between wailing strains of an electric guitar & distant gunfire, a twisted fairytale finds first wing in the most romantic of settings : the dingy bathroom stall of a euclid records in new orleans’s bywater district. here, a toast to the neighborhood’s most feared & revered (one bedizened by worn leather & the lingering persistence of whiskey’s scent, the other by most prim, pristine palliaments, her angelic perception held true by all physical elements save for a halo )–– david jameson & elenore swann–– the most unlikely pair. soon to receive ‘the height of consequence’, as her religious parents deemed the pregnancy. despite the tears & tremulation, elenore was pulled out of her senior year of high school’s tail end & tucked away from prying eyne until a baby boy was born. blue eyes, full head of dirty blonde hair, the spitting image of a father only taking responsibility for once in order to spite his own.enter axel swann-jameson, named after axl rose on a whim by his father. much to elenore’s parents’ humiliation, there was only so long that such a large secret could be kept. & so life against the thrills of the city was uprooted, the swann family relocating to avalon, connecticut after a mere handful of months in order to further the distance from their daughter’s deemed mistake. & leaving axel to stay with his father’s side in algiers, louisiana.BENDING SOUND, DREDGING THE OCEAN, LOST IN MY CIRCLE.should the surname that sticks serves as indication of upbringing, we progress to see a toddler take first steps in direction of drained liquor bottles, child strum at the strings of an old kramer baretta that david had splurged on but given up on picking up. both the setting & its seers normalize toxic patterns, color coping mechanisms grey as the shadowy footprints he soon grows to walk in.a notorious troublemaker in school from a young age, axel takes the fun found in playing class clown in exchange for harsh, often violent reprimanding from an often belligerently drunken father at home. a hurricane ravages the area just before his ninth birthday, evacuation leading the jamesons up to connecticut to allow axel to properly meet his mother for the first time–– he likes her better than the litany of ladies dad brings home, he decides. he savors the time spent amidst the mountainscape, though his parents argue constantly, sound sleep’s potential falling second to the sounds of raised voices & shattering glass. so again, he takes to the guitar in attempts to drown the noise out. a new place is found back home to replace the old & so as he approaches his tenth year, he takes his leave from the house as often as possible, if not at (or skipping) school, riding beaten bikes & skateboards with a handful of other rough & tumble kids around the potholes that characterize the city streets.finds brothers in these boys–– tripp, mitchell, & packer, breaking curfew & bones & young hearts from the third grade on. they steer clear of talking about home, instead indulging in whatever piecemeal substances or songs they can scrape up. chalk it up to the charm of your small run-town town's garage band & set your stake on a ticket for their first big show. they kick rocks across asphalt & cross small fingers it'll come along someday soon.HERE AM I, FLASHING NO COLOUR, SO TALL IN THIS ROOM OVERLOOKING THE OCEAN.you smoke your first cig at ten, choke on its comfort. dad drinks from an engraved decanter. eleven sees your first meeting with marijuana, safety derived in stoned euphoria. mom starts sending letters, which you collect but never cut the seals of. dad’s on the road to a rehabilitation facility for the first time two weeks after your twelfth birthday. for that celebration, your grandfather joins you in gulping down your first prick of that pretty poison, the amber liquid that led him to his damnation, over strewn sheets of long division. when you both indulge together, you share laughs & talk about music over your homework that sits untouched on the kitchen table. he gifts you an old leatherbound journal, which you take to scrawling fragmentary lyrics in every now & again. not the most conventional connection, but meaningful. his brand of knowledge is far more preferable to that of your instructors, less pretentious by a long stretch. more raw, more real. after all, these are the scraps of the city, they say : laissez les bon temps rouler !HERE ARE WE, ONE MAGICAL MOVEMENT, FROM KETHER TO MALKUTH.it’s that night that you first whip out the electric for someone other than your personal three musketeers, shred out the iconic “back in black” riff, thinking it's a lot cooler than it is, & are encouraged by your granddad (through slurred words & laughter) to take that talent to the corners of the french quarter. between words of affirmation & ambrosia’s spark against your heart, you feel invincible for the first time. & so, when fourteen hits, you do. take the boys along, & set up shop on royal. hook up your amps, get a little high, play the snippets of songs you’ve written––you on guitar, mitch on bass, tripp banging his sticks on plastic buckets turned upside down, & pack improvising vocals over the top of the din.it’s taken a shit ton of practice, but with dad freshly home from rehab (again. & putting little into practice, not seeming willing to give it a solid go in the mind of a child), it’s an excuse to get out of the house, to surround yourself with the growing spoils that come with steadily increasing amounts of onlookers, then the offers to play small venues in the city : the gig at gasa gasa at age sixteen gets you a gaggle of girls, a ton of tips, your first ink (a messy '6 6 6' across your knuckles-- thank you, tripp's newly pawned tattoo gun!), & . . . your first arrest. public intoxication & indecency make such a pair!but it ain’t no thing— not when newfound fans are bailing you & the boys out.not ‘til you get home & gotta face dad.he’s half-conscious, having downed half a brand new bottle of maker’s, but when the front door gives you away with an extended creak, its divoted base slams against wooden tabletop as greeting. the rest of the night works in accordance with what you’ve grown so used to, leaving boy battered & bruised / icarus with wing melted mercilessly by daedalus’s own flame.then do you begin officially conspiring with your fellow bandmates, all struggling with their own complicated personal home lives, to save up the scruples you're quickly collecting to aid you in taking sudden leave from the crescent city.THERE ARE YOU, DRIVE LIKE A DEMON FROM STATION TO STATION.after all, you can only sit & clench your jaw for so fucking long. in the words of david bowie, it ain't easy. days feel like months, minutes spent with those who wade in waters thicker than blood feeling more & more like months as tensions grow. between energies with your tightest links growing more taut & escalating inflictions of your father's anger, you begin taking to the streets just off bourbon street as early as age seventeen after waiting for dad to sink into his own besottedness, breaking free from corroding bars of a broken home on your bicycle, & sneaking onto the last ferry into the city.to drink? heavily. to use? without doubt. it's at this point that you dabble more seriously in harder drugs, your tolerance seeing an elevated height that's hard to return from with the way need gnaws at you. 