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This Just In ...

Billy Steve Korpi, the Bloody Tears guitarist has been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and just finished the first several rounds of inpatient chemotherapy at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin.   Although is recovery is coming along well and prognosis is cautiously optimistic, Billy Steve continues in outpatient therapy.  He has no health insurance so several music benefits are in the works. 

For those friends who wish to support Billy Steve at this time you help the following ways:

Billy Steve Korpi Benefit Account
Pioneer Bank, SSB
100 Creek Rd
Dripping Springs, TX  78620

Doante through PayPal at leukorpia@hotmail.com

Donate blood in Billy Steve's name at the Blood Center of Central Texas, 4300 N. Lamar

You will receive a voucher that can be dropped off at Rio Rita and will help defray the cost of his upcoming transfusions

Billy Steve is unable to receive visitors or take phone calls, so send him a note through this web site solidgold@thebloodytears.com

 

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The Tears helped raise $300.00 on Oct 11, 2007 for a Billy Steve benefit bash.  Proceeds went toward Billy Steve's Medical Benefit Fund.  The Golden Boys and The Circuit Breakers (Bruce Lamb/Grady Pinkerton) rocked at Red's Scoot Inn for the festivities. 

 

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Update 8/20/07

Straight from the chemo tainted pen of Billy Steve:

kemo land speed ball

When yer getting kemo doses in the hospital, the nurses often administer steroids to help push the poison along thru yer system. Much like flushing an old car's radiator, you pour in the toxic swill, wait as long as you dare, and then spin the garden hose wide open and watch all that muck roll down into the storm drain. (Although in my case it's bags of IV dextrose pushing neon yellow methotrexate piss into a small collection bottle referred to as a "urinal.") I can't blame them. It is a fascinating color for pee to be, and a fascinating color of pee to see.

As usual, I'm on a solid steroid blast. Decadron is the usual culprit, but they switch up brand names on me depending on what the pharmacist feels is best. I've got Xanex written somewhere in my charts, but most nights they employ Ambien as my sleep aid, owing perhaps to its more volatile history of wacked out side effects. Maybe I'll remove my pants and take a drive down Red River later on tonight. I'm still pretty energized, but my lids are getting more leaden by the moment.

I'm on the kemo speedball, friends,and not for the first time. Back during my stay in Seton, I had a steroid/downs battle that ended in an amicable stalemate. Neither was I drowsy nor jittery. I felt 11am okay at 330am in a darkened room on an 8th floor cancer ward.

Not everyone in a cancer ward is doing okay. Some of them scream and bellow thru the night, and not in a dramatic or pretentious act. They are following their pure muse, providing an honest expression of the pain that is not found on the smiley to ickey faced wall chart hanging by their bed.(rate your pain, 1 to 10 ?!) I would prefer for you to rate the pain I intend to inflict, and I don't care what numbers you use. Exponential, imaginary....shit, bust into the 12 tone scale if that's what it takes to express yerself. Go hog wild. I'll match it up with the contents of our narco cabinet.

I have no pain on these nights. Whatever stultifier they send to pin the steroid leads to a woozy truce. Fitful sleep or fitfully awake; either leads to some flavor of mental torment. Just off Seton's hall of screams, I employed a Stanley Bros greatest hits cd in my tiny blue stereo. I laid in the dark and rolled thru a couple passes of the Stanleys high lonesome sacred secular take on the world we stumble thru on our way to meet Jesus in his Father's heavenly home. Occasionally the authentic wails of pain would intrude,sometimes augmenting a song's passage, sometimes miring it in crystaline pathos.

Nevertheless, it is a worthy attempt at music apprectiation. I will not hear the bleatings of these hillbilly auteurs in quite the same way agian, as will I never relieve myself of the screaches that slide down dimly lit hallways so close to sunrise.In a purly selfish revelation, I tell you it's not a bad way at all to hear this kind of music,. Sometimes drugs make you feel good even when you need them. And sometimes life threatening diseases provide some boss context for a new level of appreciation. You are strip mining a mountain of misery, removing the temporal beauty and filling the valley of despair with chaff.

What's the difference?

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