The Report, Vol. 1 – featuring Joseph Childress and a dead body…

We are a little late on reporting this, as The Report has been sold out for almost two months now! …but we still feel compelled to send some major love to McGregor over at Chocolate Bobka for this amazing undertaking. If you are lucky enough to own – or even to chance upon one of these books – then you should treat yourself to some quality time with its pages. Don’t believe us? …then check out this rad trailer:

The Report from Charles Poekel on Vimeo.

As Devin at Naturalismo put it:

McGregor has assembled what is likely to become one of the most interesting publications this year and will only be made available for a short period of time, each copy being handmade to order. The Report is a cultural breath of fresh air with its focus on slowing down a bit from the rapid and brief fragments comprising much of online music/arts documentation and delving deeper into what is happening at the moment.

…and as McGregor describes it:

The Report, if you don’t already know, is a 100+ page bi-annual journal, compilation and DVD package, containing the weirdest, wisest musings on culture, art and music. Contributors include Dent May, Ben Chasny, Rob Mitchum (Pitchfork), Devin Wolfe (Naturalismo), Justin Gage (Aquarium Drunkar), Molly Sarle (Mountain Man), Matt Mondanile (Ducktails, Real Estate), Sawyer Carter Jacobs (Underwater Peoples, Family Portrait, Emilie Friedlander (Visitation Rites, Arthur Mag, Tiny Mix Tapes), Madalyn Merkey (Irma Vep Tapes), and Cian Traynor (SeeWhatYouHear, Guardian), amongst many, many others. The cassette compilation, which also comes as a digital download, features a bevy of exclusive unreleased tracks, as well as songs that simply were overlooked or are soon to be released.

The Report also comes with an exclusive DVD of never-before-seen footage of Justin Townes Earle, Pure Ecstasy, Twin Sister, the Alex Bleeker and the Freaks supergroup (featuring 2 drummers and Julian Lynch on keys), as well as selections from the Chocolate Bobka Church show featuring Mountain Man, Liam the Younger, Lux Perpetua, and No Demons here.

…as we tend to say about such endeavors:

THIS RULES!

Joseph Childress is featured prominently in back to back pieces. First in a truly thoughtful essay on the life and times of “folk” music in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Devin Wolfe at Naturalismo, and second in the most in depth interview ever conducted with Joseph, by Irish journalist extraordinaire Cian Traynor.

Here is a thrilling excerpt from Cian’s Interview with Joseph in the Report:

So tell me about going on the road and hopping trains…

I was extremely influenced by Woody Guthrie’s biography Bound for Glory. I found a friend who had travelled before and we decided to make our way up the east coast to meet another friend. So that spring my folks were practically in tears. They’re conservative, white Christian ranchers from Colorado. Along the way, one woman in New York got inspired by our trip and sublet her house so she could hit the road with us. She got hit by a car in Gainesville, Florida and had to stay in hospital for a while, so it kind of turned into a sad story but, y’know, it’s just that aspect of adventure. We made our way down the coast and slept wherever we could: in stairwells, on picnic tables, in old apartment buildings. We reached New Orleans and I got arrested for bein’ a knucklehead; bein’ drunk and goofin’ off. The southern route goes straight through there, so they have a heavy crackdown on wanderers and tramps. They saw me trying to sleep out near a bush. I made my way back to Colorado and right after that I recorded The Rebirths. Wow (laughs); haven’t thought about this stuff in a long time. We did a lot of riding the flying J, which is hitchhiking from one truck stop to another. It beats sticking your thumb out on the side of the highway. No one really picks you up and I learned that the hard way. I spent two days trying to hitch my way out of Jacksonville, by myself, during a snowy Thanksgiving. And I thought, ‘God, what an experience’.

What was the strangest moment?

Oh man, we had a lot of strange moments. The one I always talk about when I’m drunk was the night we broke into an abandoned house in South Carolina. It was raining at two in the morning and we hitched a ride from this truck driver who was completely fucked up on drugs. But we were pretty desperate so we gave this guy a try. He said, “you two guys sit in the back; she’s sittin’ up here with me”. Tony and myself looked at each other like, ‘oh great. What’s this guy gonna do?” So he hands her a box of drugs and tells her to get it ready. I’m just thinking to myself, “what the hell? This isn’t smart. Doin’ drugs in a frickin’ freight truck flying down a two-lane highway in the middle of the night”. I think the others were just riding along with it. Eventually I voiced my concerns and he looked at the woman, made an obscene gesture and said, “do you guys feel like dying tonight?” When he wanted to stop to get beer, we decided to get the hell out of there. So we take off from this Get ‘N’ Go in the middle of nowhere and my friend finds an abandoned house down the highway. I was standing guard to make sure there were no cops while they broke in. Then my friend comes back, shaking, saying, “Joseph, I think we just found a fuckin’ dead body”.

Oh my God…

I shine my flashlight through this old house, which is covered in dust, and sure enough there’s a body lying face down in the middle of the fuckin’ floor. We tip-toe up to it, almost holding each other and eventually I get up the nerve just to touch it and see. Turns out it’s a fully clothed life-size dummy from God-knows-when filled with sawdust and cotton. I don’t know if it was for security purposes or what. So we enjoyed an ecstatic moment and knew this was going to be a good one.

This is the second instance this year where Joseph Childress has been featured in the debut issue of an amazing handmade publication (check out the Ribbons Box Set: Book 1) Let’s hope that there are many more volumes of The Report to come.

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