Cheeseburger & Fries: 1998 Was a Very Good Year

I was digging around in the personal Dockery archives, spanning over a decade of my career in this business we call show, the other day and stumbled upon this article with accompanying photo (above) about the Cardinal Deli scene in Berea (in the period in which it was also known as "Fast Eddie's") from the the college's student newspaper, the Pinnacle, dated November 17th, 1998. The article was by Shelby Baker, and I present here the paragraph from the article in excerpt concerning our lovable Cheeseburger & Fries:

"Mostly the performers have been playing some brand or another of folk music, acoustic guitar and of course blues fits into that, because it is played by folks as well as many others. Cheeseburger and Fries is another matter completely and not entirely fit for print. I met the two men, 'Cheeseburger' (who has another name) and 'Fries' (who's named something else, too) but cannot for the life of me remember what they look like or how they got from Jackson County to Berea to begin with. A wild guess would place them somewhere adjacent to alabaster on the periodic table, but to hear them play there isn't too many periods and more likely run-ons. The guitar player, 'Cheeseburger,' looks like he might have a boot dagger, 'Fries,' the drummer, kept turning real red while was singing and jumping around; he may have a heart condition, and there was a man, maybe his name is Ed, who was definitely an assassin if I've ever seen one but there to make everything nice and easy. No trouble, you understand."

Then, on the same page, there's yet another piece by Shelby Baker (in which he seems to then recall our names, yet forgets that JSH is Cheeseburger) covering the "Iron Horse Cafe," a literary/music performance series, put together by Andrew Watson at Berea College, and it covers performances by Dockery and Holland individually, and I present those sentences in excerpt for your further perusal...

"Todd (Fries from 'Cheeseburger and Fries') read excerpts from 'Black Lung,' a Lexington magazine [actually a chapbook by me and published by Creeps--JTD]. He was accompanied by guitar which only added to the hipster climate. Todd is a performer in his heart, however black it may be[...]Jeffrey Scott Holland read poetry he wrote. 'Clean' is a fine example of subversive humor."

--JTD