Born in Wheeling, WV and raised in the dingy, long-gone Welcome Mat trailer park in Pensacola, FL from 1968-88, Atlanta-based (via L.A., where he spent three years in a Southern rock band) Americana/blues-rocker Mixon’s double LP is a sprawling memoir of growing up there, and his life afterwards. Aside from Skid Row drummer Rob Hammersmith on five tracks and Earthly Frames violinist Maria Grigoryeva on six, Mixon plays everything himself; on songs like “Double Wide Soul,” a forceful synopsis of his early years, his soot-spewing, overamped electric guitar and ear-splitting, guttural bellow dominate.
Throughout, he chronicles the park’s untold crazy residents (including “bikers, rasslers, perverts, peeping toms and tammies, traveling packs of school bus hippies, bands of Roman thieves, drug addicts, boozers, dope smokers, rock and rollers, hooker neighbors, and acid suicide swingers”) and countless wild stories, many on five hilarious spoken word tracks by his rabble-rousing childhood friend Lindberg Smith, himself also a song subject on “The Myth of Lindberg Smith.”
Mixon’s narrative tunes are like diary readings, but they’re vivid, heartfelt, and affecting, especially the two about his strong-willed parents, “Rock in the Swing” and “Coal Miner and Little Boy Blue,” the latter named for Mixon and his father‘s CB radio handles in the 1970s. Though The Welcome Mat closed its doors in 1988 — amazingly, 21 of the park’s original trailers still exist, hidden behind the market across the street from its original location — Mixon’s musical autobiography preserves its memory in colorful, warts and all detail.
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