chasing Rebecca Stout

Rebecca Stout’s manager Daryl Saunders of Revolution Records gave me a cassette demo back in 1997. I worked at the now defunct Sunshine Grocery in the arty Belmont neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee. There were four tracks I played on repeat in my little Toyota Camry. They were trip hop and momentous and hit me like Bjork. Then in the summer of 1998 I met a neat girl at a party who played acoustic haunting folk spiritual almost Celtic-sounding songs about witches and spooky folklore in East Nashville, long known to be haunted by the Bell Witch, a string of arsons, the KKK, and the ghosts of slavery. It was Rebecca. Rebecca later referred to all this creepiness as “the Dirty South” and oh how dirty it is. I mean Nashville bigots are currently trying to make Spanish illegal.
In fact any accent besides country, southern bumpkin puts you at a clear disadvantage, and you are likely to meet with discrimination.
My loyal adherence to Greg Garing’s classic country revival (often featuring the legendary Kenny Vaughn on lead guitar), pointed me towards investigating the Shakers, a folk goth ensemble that haunted the nineties round about “NashVegas” as we called the horrid and wonderful township of Music City USA.
Greg played fiddle. Rebecca, but a teen, sang with the Shakers. You tube it.
Then I caught her new late nineties thing “Rebecca Stout and the Circus Inebrius” on the stage of Exit/In with 20-30 members playing all manner of instruments and non-instruments including washboard, spoons, bongos. She wore a gorgeous flowing vintage nightgown in red. Elliot Wilcox of the Glam Rock outfit Milkshake played guitar with a battery powered vibrator used as a slide for some ridiculously weird effects.
I saw her clogging upstairs of Bongo Java once.
Then Baby Stout, more of a blues/rock/hiphop kind of thing blasted into my awareness with the anthem against the sexual abuse of children. The song “Probably a Pedophile” discussed the epidemic of child abuse and cover-ups by family members. The song was an aggressive punch in the gut to the complicity of an establishment which harbors, ignores, and protects abusers. As Rebecca so courageously sang “I ain’t going to turn this down cause it needs to be said these people are f----- in the head and deserve to be . . .”
I moved to California in 2003. Got a postcard one day from Rebecca. It had been sent to my old Tennessee address and then forwarded back out to CA. It turns out Rebecca had moved to LA. Chasing music glory led her to love. She is now the mom of a beautiful girl and heads the Friends of the Children of Macarthur Park Committee which seeks to repair the historic park in LA’s Koreatown. She is a new member of the city council.
In collaboration with green designers Xavier and Maureen of Mosaic Design on Cahuenga in Hollywood, Rebecca is excited to have just been approved for the grant funding that will enable the park rehab project which will embody ecological principles.
I want to ask Rebecca if she knew that Beck makes reference to Macarthur Park in his Guero/Guerolito projects. Everybody knows the Frank Sinatra version of “Macarthur Park.” It’s an intense neighborhood with a history of grandeur and extreme police brutality as recently as 2007.
Rebecca now sings with a Bulgarian women’s chorus---in Bulgarian. She also collaborates with her friends back in Nashville, laying vocals over tracks they send her.
She is Stout Projex and she is a workaholic extraordinaire with the vision and dedication to pull things together.
I wonder what’s next for her.