Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part Six)
It was in this experience with the traveling circus that Thomas wrote what would become his first album and discovered and developed what would become his style —punk-rock and psychedelic hillbilly and country blues, like the Gospel soundtrack of a congregation where men of God test the blood of rattlesnakes—all becoming the record Circus Freak, which would take two years of touring before being produced.
In these years his hair grew long with tangled knots and his beard went ungroomed and greasy and he appeared in the image of an inbred Jesus.
He sang in these years, among other written works, “Crow at My Window” and “Ole Frank and Lefty Jed and Jesus” and “Miss Bethlehem, Georgia: Reincarnation of June Star” in dives across the West: crossing into each new state with a wild and live vehemence that grew from within him like his spirit was fixing to burst through the stratosphere—starting out on Georgia Street in North Texas, where drinks were served in plastic cups and fried foods served on paper plates, to the Matador and Paramount Liquor and Lounge in Gallup, New Mexico, buying a case of beer and a fifth of whiskey in the store and walking through the Picasso’s Guitar Player door beads and into the bar where he would drink all day and perform all night in front of a half dozen drunks playing pool and trying get lucky with strangers, Club Rio and World Famous Woody’s Tavern on the stage with dancing drunk tourists from New York, Virginia and Florida who would offer him five dollars to play covers and so he did, and people on work visas from the Philippines and South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica who heard his sound and shared cigarettes with him on the upstairs patio and bought him shots and invited him to their homes, and the Dirty Dogg Saloon where the sound of motorcycles rumbled all hours of every day and women danced on the stage with him in hula hoops and crack pipes and meth-laced joints and tattoos of angels cloaked in light and angels cloaked in darkness riding bikes on their backs.
He hitchhiked up Highway 1 and played songs in the cars, and bussed tables during the day at the Rocky Point Restaurant and played folk music at night in awful drunkenness and cursed the couples there dressed fantastically civilized eating fifty dollar fillets and drinking hundred dollar bottles of wine who conversed delicately and who did not listen to his songs and he spent time living in the Redwoods, hiding from the authorities and when he was spotted he appeared as some American mythology written out of the wilderness many centuries ago, and lived on the rock beach where he was arrested three times for drunken behavior and misconduct.
When his hands were cuffed by the metal which caved down the blood in his wrists and he was asked what in the hell was wrong with him he would jab his head toward the ocean where the silent surface formed foam of violent waves under the sun and crashed in whispers and sang into the shells collected at the ocean’s bottom and he would say, “There’s my mind, out there drowning.”
He took a job on the Pioneer River Cruise, where he drank umbrella drinks all day in the sun and appeared to be dead in the pool and his skin became leather, and finally talent manager Jack Kettle heard him perform one night, with his family who were taking three months away from Hollywood, for nearly two hours and found himself in tears and his heart felt like liquid matter and he asked Thomas how he wrote one particular song which he swore was a ballad of his own father.
“Maybe I met him. He ever sell heroin? I might have jerked him off for some heroin.”
They picked out a band by traveling the state of Texas and set up a recording studio in the cart of an abandoned coal train, labeled in old bronze lettering Mr. Peabody, and the acoustics reverberated a hollow echo chiming of ghosts and dust.
The cover of the album is a photograph of Thomas and the seven band members getting out of a 1974 sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle Bug in the middle of a rodeo tent filled with fire-rings.
Thomas is wearing a straight brimmed black matador hat with a red band and red trim, a face painted in white and a red handprint on his left jaw, a wide silver bull ring hanging in his nose, seashell earrings tied by string and humming the ocean just over his shoulder, and a rhinestone sky-blue suit with silver sparkling and shrining the outline of his body like the sun against river.
Tied to his neck by a rope are three crows with green eyes. He holds his palm under the mouth of a bull while the band members—dressed as a bear riding a unicycle, or as rodeo clowns and circus clowns chasing geese and rounding up chickens, or as magicians or biblical shepherds in the image of John the Baptist holding his own decapitated head in his arms–flee from three other bulls chasing them ridden by monkeys wearing red pinstripe pants and playing snare drums and smashing crash cymbals together.
After the record was finished and released it was met with mixed reviews. Critic Alfred Welch wrote it was perhaps the most foul and vile thing his ears had ever endured and suffered, and Jean Valdie said it was just good enough in place to make even Milton’s Satan weep.