Skip to main content

Daniel Antopolsky: the drifter who swapped country music for chickens

Once just a mysterious figure pictured alongside Townes Van Zandt, the ‘outlaw country’ musician has been holed up writing hundreds of songs on a Bordeaux farm – and they’re only just being heard

Daniel Antopolsky wasn’t afraid of drugs. “We had this great psilocybin mushroom that was growing in Athens,” he recalls of his time at the University of Georgia, 50 years ago. He would snort anything, swallow anything, smoke anything, but he was afraid of needles, so he wouldn’t inject anything. That saved his life, he thinks.

Back in the early 70s, Antopolsky was a longhair, floating around the fringes of the deep south’s singer-songwriter scene. There’s a famous picture, taken on Guy Clark’s front porch, that shows Townes Van Zandt playing a fiddle, Clark playing guitar, his wife Susanna singing, and on the far right a young man, the only one paying attention to the camera. That’s Antopolsky, the picture taken during a short period in 1972 – “it wasn’t that long, maybe five or six weeks; I’m a little fuzzy on memory” – when he was travelling around the US with Van Zandt.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KqQH8U

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs