Alt-Country Rocker Dirt Reynolds Talks Bar Fights, Rough Encounters and New LP ‘Scalawag’ (INTERVIEW)

Dirt Reynolds is an artist who adopted that persona because his birth name (Chris Watts) is unfortunately shared with an infamous figure from Colorado. He recently released his debut album Scalawag. It is an alt-country album that brings acts like the Drive-By Truckers to mind both in sound and in the way it explores some uncomfortable topics about life in the South.

Between getting in trouble in college and joining the Louisiana National Guard and all of the crazy things (like being stabbed and shot) that happened as a result, Dirt Reynolds has a story unlike any other.

By phone, he recently discussed being stabbed in a bar fight, joining the Louisiana National Guard, being accidentally shot in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, as well as how he wanted to get out of his comfort zone in making Scalawag.

Between being stabbed in a bar fight, joining the National Guard, and being shot, you have quite a story.

The stabbing, the bar fights lead to me enlisting in the military and going to the Superdome during Katrina. I went to college in in Natchitoches in north Louisiana. I got in a whole lot of trouble all at once in my first year there. I dropped out my second year, and got in more trouble, which led to multiple arrests. The most serious one probably being battery of a police officer, which is a felony. I got stabbed in the shin outside of this bar called The Bedrock, which was a honky-tonk on the outskirts of town. I was in a fight in the parking lot. I felt something in my leg. I jerked, and it kind of ripped. I still have a pretty big scar on my shin. I saw a knife. Before I could process it, a gun went off and the bullet went through the ear of a guy at the bottom of the pile. 

I went to talk to the DA about all these charges. He said, “Have you ever thought about joining the military? If you don’t, I can almost guarantee you’ll go to jail.” I couldn’t do that, and I thought I should just join the military. I talked to a National Guard recruiter. Just for some context, this was in ‘02, a year after 9/11. I felt like I had to enlist. I didn’t want to go to jail. I didn’t want a felony on my record. 

After basic training, I went to New Orleans. I wanted to go to film school. I ended up going to film school at the University of New Orleans. I was there for a couple years, when Katrina happened. We were the only Louisiana National Guard unit that was still in the state. Everybody else was in Iraq or Afghanistan. We were the first responders. They gave us all the pagers, which is what typically happens. If they need you, they page you. You have 24 hours to report to your base. We got the page. I had friends coming in town to go to the Drive-By Truckers show with me as people are starting to evacuate. The next day, everybody’s family was calling to see if we were evacuating. I was called to the Superdome, still hungover from watching the Truckers. We arrived on Saturday. On Sunday, they opened it to the public. Every year, they use the Superdome as an official evacuation spot for hurricanes. Monday is when the hurricane hit. It blew part of the roof off of the Superdome. We had about 5 or 6,000 people, which is average. It’s what we expected and what we were prepared for with MREs and supplies. The hurricane passed, and everyone was still in the Superdome wondering “Why aren’t you guys letting us go?” We didn’t know either because we had no access to media or TV. Everybody was in the same boat. We weren’t being told anything by our higher-ups. Tuesday rolls around, and that’s when the levees break and the city starts to flood. People start coming into the Superdome from everywhere. We went from 5 or 6,000 to 25 or 26,000, and it’s still just our unit – 250 of us. It’s getting more tense by the minute. On Wednesday, they issued our M-16s. No magazines, no cartridges. There’s no ammo, just unloaded guns. You could tell that escalated things. You had a lot of National Guardsmen walking around and yelling at people, pointing their guns. It made things exponentially worse. They never gave us any orders: just go out and patrol and keep people from trying to kill each other. There was no leadership. There was never any gameplan. People could tell. We were there to help them and steer them in the right direction. On Wednesday, which was my last full day there, I was on crowd-control duty outside. If you were coming into the Superdome, everything you brought with you had to be searched for anything that could be used as a weapon. Of course guns and knives, but also any household items like nail clippers that could be dangerous. There’s thousands of people outside. It’s the hottest time of the year. People were dying outside. That night they issued us live rounds of ammunition. In the military, you need a round in the chamber before you can shoot something. You have to be ordered by your superior to lock and load. Now we have ammo, but we’re not supposed to have any bullets chambered. Late that night, we had just gotten off patrol. We heard rumors that there was a bathroom somewhere in the Superdome that still had running water. We hadn’t bathed in days, so a few of us went to this place to scrub off. It was a cheerleaders’ dressing room inside one of the tunnels where the teams come out. All of a sudden there was a commotion inside. The guy I was with was hollerin’. I ran in there. At the end of the hallway, there was a civilian and a Guardsman wrestling over the gun. I ran in their direction. Somehow a round got chambered. They went to the ground, and the gun went off and shot me in the leg. My leg gave out and I fell into the disgusting flood water. Next thing I know, a fellow soldier told me I’d been shot and dragged me out of the locker room back into the common area. He told me to wait there and he was going to find a doctor. Only two doctors were in the Superdome for all these people. There’s no way to make a long story short at this point. They got me and put me on a Blackhawk. In the hospital was the first time I had access to TV or media. I started watching the coverage of Katrina and how sensationalized it was. To me, it was putting New Orleans in a bad light. It was making the city look bad. Like looting for instance. There was a small group of looters, but that’s all you saw. They made it look like it was representative of the entire city. They talked about snipers shooting at helicopters that were trying to drop off aid. That never happened. There was a bunch of stuff that was misreported or unreported. Because of that time that I spent in the hospital watching the news, I pursued a journalism degree because I wanted to write a book about that – the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I wound up starting my first band, and then music kind of took over.

