Lonnie Holley

Holy Ghost to Willis Earl Beal’s Jesus Christ, Lonnie Holley is the sort of middle-aged, African American art-mystic with roots in both soul and primitive electronics that attracts upper-middle- class garage acolytes like baseball cards do bicycle spokes. Naturally, he’s been adopted by Black Lips types as a salve to their own lack of ‘authenticity’, which, to be fair, may involve a self- interrogation. After all, isn’t the point of a soul is that it is, by definition, that which cannot be grabbed? 

Originally published in issue #121, November 2013.