Louisville Magazine

JUN 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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I walk up to Ricky Feather's front door and knock. Te house is a handsome late- 1920s bungalow in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Clarksville, Ind., where Feather landed a dozen or so years ago after he escaped the Highlands for reasons of personal and spiritual health. Tucked away in a hidden corner of town, about three miles from the Ohio River as the crow flies and almost to New Albany in the next county, Lincoln Heights is a shady oa- sis that rarely fails to elicit the comment "I never knew this was here." A blindfolded and dropped-in Louisvillian, upon hailing its old pin oaks, elms and maples, narrow concrete streets and pell-mell mix of brick and stone homes, might swear he was in St. Matthews. My knock unanswered, I suspect Feather may have heard something but is waiting to see if it goes away. Tree trimmers, politi- cal hacks and holy rollers are known to make cold calls around here — I know because I live on the next block — and on this windy late-April Tuesday morning, Feather would just as soon stay on task. Tere is no doorbell. I knock again before heading around to the back, but then hear him call to me from the front porch. "Hey," he says, laughing, "I thought you might be a Jehovah's Witness." Not that he's against talking religion. He will do that on occasion in his inimitably methodical way, and say something like, "It always seems to be some criticism or gloomy forecast or something. . . . Tat doesn't sound like transcendence to me." Ricky Feather has been a Louisville musical icon for the better part of three decades. In- spired by the city's unlikely punk-rock scene of the late '70s — the End Tables in particu- lar (and the Blinders, who were slightly more traditional), as well as legacy rock 'n' roll acts like Cosmo and the Counts, Soul Inc. and Elysian Fields — he evolved from bit parts with other bands to fronting his own, Bo- deco, which he formed with drummer Brian Burkett in the mid-1980s. Te name is an amalgam of Bo Diddley and zydeco, both of which inform the group's sound along with a deep vault of other musical influences. I have come to ask Feather if he'll agree to be profiled in Louisville Magazine. It's a story I've thought of often, ever since I penned a piece on Bodeco for Louisville Music News in 1991. It was one of my earliest published pieces, and while rereading it recently, I cringed at my naiveté about the band and laughed at the memory of seeing them for the first time at a Frankfort Avenue bar that now houses the Grape Leaf restaurant, interview- www.treytonoaktowers.com labels designer jeans i.am.a.dog are for 6.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [33]

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