Well over a month ago — practically an eon in internet time — the little-known Los Angeles duo Twin Temple garnered themselves a nice little press cycle after claiming country star Charley Crockett dropped them from his tourover their “Satanic imagery.”
The duo, which records cheeky Sixties-style songs about the devil and the occult, turned the attention into an invitation to open for Jack White and a performance on The Daily Show. Crocket, meanwhile, seemed to take it in stride, issuing a lighthearted statement at the time, “I thought they were like Black Sabbath, but they ain’t. Not today, Satan.”
It was a fairly charming and utterly inconsequential little brouhaha that any reasonable person would say had more than run its course and fallen out of the public consciousness by today, Aug. 18. Everyone except, it appears, Charley Crockett, who seems to have spent the past month-and-a-half dwelling on the whole thing.
Crocket said it was time to “clear this up right quick” in a lengthy post on Instagram. He rebuffed Twin Temple’s assertion that they were dropped over their “Satanic imagery,” claiming instead that the group “made it up and dragged me by a rope real good.” He accused numerous artists who’d spent the past few years “showering me with praise” of using the situation “to kick me in the dick.”
And he had some especially choice words for Jack White. “[H]e used it to sell tickets too and I lost a lot of respect for him. I wonder why he wasn’t so outspoken back when he was in the White Stripes 20 something years ago. They purposely avoided political issues. Maybe he was worried about losing audience back when it was all on the line and he needed all the help he could get.”
(Ah, yes, the famously apolitical Jack White, who released “Icky Thump” almost exactly 20 years ago and sometimes tweaked the lyrics to “The Big Three Killed My Baby” — already a bit of an denunciation of Detroit automakers — to call out former president George W. Bush and the Iraq War.)
As for what actually happened with Twin Temple, Crockett claims he decided to drop the group about a month before their planned shows together due to concerns about their stage show. Crockett claimed the group’s “production requests raised eyebrows” not because of the actual Satan-loving content, but because “we couldn’t accommodate them physically.”
Not that he also wasn’t seemingly concerned about Twin Temple’s Satan-loving content. “Then I noticed some of the things they’d been doing on stage and after thinking about it for a couple days I decided to cut em loose,” Crockett wrote. “We told em the vibe just wasn’t right for an all ages audience, and we paid em in full.”
Crockett went on to complain that Twin Temple and their team “plotted for days” before dropping a statement that was “designed for effect,” and to make it look as if the country artist had booted them for a whole tour, and not just a couple shows. He also called out the band for “dog whistling about religious and creative freedom,” while ignoring his “rights” in the course of ginning up press.
“It’s my fault, I let ‘em slip through and being that this here’s my outfit, I’m the responsible party,” Crockett said. “I reacted. I might respond differently now but everybody’s got perfect vision in hindsight. I think the most difficult part of the whole deal was the way the media, save for one outlet, cared nothing for the truth. They sanitized these folks’ image for their own uses in the click bait traffic game that is America’s left-right culture war.”
After Crockett mentioned that he “won’t forget” the artists who “applauded” while he was “face down in the dirt coughing up blood” (metaphorically speaking, we assume), he closed with the defiant salvo: “Funny, I’ve got everything to lose right this minute and I still shoot from the hip. I’ve been speaking from my heart against the wishes of the machine my whole life. Real patriots think for themselves.”
As Crockett continues to grapple with the events of the past month-and-a-half, we might encourage him to look up “Streisand effect,” or consider the words of a wise man: “and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.”
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