That was going to be my question. When did your attention turn to music?

It was then. I was in journalism school. A buddy I grew up with, but hadn’t seen in years, came into this bar. He told me he had started playing guitar, and he invited me over to show him some stuff. I’ve played guitar my whole life, but had never been in a band. I played along with rock and roll records in my room as a hobby. Never sang or even considered singing. Never wrote songs. We started hanging out. One day, he said, “I got a buddy in one of my classes who plays drums. He’s got a friend who plays bass. Would you care if they came over and we jammed?” I had never done anything like that before. They came over and we jammed. Then it was like, “Hey, if we found a singer, we could be a real band.” We auditioned people, which now I think is hilarious. Auditioning singers in Natchitoches, Louisiana. At one point I was like, “I’ll do it for the time being until we find a real singer.” We had written some music. I just wrote some dumb lyrics just so I had something to sing. Then we had five to eight songs. Then it was, “If we learn a couple cover tunes, we might be able to play a show.” One thing led to another. That band was called The Mudflap Junkies.

In 2008, I moved to Washington, DC, for an internship to write for The National journal, a political magazine. I lived there for a year. I hated it and I think primarily it’s because I was away from music. They offered me a full-time job, and I declined. I told myself that I needed to get back to Louisiana and start focusing on music. I graduated, and moved to New Orleans to take music a little more seriously. I was there for a few years, and then eventually moved to Nashville. That first band, I feel like that kind of saved me. The last time I was in Natchitoches, I was getting in trouble. I didn’t have anything to focus on. I was just out there wandering, getting in trouble, and finding dumb things to fill the void. I feel like The Mudflap Junkies kept me out of trouble, and it gave me a purpose. It made me realize what I wanted to do with my life. It was a lot of fun. We were a drunk college band. A lot of good stuff came from it that I don’t regret. I moved to Nashville in 2013. That’s when I consider that I started “taking music seriously”. 

You said that with this album, you wanted to do something that scares you. What was scary about making this album?

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone would have been making this album with safe lyrics that are easily digestible that I would write to appeal to as many people as possible. The comfort zone thing would have been to make this album with studio musicians. In Nashville, you have access to some of the best people in the world. If you can afford them, they’ll play on your record. I made an EP that I put out under my own name. I wrote some generic Americana. Genericana. I tried to do that, and I wasn’t really confident in my music ability or my ability to make production decisions. I did a Kickstarter, and I got all these good players to play on it. I immediately hated it. There was no magic to it, no soul. It was plain, boring, and Nashville in a bad way. I don’t mean that as a dig on Nashville. There’s tons of great stuff that happens here. This was the culmination of all the bad things about Nashville. You live and you learn. I don’t regret that either. This time I wanted to make art as defined by me. One day, I might not like it, but I can at least be able to say that I did what I wanted and took some risks. Some of those risks were writing songs about uncomfortable subject matter. My buddy Joe who owns the studio where we recorded and my buddy Dan Delacourt were both like, “You’ve played guitar your whole life. You’re a guitar player. You should just do all the guitars on the record.” In the past, I’ve thought that there’s a million guys better than me, so why not get those guys? It was people who are familiar with me and had an idea of what my vision was and how I wanted the record to sound. It makes a world of difference when you do it that way.

What would you be doing if you weren’t making music?

Who knows? I’d probably be dead or in jail. If I managed to escape death or jail, I’ve also worked in kitchens for a lot of my life. I worked in kitchens until a few years ago when I started doing music full time. I love to cook. It’s my other passion. I still want to open a restaurant one day. Or maybe start with a food truck. That’s still something I love. I have degrees in political science and journalism. The state of both of those things, I have no interest in pursuing either of those things.