Pearl and the Drunken Dog (2001)
I recorded this concept album about inter-species miscegenation with my good friend and former roommate Nicholas Hengen, frontman of the once-great high school emo-punk dynamo World Gone Wrong.

To hide the full story of how Pearl and the Drunken Dog came into existence, click here.

History:
The Journals of Pearl

When Daniel Greene and Nicholas Hengen first discovered the secret journals of Pearl Mae McGinty, they took it as a joke—some sort of amusing, if largely unskilled, satire penned by an unknown, early 19th century humorist. However, a trip to the local library—and the subsequent, lighthearted entry of Pearl’s name into a periodical search engine—yielded results enough to stifle those two punks’ self-righteous laughter. “Local woman accused of unnatural acts,” decried one yellowed newspaper headline. “Sodomy!” exclaimed another, smaller headline.

The topic of controversy—as recorded in the local papers, and corroborated by her own journal entries—was Pearl’s allegedly “impure” relationship with a reviled local character. Close on the heels of the Confederacy’s humiliating defeat in the American Civil War, Pearl McGinty—once a distinguished and beloved Southern belle—began a passionate affair with a haggard, often inebriated… hound dog.

Literally.

“I’ve met a wonderful… being… this evening,” reads one fateful entry in Pearl’s journals. “His courage and audacity make my heart race like a jackrabbit’s.” That “being” of which Pearl wrote was known colloquially as “Mr. Jimmy,” a creature with the unenviable distinction of being both the town’s mangiest mutt, as well as its lushest drunk. It was his bad-boy (or, more accurately, bad-dog) charm that attracted Pearl to Jimmy, and sent her slumming on the wrong side of the evolutionary tracks. “I fear that my behavior could bring ruin to myself and my family… yet I cannot bring myself to stop! Mr. Jimmy’s rough paws and heavy, lingering breath are an addiction for me. His very presence makes me as light-headed as the sweet, sweet tobacco which grows in father’s fields.”

It wasn’t long before the townspeople caught wind of the situation, and Pearl and Jimmy’s “light-headed” love became the source of considerably nasty gossip—both spoken and in print. One thinly veiled entry in The Confederate Examiner’s malicious gossip column reads, “…and best wishes to a certain Miss P. McG. It has been reported that she will be expecting pups in the Spring. Let’s hope that the little ones are quick to wean off the bottle… unlike their father.”

Of course, no tangible evidence exists in support of this alleged, interspecies pregnancy. Evidence of the young woman’s scarred psyche, however, abounds. Especially taxing on her emotions was her family’s predictably grim reaction to the relationship. “Mother and Father have taken the news extraordinarily well,” Pearl wrote of her parents. “Of course, they have ceased speaking with me, but thankfully they have not ejected me from the manor.” If not for the reluctant support of her mortified, yet terribly wealthy, parents, Pearl most assuredly would have been imprisoned for her carnal transgressions. “I am convinced that Father has bribed local officials and judiciaries into complacency. He has paid them so that my love for Mr. Jimmy goes unrecognized! I cannot bear this humiliation! Our love is beautiful… much of the time… that is… when sobriety finds Jim.” This journal entry marks the first noticeable appearance of cracks in Pearl’s happy façade. Pearl and Jimmy’s storybook love was obviously imperfect. “Still,” she continues, “in any case, I refuse to sit by silently as we are ridiculed into nothingness!”

Her ardor was not just talk. In August of 1866, Pearl and Jimmy began to sing.

The Music

Buried beneath the dilapidated plantation manor where Pearl and her family once resided—in a primitively dug hole beneath the porch floorboards—numerous weathered pages of sheet music, libretto, and performance notes were uncovered. Crudely scrawled by hand (or paw, perhaps?), comprised of minimal chord structures and near-laughable text, this handful of half-written tunes foreshadows modern country music. These songs, and the shrouded history behind them, are all that remain of Pearl and Jimmy’s forbidden love.

“I’ve discovered an untapped talent within myself,” Pearl excitedly wrote in her journal. “I have found that I can express my deepest emotions and desires through song! I have been writing, singing, and plucking at an old guitar fervently for many nights… whenever Mr. Jimmy fails to return to me.” Rather than penning straightforward songs of protest, Pearl composed tortured mini-testaments of raw emotion, revealing the innermost workings of her wounded heart. Perhaps more surprisingly, it was she who encouraged Jimmy to tell his side of the story. “I pray that Mr. Jimmy will display the same flair for musical expression that I have. When… if… he comes home, I will give him pen and paper and ask him to release for me the demons of his haunted soul.”

According to Pearl’s journals, it was her hope that the local community would recognize such pure, unadulterated sentiment when they heard it, and would sympathize with the couple’s difficult situation. She deliberately “dumbed down” her lyrics in order to more effectively appeal to her intended mass audience. The resulting songs are simplistic yet bold, and possess an emotional—and sexual—frankness unheard of at the time. As a result, the would-be album that was intended as a heartfelt plea to society only served to further ostracize Pearl and Jimmy. On one of the last days that Pearl and Jimmy appeared together in public, a journalist from The Dixieland Daily was present to chronicle the ensuing fiasco:

“Please, everyone,” the vile Miss McGinty pleaded, “Before you condemn our love, let us perform for you a few songs that we hope will open your hearts and minds to our situation.” Miss McGinty’s mangy devil-dog companion added a number of impassioned yet inarticulate barks for emphasis. Seating herself at the nearest readily available piano, Miss McGinty began to play songs of a most alarming and rebellious musical style and verbiage. Out of respect for our more sensitive readers, and contempt for the impure Miss McGinty and her beastly mutt, The Dixieland Daily cannot reprint a single word from these ghastly, yet oddly catchy, ditties.

Behind the often sensational wordplay and always questionable rhyming schemes lies an unmistakable tension—the exposed nerve of a torrid love affair gone sour in the face of insurmountable frustrations. Pearl and Jimmy’s tragic tale serves both as an encouraging inspiration and a cautionary lesson. Despite the bravery and purity of their unconventional love, Pearl and Jimmy—as in the myth of Icarus—flew too high, and melted in the damning radiation of society’s scorching glare.

But now, over a century later, thanks to the tireless efforts of Daniel Greene and Nicholas Hengen—both accomplished musicians in their own right—Pearl and Jimmy’s story will no longer languish in obscurity. Reconstructing Pearl and Jimmy’s remarkable songs from the few pages that were recovered, Daniel and Nicholas have striven to recreate the closest approximation of what the original tunes might have sounded like—right down to the erratic guitar work and inconsistent vocal pitch. In these all-new recordings, Nicholas—by default, as the more effete of the two performers—assumes the voice of Pearl, the tortured heroine, while Daniel—drawing from personal experience—undertakes the role of the shell-shocked, canine drunkard, Mr. Jimmy. “Growing up in South Dakota, I can totally relate to the plight of the dog-fucking Southern belle,” Nicholas claims. “I mean, think about it: fucking a dog. It doesn’t get much more tragic than that.” Daniel has his own take on the expansive project: “If there’s two things I hate in this world, it’s dogs and people with fucking Southern accents. But, somehow, when those two things come together to form their own freakish brand of love… well, I just couldn’t resist.”

It’s fortunate for us that he couldn’t! God bless you boys.

—Daniel Greene
—Minneapolis, August 2003