It's a cold, cold world

Blaze Foley was a difficult character who wrote dozens of excellent songs but couldn't hold a job, was kicked out of pretty much every venue in Austin as a jackass, and otherwise lived a hard life where his own demons were half of the reason it was hard. But it wasn't just his own demons. A whole lot of success is just pure dumb luck, and pure dumb luck was something Blaze never had. Every time it'd seem he was about to break out with a new album or something, something would happen -- the DEA would bust the label and seize the tapes as evidence, the studio would burn down and take the tapes with it, whatever. When he died defending a black neighbor from a violent son who'd been stealing the father's Social Security checks to buy drugs, it was just the final indignity to a life that seemed like just another homeless bum bought the farm -- none of his music had ever actually been released, anywhere.

Thanks to his friends and family, that's changed, you can buy several albums that are either recovered from mix tapes made by the soundmen at the studios that recorded him (the originals are long gone, destroyed by the DEA, destroyed by fire, whatever), or from the mixer at clubs he played at. Not that it does Blaze any good, since, well, he's dead. This song, "Cold Cold World", pretty much sums up his life in a nutshell -- the only time a good break happened to him, he was long underground. A cold, cold world, indeed.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin