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Original Cover Artwork by Rebecca Israilevich

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Limited Edition CD's are available on a first come first serve basis. Email me here for more info.

All songs written & performed by Delta Company with special guest Steve Keys. Recorded at Goodmoon Studio in Acworth, GA from the winter of 2007 to the winter of 2008. Produced & enginered by Johnny Massey. Mastered by Jason Buecker. ©Delta Company 2009

Specials Thanks: Kristen Massey, Steve Keys, Brad Humbarger, Jason Buecker, Rebecca Israilevich, Jennifer Coleman, Alex's Parents, the Great Spirit (not necessarily God), Upchurch and the good people of Bowline Circle

This album is for Alex's Grandma.

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I’m not sure who it was who told us about Shake on the Lake, maybe Bobby Cobb, older kids of like mind or maybe just a suitably unsavory character, hell, probably all three. At the time, 94-96, the place seemed mythical, lawless, a refuge where it didn’t matter you were 16 and on mushrooms; all that mattered was you had cash. It also didn’t matter which friends you were with because everything that happened there to any of us eventually became one story, a shared history.

I do remember driving way out the fuck in the middle of nowhere, past Belzoni, Silver City, past Midnight, seeing signs of towns with weird names like Zalleria and Norway, until we rounded a dogleg ended up idling in the parking lot of a glorified sheet metal shed overlooking a swamp somebody had mistakenly called Wolf Lake. I also remember being scared shitless from the sheer antiquity and size of the four-wheel drives in the lot, trucks as duded-up and bent as the rednecks driving them.

We’d pay the cover and quail inside, self-conscious but smart enough to know nobody gave a shit, that it was a buyer’s market. Usually the owner, a man who looked too much like a mugshot who we’d eventually give the nom de tonk Gregory Shake, was behind what passed for a plywood bar, ready to take what little cash we’d made from our summer jobs.

The night that stands out most is the one Blue Steel played, though I’m sure the details here blur into others. Imagine a band consisting of former Mid-South wrestlers playing Marshall Tucker covers and you’ll get a good aural picture of Blue Steel; badass redneck rock played by bearded drunks, perfection. It’s easy to romanticize Shake on the Lake, but there was a certain level of pure capitalist democracy to the place. Debutantes slow danced with welders and high school boys hit on divorced hair-dressers.

No matter the trip, my favorite aspect of Shake on the Lake, the one staved in my memory like a pylon, was pissing outside. You’d walk past the band, out the corroded metal door and into the humid, blanket heat of the Delta summer, mosquitoes thick as a contrail around you, then wander down by the bank while Blue Steel or some other sonic aberration thrummed through the air behind. No matter the weather, Wolf Lake was always darker than the night around it, a washed out photo negative under a shard of moon blue as a valium.

Surprisingly, we always made it back home, though most of us were covered in mud, puke or both. Shake on the Lake couldn’t survive today. Too many laws and now that the new bypass between Yazoo City and Belzoni’s done, state troopers have run of the highways, even the backroads. Besides, nothing’s as fun as knowing you’re bound for a hell of trouble you can surely walk, pay or bullshit your way out of.