Texas Red Dirt country has never been cautious about colouring outside the lines on what constitutes the music of the Lone Star state. Reckless Kelly is a Texas band, though its members numbered only one Texan at the time of this video, bassist Jimmy Jam McFeely. Co-leaders Willy and Cody Braun are from Idaho, guitarist David Abeyta (Oklahoma), and drummer Jay Nazz (Connecticut) comprise the band. You’ll hear them all introduced in the middle of this Classic Clip during a live concert filmed on March 31, 2006, at La Zona Rosa in Austin, Texas.
Reckless Kelly has been a working band for around 30 years, and they provide just the right mix of honky tonk, rock, blues, country, and folk, with some western swing thrown in for good measure. The song you will be hearing comes from their second album, “The Way,” and ‘Crazy Eddie’s Last Hurrah’ is a tale about a rascal who loses his best girl Joely, then decides to pay a visit to her house and Stagger Lee her new guy, Well her boyfriend was sure nice to me / Said calm down would you like a drink / And then I shot him full of holes / From his nose to his knees.
Nevertheless, the shooter is feeling kinda awful about what he’s done – And I’m crying on my knees, feeling dirty and unholy – though he knows he’ll never be able to get over Joely, not even when I’ll probably get life and serve at least forty.
The band often used this song to close their shows while Willy Braun introduced the players. You will see the crowd are pretty exuberant, and from the several Reckless Kelly shows I’ve had the pleasure of attending, you could say the response is hardly unusual.
Now, there is no proof that the Brauns took the name of the protagonist from the owner of a chain of electronics stores from Jersey. Crazy Eddie’s advertised everywhere and drew customers like a latter-day Amazon. Unfortunately, he ran into a little trouble with the feds and fled to Israel. Again, unfortunately, he neglected to check extradition laws and was summarily sent back to the States, where he was convicted of fraud and served seven years in prison. He knew better than to open fire on federal agents. The stores were sold but closed soon afterwards.
