money overnighting straw on that tour.”
At press time, Waits had further complicated his royalty payment process, now demanding that checks be printed on paper made from shredded pre-war horse racing forms."
And for you disbelievers, here's the link to the online article: https://thehardtimes.net/music/tom-...checks-be-delivered-by-raven-wearing-top-hat/ .