The Giant Panther

My name is John Jay and I was recently invited to blog on The Giant Panther and I'm genuinely excited about the opportunity. In the past The Panther has catered to the Indie scene and new music in general. It will continue to do so. If everything goes well my contribution will be a bit of wild card swooping in from time to time potentially turning on or reminding some folks of some recordings from the past. I'll be something like an unestablished columnist with a by-line I don't really deserve. I'm going to try and have fun with it until my ratings head south. I'll just write about whatever music I feel like and hopefully entertain a few folks in the process. I want to thank Chrissie Hynde in advance for inspiring my use of the word insipid. It makes me laugh just thinking about it. For my first post I'm pulling from the obscure file. It was a tough decision, but I didn't want to stray too far off the beaten path right off the bat. Hope you enjoy it.

About four years ago around Christmas time I was combing the year end critics lists for discs I might have missed and I stumbled across an artist from Fat Possum Records called the Heartless Bastards. I'm a big Blues fan so I was familiar with Fat Possum. It is home to tremendous Blues artists like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. I had a reasonable economy (with a nod to Johnny Rotten) at the time so I tossed a CD called Stairs and Elevators into my shopping cart and had it sent to me. Good move. This is a rock record as opposed to a Blues record just so we are clear. I guess you could call it a garage blues record. It does have some Smithereens like overtones to it, but it's got more of a heartland feel to it. I must have played this CD 50 times over the next year all the way through. My collection is fairly large so this doesn't happen that often. I can't explain it, but I loved it. It rocked. This three "man" band hails from Dayton, OH if I have my facts straight. I hope they are friends with their Ohio neighbors The Black Keys somehow. That would make sense. OK, my time is up for now, but I'll back. I hope you support these guys somehow. They deserve it more than your run of the mill band. I'm leaving you with a temporary sample in the hopes that you might buy this recording as I did.