If you have never seen grown career music industry professionals and journalists act like tennybopping groupies, see a Chicago press day-meet-and-greet and die. For the Stank Love Tour’s promotions among news media folk, radio jocks, street marketing vets, music retailers, and other cogs that help turn the wheels of urban commerce and industry in the Great Lakes that coincides with two days of gigging farther north at the big band relic Aragon Ballroom, the circus occurs in yuppie-fabulous portion of the city’s North Side known as the Gold Coast. North Georgian mic-controller Slimm Calhoun and his Organized Noize kinsman Backbone abide the spectacle with a stoic but amiable noblesse oblige, shaking hands and telling their stories to the people those limbs are attached to as a tier of handlers walk a tightrope of leading, following, or getting the hell out the way.
The organized mob appears most drawn to Slimm’s swarthy, cornrowed, Cool Hand Luke presence, buzzing around him like drones and worker bees around a queen bee, perhaps because of the unexplained absence of OutKast and the explained absence of Ludachris en route with Twista from Ohio by motor vehicle. Or perhaps is it because Slimm is the closest thing to Lud’s twin. Or maybe even some of the hive is flapping its consuming wings over Slimm out of a genuine sense of southern hospitality, since the greatest honor you can pay a person worthy of celebrity is to heartily receive them. In his own exchange of southern hospitality and a bit of trouperism that neither OutKast nor Lud are known for these days, Slimm settles down for his only in-person print interview at the event to make up for several days of scheduling snafus afflicting arrangements for a phoner.
With the exception of his shoulder-length braids, Ft. Knox-adorned teeth, bubble lips, and slender model-perfect build, Slimm Calhoun is not desperately fighting to kept up with Ludachris’ Adonised flamboyance. Throw in his cauliflower ears and amply bushy eyebrows and goatee, and he might be mistaken on downtown Atlanta’s main thoroughfare Peachtree Street or about the Atlanta University Center complex on that city’s southwest side as a brother living for the city but possessing enough intelligence to surmount the rat race in skyscrapers glittering over North Georgia’s rusty clay foothills. But then, this youngest prince in the Organized Noize empire encompassing the duchy of the Earthtone III production company triumvirately ruled by Outkast’s Antwan “Bog Boi” Patton and Andr
