Dege Legg www.degelegg.com : writer, underground musician, and leader of the psyouthern-hard rock band Santeria, hailing from "GhostTown, LA and formed in 1994. It's been 10 years of gigs, madness, tours, voodoo curses, wrecked vans, band members losing their minds and much more, detailed in the online Santeria Tour Journals, authored by Dege and read by countless freaks across the world.
Santeria was it's own beast, uninfluenced by any trends in the under/over ground, slamming out their own strange brand of southern heavy rock that incorporated Middle-Eastern rhythms, dual-effected slide guitars, rumbling bass, and two drummers–one from India.
Santeria are currently on "tenured leave" following the drummer's near-fatal car accident during summer'04. During the band's 10-year run and following it, Dege obsessively honed his own brand of southern acoustic gypsy death blues that veered into singer/songwriter territory, but without the woe-is-me-cheese and more of the dynamics that characterize great rock bands.
Evidence of this can be heard on his first two solo release: "Bastard's Blues" (1996) and "Love Letters & Suicide Notes" (2000). Pre-production for a 3rd solo release is currently in the works, while Dege shapes and tailors the latest batch of songs with his live band, Black Bayou Construktion–consisting of dual slide guitars, bass, hard rock drummer, piano, and violin.
Dege Legg (Dobro bio): Writing in the old, haunted tradition of slide-blues greats, writer/musician Dege Legg breathes new life in the Delta Blues genre, not by imitation, but by infusing original songs with his experience of growing up in the Deep South—young, white, alienated, freak-in-the-country-style.
With Robert-Johnson-on-Thorazine-style slide work paired with Middle-East-Meets-South melodies, a mindblowing new take on an old tradition emerges—one that is surreal, warped, odd, and droning, but also firmly rooted in the troubled and death-obsessed masters of old.
Dege adamantly avoids the flashy, purist, mid-life-crisis white-guy school of slide playing—with its hokey attempts at singing about country living and faux cottonpicking. Instead you hear battered tales of apocalyptic prophesies, endless darkness, yearning stoners, backwoods drugs, hallucinatory angels, burning barns, junkyards, and the floating ghosts of the Deep South.
All of it is told in an honest voice by one who lived through it, born and raised Cajun in small-town southern Louisiana. This is the new real Delta Blues. New All-Slide CD coming in ‘08.www.degelegg.
com