Frontman and creator of Rockgrass cult band, Hayseed Dixie, John Wheeler is singer, musician, drinker, and hellraiser. He’s either a lovely and talented fellow with a gift for unexpected mashups, irreverent humo(u)rous original songs, and genre-bending piano and guitar playing . . . or he’s an utterly worthless bastard, rude and juvenile, self-righteous and sanctimonious and completely up his own stinking ass. Both are valid responses, but say more about the person responding than they do about John.

Some people call him a white-trash liberal-elitist. Some people call him an educated redneck. But pretty much nobody calls him the Gangster of Love.

John Wheeler likes drinking dark ale, Italian red wine and Austrian white, going to art museums that have at least one Edvard Munch painting, Brahms and Debussy on the piano, Heidegger and Nietzsche and the Brothers Grimm on the bookshelf, arguing about politics and the death-cult that is all religion from sundown until sunrise, and being all pretentious by butchering a variety of languages he‘s picked up bits of over the past 25 years of being a road dog, besonders Deutsch. In der Vollkommenheit der Zeit, müss Alle John bejahen. Nicht zustimmen, nein. Doch bejahen. Prost! Skål! Kippis! Slainte! Salute! Cheers!