by Michael Faubion -- Bethel, 1989.
I wrote this song in Spring of 1989 when I was running a thrift store for Bethel Community Services. It was part of a job training/employment project for disabled folks. The community supported the thrift store more with their donations than their patronage, although it was actually a pretty successful venture--it just didn't generate enough revenue to pay for its management. What this information has to do with the song is that among the contributions were heaps of used shoes. The rest of the inspiration for the song came from that old Twilight Zone episode about the bum who finds a dead body and takes the shoes, then becomes possessed by the ghost of the dead man.
Neither of these things really contributes to the message of the song, which has more to do with the consequences of conformity, but the image of a pile of used shoes in a thrift store in Bethel, Alaska, ought to provoke some sort of mental reaction.
This recording was pobably made about 1994 or 95. I'm doing all the parts. There is probably more guitar going on than necessary, but I had these two riffs that went well together. One of them (the left side of the stereo image) I came up with back in my honky-tonkin days and used on my arrangement of Charlie Daniels' Long Haired Country Boy.
I entered Dead Man's Shoes in Billboard’s Song Contest in 1995 and it won an honorable mention in the Rock category. I was rather amazed about that because I seldom write anything that could be construed as Rock. None of the country songs I ever entered in any song contest even made the first cut as far as I know.
Another indication that this may be a hit is my 5-year-old loves it and as it plays over and over on the MacAmp while I write this he hasn't tired of it yet. Of course, he can watch Tarzan 20 times in a row and likes to listen to Christmas carols in July.
--Michael