“I’m Like This Everyday” is a documentary short about legendary Dalton, Ga., songwriter Peter Stubb, whose obsessions with death metal, werewolves and Air Supply shaped his unique musical style.

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Dry Ink: How did you get into filmmaking?

Mitchell Powers: I started taking film classes when I went back to school at the university of New Orleans a decade ago. I was inspired to make documentary films by a guy named Bill Daniel, who used to be called Photo Bill when he was taking pictures of The Dicks, The Big Boys, and skateboarders in Texas in the early eighties, and now makes a lot of interesting film work.

DI: How did you learn about Peter Stubb, and why did you choose him as a subject?

MP: A lot of the people who are in this film were on a cassette-only punk comp, “Region Rock” put out by Erick Lyle a.k.a. Iggy Scam in the mid-nineties. Through travel, music and friendship, I got to know a lot of them over the years. Eric Nelson and Mike Pack, who were in the Shaffers, Jack Palance Band and Hidden Spots, grew up with Peter and played a large role in spreading the Stubb Legend.  Many late nights became mornings as Eric Nelson told tales of Stubb, and played the songs.

DI: How was the filmmaking process? I know Stubb is somewhat legendary, but was it difficult to get the interviewees together? That shirtless dude drinking beer by the trailer was pretty terrifying…

MP: Everyone was very glad to take part. The scene in Dalton, which gave birth arguably to this larger “Region Rock” scene, is something everyone thought should be documented, and was happy to help spread the Stubb Legend. I first met the shirtless dude, scene legend Josh “Number Two,” when he was an up and coming young punk rocker in Chattanooga, and he is still the tender little buddy he once was.

DI: Was there a lot tape on the proverbial editing room floor? Any funny or weird behind the scenes stories?

MP: I shot about 30 hours for this piece which is about a 100:1 ratio, which is not uncommon in documentary. This was my first doc, so I made a few mistakes along the way, but I knew the raw emotion and mystery that is the Stubb Legend would carry us through. The camera man was so affected by intensity of the stories that he left the production halfway through. I think he may have quit filmmaking altogether to make music full time.

DI: And what about Peter? How did he handle the filmmaking process throughout? I’m sure he was pretty stoked…

MP: Peter is a huge film fan, especially of horror films and he was ready to go. He’s been talking and singing into tape recorders and four tracks all his life, so he’s been making documentaries for a long time.

DI: What do you think of him as a person? I noticed he’s since had hot dogs tattooed under each eye.

MP: He’s a persona shifter, it goes on to this day, although the Peter Stubb persona keeps coming back. He’s always sung about food a lot, called himself Corndog Joe for a while, and became Hot Dog Joe after we shot the movie. I really regretted not being there for the tattoos. Peter is a sweet and tender soul, and a driven artist. His prolific, restless and relentless songwriting and persona creation are to me endearing and affecting.

DI: And what are your thoughts on his music?

MP: He’s an interesting musician because he’s got an assortment of weird influences, combining in unusual ways. Outlaw Country, Death Metal, Horror, Pop, and his lyrical obsessions with sex, food, mental illness and documenting his life can surprise you. He has the ability to mystify and entrance jaded music obsessives.

DI: Can you talk a little bit about the technical aspects of the film? How was it shot, etcetera?

MP: I shot it with a camera that I really like, the Canon XL-2, maybe the greatest standard-definition video camera ever made. Interchangeable lenses, and image presets in camera allow for some really interesting pictures. Also, it has XLR inputs, so you can record sound directly from your boom mic, or lavaliers. I wish I had a dozen of these right now to put in the hands of young documentarians.

DI: Any other films in your catalog, or on the horizon?

MP: I’ve got a film in post that is struggling to be finished, about mass immigration arrests during the last years of the Bush II. Right now, I’m really excited about my new job leading documentary workshops for teenagers, which I’m doing for Savannah’s arts non-profit AWOL Inc. http://awolinc.org

Editor’s Note: Read Mitchell’s essay below on the beginnings of “I’m Like This Everyday”

The Dalton Mystery

I moved to Chattanooga Tennessee at the beginning of the zeroes to play in a band with an obscene and preposterous name. Chattanooga had become a collection point for aging punk rockers from end to end of Interstate 75, Detroit to Miami. It was a phenomenon documented in the Stun Guns song, “The I-75 Connection.” This was a mystery itself, this community of blaspheming and surreal-minded alcoholics, in a town which is noted for having the largest concentration of Christian AM radio stations and small presses in the country.

Two of the people at the center of this community, lifelong best friends, who appear in this documentary, Mike Pack and Eric Nelson, were from Dalton, Georgia, a factory town just down the road, that boasted of producing 95% of the world’s finished carpet products. They had left Dalton after years of police crackdowns on their shows and houses and had played together and apart in some of the legendary bands of “the Region.” In the late nineties, their heart-wrenching and melodic outfit, the Jack Palance Band, was maybe the greatest punk band in the country. Eric’s song, “Heaven”, was an anthem for Christ-haunted southern punks. Eric said that Chattanooga was like a paradise after Dalton.

While going to shows and parties in Chattanooga, I started seeing teenagers from Dalton. They stood out. They had a massive desperation about them, thousand yard stares and profound drunkenness. They made you ask the question, what is it about Dalton?

I posed that question to Dr. Douglas Flamming, a professor at Georgia Tech who wrote a book about the first cotton mill built in Dalton, in 1896. He said, “A lot of people ask that question. Why is it that so many celebrities and entertainers come from this little southern factory town? I’ll tell you what it is, or what I think it is. It’s in carpet.” He suggested that the entrepreneurship and invention that built the modern carpet industry had given birth to a culture of the ruggedest individualism. He told me about one of the fathers of carpet, who started out as a garage mechanic, and built a fortune on his patents and factories. “Dalton,” this man said, “is a capitalist paradise.”

When my friends talked about Dalton, which they would, late at night, they talked about the mills, doom, getting out, and they talked about Peter Stubb.

Peter was a name on a cassette tape to me, a semi-mythic backwoods visionary who put out homemade albums that he recorded in his closet. He was their childhood friend, and a mystery to them as well. Eric would get the guitar out and play Peter Stubb songs, these epic, preposterous tales of demons, werewolves, self destruction, mysticism, Jesus and sex. The tapes were everywhere, dozens of them, hundreds of songs, a window into the Stubb universe, which was a totally unexpected and surprising place. Peter Stubb was a case of Dalton individualism run rampant, and he was not from paradise. Night after night, there were stories of Peter, his childhood, and the Dalton authorities who hospitalized, jailed, and otherwise confined him. After a while, Peter Stubb started to seem like the shrouded figure at the heart of the Dalton mystery, and the question formed, “Who is Peter Stubb?”

In 2006, while driving back from a Kentucky wedding with my wife and infant son, we stopped in Asheville for a cup of coffee and a break from the road. I ran into an old friend from the Chattanooga days, Josh Mayfield, who used to be called little Shank. He was one of the Dalton punk rockers, no longer a teenager with a thousand yard stare, but a man who talked fast and had projects. He was putting out a boxed set of four cassettes of Peter Stubb music, in a limited edition of 100. I was stunned to find out that Stubb was still making tapes, cycling through personae, and being incredibly wild. I had been looking for a documentary project to cut my teeth on, and I asked Josh to make a documentary about Peter Stubb with me. Two months later we were in Dalton doing interviews with Peter, his family and friends.

By Mitchell Powers