Tom Russell's HOTWALKER (HCD8177) is a portrait of a segment of American culture in a time gone by. Through original songs, narration and the actual voices of literary and historical figures, Tom constructs a recollection of the outsider voices of American popular culture, literature and art of the 1960s.Acclaimed novelist-poet Luis Urrea listened to the record and here's what he had to say:"HOTWALKER is the best Sam Peckinpah movie since Peckinpah died. It's a ghostly jubilee, an audacious slab of Blue America. Narrated and (mostly) sung by noir cowboy, Tom Russell, it is a singular recording, bound to be controversial--it's not only going to ruffle feathers, but leave feathers scattered on the ground. Begin with the American Songbook of musical history: travel into a haunted drunken landscape of backwood Jesus hymns, blues, Tex-Mex raves, weirdy frightening mutated circus music, rock and roll, balladry and cool cool jazz saxophones. Fall into ambient recordings, hard-boiled memories of skid rows, border towns, hard scrabble blue collar Hollywood, and those books that drove you mad when you could still be reached. Circus midgets, Charles Bukowski, Lenny Bruce, Kerouac and Ed Abbey all speak, unexpectedly, their voices coming out of the dark. It'll give you chicken-skin, and by the end of the album, you won't know whether to raise your fist, tip back a shot of tequila, or cry. By about two a.m., I was certain that ghosts were going to come through my headphones. It's funny, eerie, sad, pissed-off, at turns ugly and epiphanic. Desert Beat. I never heard another record like it."The taking-off point for HOTWALKER -- set for release March 1, 2005 -- is Tom's correspondence with outsider writer/poet Charles Bukowski in the 1960s. Tom and circus midget/actor Little Jack Horton read parts of the correspondence and narrate an historical landscape, dotted with the voices of Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, Dave van Ronk, radical environmentalist Edward Abbey, hobo classical composer Harry Partch, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Bukowski himself. In the process, the listener is taken on a tour of dive bars in downtown LA, Mexican border whorehouses, huckster revival meetings, Bakersfield honky-tonks, and more. It is a remarkable journey through Russell's celebration of quirky American culture of the past and his lament on its decline and homogenization.