Sub Pop Records

KING TUFF

A more charismatic, enigmatic nomad of a furioso frontman/artist/guitar legend could not be imagined. You can’t make this shit up.

Grinning gold teeth behind blonde shades, in black, skeletal denim, with a studded “KING TUFF” across the shoulders where feral locks fall around his infamous “Sun Medallion.” With an acoustic guitar slung over the shoulder, King Tuff slinks through the abandoned halls of Detroit’s Malcolm X Academy. His baseball hat reads “VERMONT.” It’s the 4th of July.

Will somebody please snap a photo of this animal before it escapes back into the wilderness from which it came??!!

Magic Jake pulls up on a motorcycle, riding left-handed with his bass guitar hanging from the right arm, shoeless.

Kenny arrives in a rusted van, drums stacked in the back atop a shedding sofa complete with coffee table and a thermos full of god knows what.

Captain Cox, prodigy engineer, is attempting to “fix” the mixing console, on his back, under the wires, a flashlight between his teeth and soldering gun in hand.

“COX!” I bark, “What the FUCK are you doing?”

“Just trying to get these channels to work,” he laments.

“What’s wrong with them?” I lean under the desk and practically fall into a pile of live spaghetti.

“I built them,” he confesses.

King Tuff sits, center stage between Magic Jake and Kenny, his trademark guitar, Jazijoo, on his lap while the rhythm section diligently loops the groove under Tuff’s frenetic fingering.

Silent on a marble staircase, a ghost of a child, King Tuff, expressionless, leans back into a half shadow, with rays of silver rings leaping under incandescent light. The sessions go long into the bordering hours of morning.

Never…