'the kindness of strangers' takes on a warped meaning, desperation driving you forth in order to prove a point to yourself, to whatever powers may be watching from above & below–– you are capable of defending yourself. you can hold your own ground, you can sink your teeth into it & draw blood if you must.but these merely serve as buffers to your desperate attempts to regain control by approaching those assumed to be under similar influence & picking fights, throwing punches, stripping & scarring knuckles in baseless arguments with strangers in order to regain any semblance of control in violent situations back again. of course, those close to you begin asking just what that carmine shade that paints joints sources from. & you merely shrug it off, grant acerbity of a scoff, mumble some vague perhaps under your breath.maybe you just like fighting. maybe your father taught you how.the lusher school hates you during your senior year. it makes that much glaringly obvious. you hate it back, the way its grounds forge an entity of their own beneath the scorching sun. but you graduate. despite threatening to fight the science teacher over looking at mitch the wrong way & scraping by half your classes by the skin of your teeth. you & the boys vaguely discussed dropping out to pursue the plan, but packer advised a redeliberation. he's usually right, so you all roll with it. you stick it out.more time to get that money together anyway. more time to pack, too, tripp reminds. does the guy always gotta have a fuckin' point?but the second you're done, you're done.you're banding together & dragging the bags you've packed in silence for months & all but sprinting to the louis armstrong airport to escape the fucking heat of the city. to escape the burns it brings.but when you land that flight & touch down in the city of stars?a hell of a lot of shit is about to hit.THE RETURN OF THE THIN WHITE DUKE, THROWING DARTS IN LOVERS' EYES.y'all thought you had the money. you didn't quite have the money, not a bunch of ragtag boys with expensive habits & impulsive tendencies. in los angeles, you snag a manager who seems alright at right but will disprove that down the line, find yourself on a shitty excuse for a tour bus that gets you & the boys to smaller venues than you'd hoped, but you keep that old guitar. your first girlfriend after your high school tricks is really cool, she even puts pink streaks in her hair-- but your bad habits prove to be contagious. when she tells you that she has to go to treatment, that she simply can no longer live this way, you kiss her goodbye with whiskey clouding your breath. you cheat on her with a playboy chick named nalini that you meet at a party before it's been three weeks. here, find the fragmentary beginnings of your reputation in the media, your likeness replicated upon the first glossy cover you haven't shared with the boys.some years on into the hollywood scene, the band is doing better than ever, even if you've gained a beyond questionable reputation as a man to stay far away from. from publicized cheating scandals to handfuls of nights too strung out to properly carry on conversation to an attempt or two to swing at those behind the flashing cameras, maintaining a distance would likely be a solid idea. but this is the nature of the beast, isn't it? don't you deserve some reprieve?before that fateful night, perhaps. before you walked through the opium club's iconic doors with three other men & exited with two.THE RETURN OF THE THIN WHITE DUKE, MAKING SURE WHITE STAINS.it was packer's birthday. the band was preparing to go on another tour, this time featuring more exciting stops than ever before. there was a ton to celebrate, & you & the boys always partied hard, known for having borderline ridiculous tolerances for nearly whatever substance should come your way. so when you kept encouraging tripp to do just one more line, to take one more shot, how were you supposed to know that you would find him lifeless, crumpled into a corner in the men's room after an extended absence from the thrills & frills of the party? how were you to know that he shouldn't have had just one more, that he couldn't have done just one more? how were you to tell the other boys, to tell management, to tell his family? the air in your lungs stills, turns to static. you decide that this isn't your fault. that you couldn't have known. so then why do you feel the guilt, leaden on your shoulders, to this day?without that steady line of percussion, once as certain as the tide's ebb & flow, the song derails. you & mitchell & packer attempt to hold down the fort for two weeks before the jury is in. steel the son is made a thing of the past, a hometown homage to the heart of rock & roll left to rot & wither with the flowers mourners materialize for the drummer who never knew what to do with his hands at parties, the voice of reason who would always shrug his own wisdom off as overthought. something deep inside you tells you that your remaining friends you're the wroxed root, the reason it all went wrong. & you may be. but what else can you do but press onwards in your own way? go back home to the west bank? no way. revel in the reputation you've built for yourself as nothing but trouble? now that's something you can work with, you decide.two years after the band breaks up, & after two years of landing your name in tabloids & on e! news countless times for continuations of your reckless behavior, you drop a single out of the blue, then another now taking on the mic with your vocals as you keep your signature guitar draped over your shoulder. to distract others from seeing the true sickness embedded in your own behavior, you amplify it tenfold. once a ladies man run off the rails, now never not accompanied by a likely new, fresh, pretty little thing in bed. you're openly proud of being a new orleans native, though you never return for more than a week-- seeing your father reminds you of the similarities that slither into view when you pass by a mirror. with bloodshot eyes & dilated pupils, tracks along pale limbs & ichor stemming from numbed nostrils, the questions begin to blaze at the back of your head: how many lives do you have left, & how long can you land on your feet?