At Mule HQ: Jeffrey Foucault
At Mule HQ: Jeffrey Foucault
Last week I found myself at Mule HQ five feet away from Jeff as I filmed him play this song he wrote for Kelly Joe Phelps- the man responsible for inspiring these guitars and my friendship with Jeff.
About 15 years ago I saw a fella I hadn’t heard of before named Jeffrey Foucault was playing at my hometown venue Schuba’s in Chicago. I got lost in his music and by the time the gig came around I was fairly starstruck. I walked passed him outside before the show. He was leaning against the wall wearing a striped suit jacket and smoking a cigarette. All I could get out was “have a good show” and he tipped his hat me. Of course he tipped his hat.
Over a decade later he sent me an email inquiring about getting a Mule. He was way into Rainer Ptacek and his friend Kelly Joe Phelps had told him about our guitars. Another moment of KJP connecting people who should be connected.
Jeff and I were talking recently how the nature of promoting ourselves online. Learning to dance the line of adapt or die without soul-selling. As much as those are realities so is “everything costs something.” If you’re spending your time and energy doing something that means you’re not doing something else. We can pretend to be able to figure out the algorithm and glaze over more thumbnails that treat everything like a surprise “you’ll never guess what I found” or self-fulfilling our authority on something someone else did “How he did it”. The other side of that coin is Jeff’s advice. “The only way is to be good, the rest are just antics.” I think what you get from taking that road is those big life-wins no one can take or deny it’s improved the world in some way. That’s worth taking the long way.
-Matt