Whiskey weed and waffle house mixtape - jelly roll

[gregm]

http://gawker.com/the-story-of-the-...m_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Jelly Roll, a 28-year-old white rapper from Antioch, Tennessee. Jelly Roll, who jokingly describes himself as "a regular fat piece of white trash," has been so devoted to Waffle House that the restaurant became a muse. Earlier this year, he released Whiskey, Weed & Waffle House, a 21-track free mixtape that also functioned as a hometown nod to the song “Whiskey, Weed, & Women,” a mewling country lament by fellow Tennessean Hank Williams III. He printed up roughly 10,000 copies for a street-team to give away.

Or stalled, as would be the case. Within a month of WW&WH’s release, Waffle House’s legal firm Kilpatrick, Townsend, and Stockton sent DeFord a cease and desist for infringing on the corporate trademark, thereby giving him 10 days to eradicate everything using the company’s name and logo.

Being a loyal customer, he was initially flattered by the attention. “I was calling everybody, like, ‘We're popular! Waffle House is trying to sue us!’” But then he visited his lawyer. “He was like”—here Jelly adopted a solemn tone—“This is very serious. Waffle House really sues people. I was like, ‘Fuck, you're kidding me!’” If only he’d thought of this approach first. “I'm 450 pounds—I should have sued Waffle House 10 years ago! Do you know how many All-Star Breakfasts I bought in my life? I might’ve stopped at 330!”

Jelly Roll, for his part, had never considered such a possibility. “I didn’t even think I was a blip on their radar,” he explained on a recent weeknight, on his cell in a waiting area of the Nashville Criminal Justice Center. He’d gone to visit a friend facing a charge for conspiracy to distribute 2,500 pounds of marijuana—his friend’s second federal offense, one that would likely keep him imprisoned for the next decade or two. Many of Jelly’s friends are incarcerated, a consequence of his having spent almost exactly half his life in the penal system.

“Here goes another sad rapper story,” DeFord groaned. His father left his mother when he was a teenager; he first went to juvenile hall for an armed robbery case at 14. “My mother didn’t have shit, nobody had shit at all. People around me who did have shit got it from drugs.” So he sold drugs to have shit while experimenting with rap, which he’d loved since he nearly wore out the cassingle of Wreckz-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker.” In his rhymes, he emphasized the banalities of slinging dope—always driving around the block, always waiting in the car, etc.—for a handful of inconsequential mixtapes. “I rolled around and sold eightballs of cocaine and crack all day and rapped about it. I should have just called it The Stories of the Unsuccessful Drug Dealer.”

The Stories of the Unsuccessful Drug Dealer, had Jelly Roll released it, could have featured rhymes about serving time for marijuana and cocaine possession after dropping out of school, earning his GED at 24, or fathering a daughter, Bailee, now five, with a bartender who came out as a lesbian while still pregnant. It might also talk about the pitfalls of growing up poor in South Nashville, like how everybody in his Antioch neighborhood always wants to borrow money for cigarettes or gas.

It might also describe the professional opportunities now available to a heavily tattooed, 400-pound-plus paroled felon with a little girl to support financially, employment options mostly limited to lucrative recidivism (Jelly’s merch line includes a shirt that reads, IF MY P.O. ASKS, I HANG DRYWALL) or low-paying manual labor. “If I go to work in a factory, Bailee ends up in a trailer. You know what I’m saying? This story gets bad quick.”

Jelly Roll now knows he messed up by using their logo. "That was unprofessional," he admitted. But he's particularly annoyed because, after all, this is Waffle House! The place is so sketchy Kid Rock got into a brawl there! A business whose employees make headlines for faking robberies, where people get stabbed or live on the roof, and even the CEO has been accused of sexual harassment! "Have you all ever went into a Waffle House after 8pm? It looks like an old pregnant woman strip club that sells hash browns! Dude, ya hire cooks without teeth! And then, like, me putting a little pot leaf beside their logo—that's the worst you've ever looked? If we piss-tested everybody who went to Waffle House on drugs and wouldn't let them inside, they'd be out of business!”

Perhaps most frustrating of all, Jelly Roll hasn't been able to stay away from the damn place. “I swore I wouldn't tell too many people—I promise you're the only reporter I’ll tell—I just ate at a Waffle House! Even after I vowed I'd never eat at one again, I found myself hungry at an odd hour, under the intoxication of a little whiskey and a little weed, and I wound up in a Waffle House.”

 

[gregm]