A couple weeks ago James Apollo and the boys headed up to an old ski lodge in the Cascade mountains. With the aid of some car batteries and a ripe hell of fallen logs, they recorded a few numbers, such as the bastardized Garth Brooks murder ballad, “Papa’s in the Pen.” (Live from American Ridge Sessions Pt 1) BELOW
If James Apollo hadn’t rolled up the river when he did, things would have been awfully different. “I’d be playing in a house band in Branson, or selling appliances off my porch.”
Fortunately for James, the Apollo clan moved up the river at a young age, leaving the old home of Libertyville, Arkansas behind, and heading for the sweet life of the upper Mississippi.
That early taste of the road stuck, James wound up living on a boat in San Francisco “when the land ran out.” He describes it fairly dark times. “I had no one. I thought that’s I wanted. I’d write these songs about beauty and sadness and love and loss, but what I know? I was captain of a sinking ship.”
After a night of escalating dares, Apollo moved to New York City. Inspired by the city’s concrete canyons and his own Western longing, he released HIDE YOUR HEART IN A HIVE, an album the London Times called “Americana in the truest sense.”
Apollo spent another year on the road, but his luck ran out when he got back to New York. In the summer heat, home for a few precious days between tours, he was returning home from a late-night rehearsal on an old motorcycle when a van ran a red light and flung Apollo 20 feet through the air. “I was in a cast from the waist down,” he recalls. “I woke up in a haze of pain, fear and opiates.
He describes the event as “the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” and explains, “New York City was tearing my heart out. Before the accident, I was a cruel, unhappy bastard, and my loved ones were getting mighty few. I needed a way out.” It took 6 months before Apollo could walk again. But as he recalls, “I looked mighty good with a cane.”
Despite the dark experiences and a savage touring schedule, Apollo found time to disappear into the Utah canyons last year do write his latest, TIL YOUR FEET BLEED. The bowery bum orchestra features many of Apollo’s New York co-conspirators. It’s these haunting tunes James Apollo will be playing when the born rambler and his hobo troupe tour the wide world over throughout the year.
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