Twin/Tone Records

Charlie Pickett

Charlie Pickett plays something he likes to call "jacked up blues." Not the slick and snakey electric urban blues that migrated north to settle in Chicago. Too smooth, that. Nah, Charlie's brand is rougher, raunchier, swampier. More Delta. Not country, really, but most definitely rural. And then "jacked up." With great big electric guitars, an avalanche of feedback, a little slide please, and the voice of a lanky southern poke who grew up on Charles Dickens and Chuck Berry, Mark Twain and the Roiling Stones, Son House and Rita Mae Brown.

Born in Meigs County, OH, one of the poorest counties in the Appalachian foothills, raised mostIy in Danla FL, a MiamI suburb, Charlie came to rockin' a little late, during college In the mld-'70s, when the first blast of punk hurled a lot of closet guitar bangers out on stage to do it themselves. But with this particular picker, the whole punk thang served more as inspiration than model, and Charlie ventured into the bars to try his own very unique takes on "White Light/White Heat," "Stray Cat Blues," and "Slow Death." The final stages of this period are preserved on Open Records' highly acclaimed "Live at the Button" LP (The Record suggested that it may have been recorded by "the world's greatest rock'n'roll band"), and that Iive disc also gave the world its first taste of Charlie the songwriter.

Though the "Button" album, a couple local hit singles and a string of raucous Miami area gigs made Charlie something of a local rock bigshot, it didn't make him a Iiving. For that he worked in a rock pit, driving a bulldozer. Following a grueling 110 day tour in the winter of '84-'85, Charlie went back to the rock pit for a while and then onto the race track to work in a barn. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he signed with Twin/Tone, split with his band, the Eggs, and recorded Route 33.

Route33, Chariie's debut LP for Twin/Tone, is his first vinyl effort since the Cowboy Junkie Au Go Go EP back in '84, a record that landed him & the Eggs in the Village Voice's year-end Pazz & Jop poll with one of the year's 10 best EPs. In addition to the now-departed Eggs, Route 33 features Jim Duckworth (Gun Club, Panther Burns) and Chris Osgood (Suicide Commandos) on guitars and Maureen Tucker (VeIvet Underground) on drums and percussion.

- 1986 Twin/Tone bio