Several years ago, I came home from the beach and there was a message on my answering machine. After tracking sand all over the living room, as is my habit, I played the message, and practically fell on the floor. "Tom Griswold, this is the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, I want to play in your town..." the message started. Lower jaw agape, I listened to the rest of the short message, and wrote down the phone number he left. It was the same one I had left a message at a few weeks earlier, after seeing it on the bottom of a promo 8 x 10. When I called it a few days later, it turns out that it was a record store that "the Ledge" hung out at, and the record store employee told me that everyone at the store was kind of amused by his eccentric ways, but that he could be kind of a pest. ("Every record store has its pests," I was thinking, remembering a past visit to Tasha's, a old beater of a record store in downtown San Diego, arriving just as Wildman Fisher was getting 86'd.) I left my phone number with the employee and just kind of forgot about it. About a year later, I came home , and, again, there's another message from the Ledge. "Tom Griswold, this is the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. I have a new record coming out on New Rose Records...," it began. This call, more than the first, amazed me. I could just picture him, dialing every goddamn phone number he had, long distance be damned, to promote his record, simultaneously wiping out any royalties he may have earned. It defied rational explanation; a hallmark of an outsider.
Perhaps the most endearing quality of a real outsider is that they do not share the usual motivation of most artists. Their primary reason for creating is not profit, fame, adulation or to get laid. They simply do not know how not to create. And, while they may be cognizant of criticism, they are not beholden to it. (Talent is subjective anyways.) In short, it's punk rock with an added dose of sincerity, minus the swagger and (all too frequent) veiled intent.
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