moonbeamterror
Story teller, musician, artist, alien expert, psychic, renegade, and a gem of a human. I’ve been lucky enough to hear these songs before being put to tape. We would be missing out had the tape been lost! Leslie’s songwriting and delivery are one of a kind. Cult icon in the making!
Pre-order of Leslie Eaton and the Weird Winonans. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases May 1, 2024
$7USD or more
Cassette + Digital Album
Includes digital pre-order of Leslie Eaton and the Weird Winonans.
You get 1 track now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
In 2022, I was working on compiling an oral history of the Latsch Island boathouse community, where I lived. Latsch Island is home to the only legal year-round habitable boathouse community left on the Mississippi River. Perhaps more importantly though, since the inception of the community, the island had become a stronghold for free thinkers, artistic hellraisers, and outsider counterculture.
Early on in the process I was made aware of a cache of songs written and sung by my neighbor Leslie. They all dealt with the existence of alien life forms, portraying the E.T.s in a less than favorable light. Uninvited, intrusive "sneaky little bastards", as she sometimes called them.
Recorded many years before at a one off session, I was finally able to hear the songs for myself when through digging around online, I discovered a site that was hosted by Leslie's friend Jerry Modjeski, a musician and member of the Weird Winonans. The domain was called Scorched Ear,
and housed his various musical projects, Leslie's UFO songs being among them. Cool. Thank dog someone had the foresight to preserve this utterly unique freaky folk music.
At some point, I'm not sure exactly when, Jerry ( who I had never met ) unfortunately passed away. Then later, ( I'm not sure exactly when ) tragedy struck again when, with no one left to maintain the payments, Jerry's site also vanished into the ether. Now if you were to do a quick search for "Scorched Ear", you would be directed to a sketchy domain advertising wireless ear buds. No one I asked had any leads as to whether the songs existed in hard copy form elsewhere, and as far as I knew, they were as good as gone forever. I was frankly devastated.
The months passed, life on the island chugged along, I continued my work archiving the island's history. Later that year, my partner and I were helping our friend and fellow islander Tyra with around the clock care so she was able to die at home after a cancer diagnosis. She was also a neighbor and close friend of Leslie's.
After Tyra passed, we were left in charge of distributing her possessions. Several weeks into the monumental task of redistributing the detritus of someone's long life with as much care and thoughtfulness as we could muster, we were getting close to being done. There was a smallish pile of stuff piled in a corner of a room, destined for the thrift store. Including a shoe box filled with cassette tapes, most of them unlabeled. I sat on the floor with a little tape player and played a few minutes of each one before moving them into the thrift store pile, mostly out of curiosity ( which if I'm being honest, isn't totally out of character for me ). You can probably guess what happened next. That's right dear reader, one of those unlabeled cassettes contained a bootleg copy of Leslie and the Weird Winonans. Call it alien intervention.
This music is special. Humorous, but sincere. Catchy, but weird. The rest of the planet needs to hear these songs. The quote I got from the tape reproduction company is $560, plus extra for the liner notes plus any audio mastering that needs to happen, I figure it will cost around $650. By supporting the presale, you'll be making it possible to pay for a limited run of 150 cassettes that include a digital download code and liner notes, and you'll also be contributing to the preservation of visionary freak culture from Latsch Island and beyond.
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