Mudcat T. Bass
Bassoon
Clavical
Tenor

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it."

Spawned near the brown churning waters where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi, Mudcat T. Bass followed the sirens of the his musical muse on an odyssey that got him kicked out of many of the most respected conservatories in the world (mainly for being "just too darn loud”), including Julliard, Berkeley, the Sorbonne and, finally, Ye Olde Alum Creek Institute of Music Technology and Bait Shoppe whereupon he joined Sonny “Bug Splat” Williams’s Band to sub for an ailing Left-Foot Washington and suddenly discovered da blues.

After Left-Foot had recovered from the latest in a long series of stab wounds, Mudcat was on the road again, hitching a ride at a crossroads near the Olentangy River when a black van driven by Lighnin’ M. Norton pulled over and offered him a ride to parts unknown. On the way West, the legendary blues juggernaut, Funk Bucket, was born. Mudcat and Lightnin’, wailin’ and tradin’ chops, rattled the rafters of gin joints, road houses and speakeasies up and down the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans, until in an extreme existential moment precipitated by a case of simultaneous mistaken identity on the part of Mudcat and Lightnin’ relative to a cajun mob boss’s identical twin daughters, scattered the boys into the swamp in a hail of thirty-eight slugs.

From the bayou of Louisiana, Mudcat somehow ended up dodging the misty jungle peaks of Southeast Asia, where, as an Air America pilot, he flew hard rice into Laos and Cambodia, until the day his Cessna was shot down near the Plain of Jars. He was never seen by the Company again, but it was later learned that he had walked away from the wreckage and found his way to the Colorado Rockies where he lived peacefully until his cabin outside Gunnison became the scene of a bloody shoot out with what were either shadowy government officials or Jehovah Witness missionaries and the Mudcat was on the move again.

Seeking safe haven on the shores of Lake Erie, he worked undercover as a beat reporter for the Mudcat Falls Times-Herald-Post-Picayune-Press-Gazette-Tribune by day and wrote songs, novels and excelled especially in the fictional genre of corporate expense reports by night, until being reunited with the long lost Lightnin’ Norton at Stevie Ray’s Blues Club in the Barleycorn District for jam night hosted by their old mentor, Bug Splat.

“Screw it! . . . and screw them, too,” Mudcat boldly declared.

And with that – and a bottle of Jack Daniels – the boys launched The Acme Blues Rockets.