New Old Music: Kathy McCarty's Dead Dog's Eyeball

I lost my copy of Dead Dog’s Eyeball sometime in the late nineties, bouncing between home (then Texas) and work (then Ukraine). Every once in a while, mourning its loss, I would check Google to see where it might be sold, and always wound up on eBay or Half.com.

I searched again on Christmas and found, much to my surprise, not only that Kathy finally got her own website and released a new album, but that Dead Dog’s Eyeball could be bought directly from her. I didn’t make the connection that it was actually a re-release with new tracks until I got it in the mail two weeks later.

What can I tell you–the album is pure bliss. It is a musical part of Austin Texas which we’ll probably never see again. This review says it all:

"I just knew he was a genius," K. McCarty says in Gina Arnorld's (sic) essay inside the cover of Dead Dog's Eyeball, and Kurt Cobain might have agreed, and the people at Homestead and Atlantic and Paul Leary must have agreed, and fifty million fans can't be wrong, but some of us didn't hear it. We couldn't listen past the surface noise, the cruddy sound, the cruddier instrumentation, the whiny and offkey singing, the infantilism: "I am a baby (in my universe)," he explains in one song, and no kidding. Were we, new-wavers turned nine-to-fivers, missing out, or were the hipsters deluding themselves into seeing something imperial in Johnston's big, crazy nakedness? That's why K. McCarty's work was so welcome and so valuable. It rendered Daniel Johnston's music listenable for the rest of us, it made his songs available to people who wouldn't have gotten it--the joke, the genius--who maybe couldn't enter the microcosm, the alternative universe, in which this music was formed...

Okay, so here’s what you have to do: 1. Go to Kathy’s website. 2. Buy both of her albums. 3. Listen and enjoy. 4. Repeat step 3.