- First-ever reissue of this 1981 private-press masterpiece and collector's item by Johnny Cash's right-hand man and Cowboy Jack Clement's sidekick - Available on 150g virgin vinyl, in a deluxe, limited edition, as well as on CD and digital formats - Gatefold package features a 13,000 word oral history chapbook recounting Chance's adventures with Johnny Cash,Tanya Tucker, Robert Altman, Carl Perkins, David Allan Coe, Ozzy Osborne, and others; dozens of outrageous photos; and a lyric sheet and digital download coupon (vinyl only) As ringleader, maestro, and indomitable troubadour of Nashville's most private, elusive, and exclusive far-out scene-the Dead End-visionary artist and Nashville lifer Chance Martin (aka Alamo Jones, the Voice in Blackaka the Stoned Ranger) could have stepped from the pages of a Portis novel, Barry Hannah story, or Coen Bros.

script. After working for and touring with his friend and mentor Johnny Cash as cue card man, stage manager, and lighting designer for eight years, in 1977 Chance began a new life.

By the time he was thirty-one, he had already worked stagehands union gigs for all the greats, hung with them and partied with them backstage, and realized that it was now or never-time to turn off all the outside influences, hunker down, and make it new, or else.

So he started writing songs on Johnny Cash's D35 Martin, a gift from the master. Chance and his gang holed up in the Dead End, the kitted-out "bonus room" above his parents' garage on a cul-de-sac in a residential South Nashville neighborhood.

Under the direction of Chance as guru, they spent five years in secrecy and self-imposed musical isolation, writing songs and recording endless hours of work tapes.

The result was In Search (1981), a fierce, inimitable, and mythmaking countrydelic masterpiece of insular inspiration and absolutely singular vision and scope.

Commanding, aggressive, and unabashedly masculine, it literally sounds like nothing else we've ever heard-this is as close as we've gotten to unique music (if there is such a thing), the real deal, an obsessive, private-press triumph of the imagination.

The closest analog we can (tentatively) venture is some unholy pot likker of Waylon Jennings, Funkadelic, the Fields of Nephilim, and the Bob Seger System: a strange Southern Gothic, alternately frightening and funky, and utterly transfixing.