“Some kind of savior singing the blues
A derelict in your duct tape shoes
Your orphan clothes and your long dark hair
Looking like you didn’t care, drunken angel
Blood spilled out from the hole in your heart
Over the strings of your guitar
The worn down places in the wood
That once made you feel so good, drunken angel
Drunken angel
You’re on the other side.”
-“Drunken Angel,” Lucinda Williams
“Blaze,” the Ethan Hawke feature film about Malvern native Blaze Foley, is bound for the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 in the American drama category. Foley, the so-called “duct tape Messiah” who wrote “Clay Pigeons” and “If I Could Only Fly” and who inspired Lucinda Williams’ song “Drunken Angel,” is played by Little Rock native Ben Dickey. Dickey is a former member of Shake Ray Turbine and made his solo musical debut on Max Recordings with “Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics” in 2016, for which Hawke directed two music videos.
Alia Shawkat stars as Sybil Rosen, longtime lover of Foley’s and author of the memoir “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley,” the book on which “Blaze” is based.
Here’s a video Dickey did in March for Gibson guitars about “becoming” Blaze Foley for the film.