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* "this shirt is just an old faded piece of cotton...."

Surfing around our website today, I happened upon the "Buy Our Clothes" page where several photos of our various T-shirt designs are featured. I think I have one of each of those shirts hanging in my closet or folded in a drawer, many of which I wear from time to time. But, not always wishing to so shamelessly promote our own product when I venture out -- and also because, well, variety is the spice of life -- I still frequently choose something from the sizable stash of artists' T-shirts that have found their way into my hands over the years, through either having bought them (probably the majority of them, still) or being given them by some generous soul.

So today I got the bright idea to share a little bit of what's in my closet, along with a few comments about each shirt. There are enough that I may make this a mini-series of blog posts; we'll see how it goes. I've also got a good many others that I don't wear as much anymore tucked away in drawers, which I may or may not bother to dig out and photograph at a later date; a few were purged in our recent cross-country move, but many more I just couldn't bear to part with, even if they've shrunk too small (or I've grown too large!) for them to fit anymore. To finish the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyric which provides this entry's title, many a T-shirt crowding the corners of my closet is "so old I should replace it, but I'm not about to try."

Here's one of the oldest:

My rough estimation is that this shirt dates to either 1988 or 1989. My favorite band of that era, the Reivers, had a thing about baseball; this one played off the classic logo of the Texas Rangers, band leader John Croslin's favorite major-league team. The band's previous T-shirt design featured a variation on the official major-league baseball logo, with the profile of a player swinging a bat a ball replaced by the profile of a player swinging a guitar at a record. (If I recall correctly, anyhow.) There were two models of that shirt: the original from spring 1987, which carried the band's original name of Zeitgeist, and a subsequent fall 1987 version shortly after they'd changed their name to the Reivers. The former I still have in a drawer somewhere; the latter is the shirt I was referring to when I wrote, in a tagline at the end of my Whiskeytown cover story in ND #10, that "Peter Blackstock once gave Ryan Adams the (Reivers) shirt off his back." Somehow I sorta doubt Ryan still has it; no idea where it might be right about now.... but that does provide a nice little segue into T-shirt #2:

My recollection was that this had been given to me at the end of the 1997 No Depression tour (which featured Whiskeytown, the Old 97's, Hazeldine, and the Picketts), but the back lists tourdates from 1998, so I'm not really sure when or where I got it. I dug it out of mothballs amid our recent relocation, and wore it a couple weeks ago to a show in Raleigh which featured Walter Salas-Humara and Drew Glackin of the Silos teaming up with Tres Chicas members Lynn Blakey and Caitlin Cary (the latter of whom was, of course, in Whiskeytown). At least one other former member of Whiskeytown in attendence expressed a certain degree of mock outrage, upong seeing my shirt, that HE never got one! Apparently they just didn't properly estimate the necessary inventory when they placed the order with the silk-screener....

No such special story behind T-shirt #3:

This is one I've kept for more than a decade simply because I liked the design, which I believe is a logo borrowed from an east coast bread company. The color (a deep navy blue), the rubbery nature of the printed element, and the hardiness of the T-shirt material have helped keep it going strong when other lesser-quality shirts have faded or thinned or otherwise worn themselves out of regluar use. Let that be a lesson to all ye T-shirt-hawking artists out there!

OK, last (for this blog entry, anyway), but far from least:

There's no band-name being trumpeted in the artwork, which I expect is one of the reasons this is probably my favorite of all the band shirts I still wear regularly. It was from a Jack Logan tour of Europe in 1998; they did advertise themselves on the back, but wisely (I thought) left the front image alone. I believe it's Logan's own handiwork, though I'm not sure about that. All I know is that there's a really basic but moving simplicity and depth to the image; "time, love and death," I always figured, and the inherent relationship between the three. Logan doesn't really tour hardly at all anymore....but I still wear the shirt, at least once a month.

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on November 27, 2007 1:01 AM | Permalink