One call leads to another and before you know it, the fat's in the fire. I want to know what makes them tick, so I pick up the phone. Maybe that's one reason other people interest me so. Curiously enough, I remember nothing from my own life - ask my wife, haha. They had to get another tour guide to answer my questions. Even as a little kid I'd get really interested in certain subjects.

For the most part these are individuals I've spent a long time thinking about. That's really all there is to it: I write about people who move me.

I wanted to find out what happened to him, tell the world how great he was. Gary had great country hits in the mid-'70s like 'She's Actin' Single (And I'm Drinkin' Double)' before falling off the face of the earth. He was happier at home on the couch, watching Bronson in The White Buffalo for the 400th time. Gary was maybe the most talented person I ever met. Much to Gary's surprise I conned my way into that trailer by finding an old 45 he'd been searching for. He was hiding out in a Florida trailer with the windows painted black. Jimmy McDonough: My first profile was on the honky-tonk singer Gary Stewart for The Village Voice in the mid-'80s. Or maybe it's that Jimmy McDonough knows how to get a subject to come alive on the page that getting prose to read like a person's talking, requires prose writing, and not just talk transcribing. Maybe it's that he's a reclusive crank maybe he's just a control freak. He agreed to field questions lobbed in over the internet and returned answers honed to an off-handed perfection.

Loves rayon shirts, Casino and Eyes Without a Face. I requested an interview and got a 'yes.' Learned he lives in Portland. Russell and Tammy Wynette, Tragic Country Queen, a bittersweet, evenhanded appreciation of a singular talent most simply worship, deride or ignore? Who was this Jimmy McDonough, who had bushwhacked a course through the night traps and neon thickets of America's postwar counterculture? I had to know.

What kind of gutter-dwelling genius would write not only The Ghastly One, but Shakey: Neil Young's Biography, a vast, fevered journey through the life, times and music of the infuriating icon Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the tragicomic biography of sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer, soon to be a major motion picture from David O. I sought out his other three books and they were all funny, compulsively readable, staggeringly well researched and ragingly well written. I knew enough about Milligan's awfulness to be intrigued and found Jimmy McDonough's paperback unforgettable, moving, and brilliantly put together. Found his book, The Ghastly One, on sale at Skylight Books a whole volume on Andy Milligan, the Staten Island schlockmeister usually referred to as the more prolific, 'worse' Ed Wood.

Shakey by Jimmy McDonough