Resplendent in his jeans, boots, black sport coat, his head shaved on the sides with a tufty palm tree of hair on top, wide-eyed and expressive, Stuffy Shmitt has consorted with known felons and worn-out trollops on the mean side of the street. A Milwaukee native with poetic alcoholic disasters for parents, Shmitt grew up seeing the world not so much as a place for good souls but as a backwater county fair full of damaged human exhibits smelling like hay and cow shit. He’s a heck of a good time, in other words.
His latest musical offering, Stuff Happens, is a rocking, bluesy, angry, funny, howling, cooing, heartbreaking party where all the crazy chickens come to roost. It takes a special artist to write a song called “Sleeping on the Wet Spot” and it not be a novelty song — or go from the gorgeous ode to his parents, “Mommy & Daddy” (featuring strings from Austin Hoke and Derek Pell) to the ‘turn it up to eleven’ Velvet Underground-ish madness that is “Scratchin’ at the Cat.” “Mommy & Daddy” birthed an equally poignant video, produced by Irakli Gabriel and Anana Kaye.
