A good man recognizes when someone has made his life easier. After Shreveport rocker Kenny Bill Stinson’s son traveled the country, putting stickers with a crude drawing of a face and the slogan “F- Earl” up everywhere he went, Stinson decided if he called his album “F- Earl,” his advance publicity was done for him.

 

Stinson applied that same DIY spirit to the making of the album, playing all the instruments and producing himself, and that approach often serves him well. On the big, stomping, fuzzed-out “Crazy in Love,” the layered garage rocker works. On other occasions, though, it’s easy to imagine how the songs could really move if he had a live band swing in behind him.

 

The Jerry Lee-esque “Goofed Up” is the album opener, and it sets a high standard with his liveliest vocal and the revved up bounce of great piano boogie. Curiously, it’s a sound Stinson never really returns to, with most of the album based on guitars rather piano. Only the closer, “Buzzin,” moves at a similarly jumping tempo. Along the way, he visits rockabilly, the southern take on Brit pop, and pretty much any other roots music heard within a few hundred miles of Shreveport. Every track shows a good-natured love of rock ’n’ roll in all its traditional forms, and its clear the great records shaped Stinson’s musical vocabulary.