MySpace is a place for music discovery. It took me awhile to get past some of the gaudy graphics, but when I finally did, I realized this is where musicians place “ads” for themselves and also interact with fans.
Not everyday, but frequently enough I happen upon an artist I find particularly intriguing. It happened earlier this summer with St. Louis bluesman, Boo Boo Davis. And it happened last night when I clicked over to Larkin Grimm’s page on MySpace. Her music is somehow soothing to me, but what I truly enjoyed was reading her lyrical bio.
Larkin Grimm was born in Memphis, Tennessee four years after Elvis died. Her parents were members of a community of energy healers called The Holy Order of MANS. When this cult disbanded, the Grimm family moved to the Appalachian Mountains so that Larkin’s father could devote himself to the practice of learning old time fiddle tunes and her Mother could carry on her mission of bringing light to the world through singing hippie values to the children of her hillbilly friends. It was a sweet existence. The water was pure. The air was clean. The food was delicious. There was a spirit of oneness in that Appalachian valley, but soon the exhaust and consumption of the nearby cities began to creep up into the mountains and Larkin, nearly a grown woman, took off with bitterness and anger in her heart trying to find the source of this pollution, to search and destroy. She charmed her way into elite institutions of higher learning – Yale, Harvard, and Brown – and she was mega grossed out by the “education” they were selling. So she hitchhiked across Alaska, staring down bears and grizzly old men, she ducked in and out of communes and cults of many kinds, she sang songs to hipsters in fashionable cities, she spent days locked in mental institutions and in jail cells, fell in and out of love, in and out of consciousness, in and out of sobriety and society, just searching for the answers. And every time she thought she knew the answer, she wrote a song about it, and sang the song until she realized she didn’t really know. And Larkin is somewhere searching still, and if you believe in her, someday soon she will find the answer and sing it for you. !