"At the age of 19, a naive young man began a voyage down South looking to cultivate his garden in the wilderness of the American promise. Long before the flood in New Orleans, he met a street musician called "Woof" on Jackson Square, the leader of a three-piece jazz band playing standards for tourists outside a church. The story goes that one day, as Woof sang Louis Armstrong's lyric "I see friends shaking hands", he approached the young traveler in the crowd. Woof shook his hand and with a possessed stare put a spell on him. While still in New Orleans, a Native-American medicine woman caught sight of the young man's hands and stopped him. After observing them for a moment, she ominously warned: "To find yourself, you must first completely lose yourself". A few nights later, while in his bed at the New Orleans Youth Hostel, there began what would be endless months of hallucinations and haunting visions: Rocky Mountain Fever. In a burning vision, when the struggle became too great to withstand, he saw the Phoenix rise. He had found himself at the Crossroads and music was his only remedy. Our weary traveler shed his youthful skin and thus began the rebirth of Nickel Eye."