The Death Of Jim Shepard And The Dying Of A New Age

The death of Jim Shepard and the dying of a New Age.
The New Age arrived first upon the defunct shores of a murky Midwest cinema scope. Onlookers appeared half-dead before even his guitar patterns could be detected over the simmering din. Historians only possess peripheral vision, and to even begin to process a sound as sonically wounded or disturbingly terminal as Jim Shepard's, you must first suffеr the crippled hallucinations of a false prophеt or carnival barker. Jim's venom-soaked guitar requiems are as charred as the vocals as his vocals are singed, because fire is the musician's most elusive of friends, and when you're a guardian of light to boot, then damn the torpedoes and get the fuck out of the way. His live shows were more like indoctrinations into something damp, dark, and musty, while also electrified throughout from this man's integrity and sweat. Hell yes, his performances were more an introduction to the underbelly of light and magic than a music show dealing in the politics of sex. When Jim spun off this mortal coil, like a war baby in desperate need of undisturbed sleep and a mother's teat to suck upon and derive honest-to-goodness nourishment from, this freshly contrived new age, still reeking of God, heaven, and the doctor's most expressive of detached drugs, decided it also had had enough, crawling inside Jim's most illustrious of illusions. A new age died with Jim Shepard, hell yes, on October 16, 1998. An entire generation of martyred saints, puffed up ballerinas and insurance thugs were silenced right before our eyes and ears, and the music and the mayhem and the qualitative bliss James Michael Shepard has delivered so generously upon us for 30 years plus, with hardly a break or misguided step, became an ornate piece of a history blind idiotic historians will never understand. I believe you must be a misfit incapable of seeing yourself as such before this cracked Liberty Bell speaks to you. Jim Shepard, with his fingers, knuckles, and wiggly digits, spoke out for all of us, recognizing early on that most people's love is highly charged with damage and a too low opinion of themselves. Everything he set to task bordered on being ultimately primitive and tragically passionate, and this is exactly why the impressions he continued digging and continues digging into our consciousness, outlast life's hollow and pathetic excuses.
The death of Jim Shepard and the dying of a New Age, Charles Eric Cicirella, 6-13, 2001.