Two Stinky Fingers

No. 1

The Mystery

Nobody knows why it's two.

Not one. Not three. Two.

Every person who has ever been asked — former members, venue owners, the man at the bait shop on Water Street who claims to have been present at the first rehearsal — has been asked why it's two fingers specifically. Nobody has answered satisfactorily. Nobody appears to know with certainty.

The band, in the one interview they gave (to WOYS-FM Carrabelle, 1984, on a cassette tape that partially survived a 1992 flood), was asked directly. Lead vocalist Curtis "Two-Bit" Ladner said: "You know why." The interviewer said he did not know why. Curtis said: "Then you'll figure it out." He then played a harmonica note that lasted approximately eleven seconds.

Nobody has figured it out. This is the central documented fact of Two Stinky Fingers.

No. 2

The Bait Shop

Apalachicola, Florida, 1978. The oyster capital of the Florida panhandle. A town at the end of a road that doesn't go anywhere else, on a gulf that has no opinion about anything you have going on.

Two Stinky Fingers formed because Curtis Ladner had a slide guitar, Eugene "Fish" Fontenot had a bass he'd found in a dumpster behind a bar in Eastpoint and repaired with materials from the bait shop where he worked, and because there was genuinely nothing else to do in Apalachicola on a Tuesday night in August that didn't involve sitting very still and sweating.

The drummer, known only as "Damp" — a nickname whose origin is separately mysterious from the band name — was recruited from Carrabelle. They played the blues. Specifically the blues as it would sound if developed in a corrugated tin building near the water: slower, wetter, smelling distinctly of brine.