The band let gravity dictate where they’d fish.

“In the spring and summer months, when the fishing was good anywhere, we used to flip a coin to decide whether we were going saltwater or freshwater,” says Chuck Ragan, singer, guitarist and former front man for the pioneering punk rock act Hot Water Music. 

Maybe they were recovering from a show in Gainesville, FL—probably at the Hardback Café—they were tired, ears still ringing, voices still rough and clothes still damp with sweat. Maybe when they flipped the coin, it clattered onto a floor sticky with the previous night’s spilled beer and dusted with cigarette ash. Maybe each side of the coin always dictated the same direction: heads, saltwater; tails, fresh. Either way, one thing was certain: Ragan could balance the night’s chaos with the peace of reading the water alongside floating hydrillas in a nearby reservoir or targeting redfish on an outgoing tide at the mouth of oyster mounds in the Gulf of Mexico…

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above Chuck Ragan gives the crowd at Irving Plaza his singular take on soulful folk-punk-country-rock on April 18, 2014 in New York City.

Photo: Rebecca Reed