You don’t do it for the fame — you do it for the love of the game.

Jack Logan loved two things: writing comics and writing songs. In the late 1970’s, after graduating from high school in Illinois, he moved to Georgia with his best friend, Kelly, and they took day jobs working as car mechanics. Evenings, nights, and weekends, however, were spent recording Logan’s songs on a little home recorder. Sometimes it was just Jack, sometimes Jack and Kelly, and sometimes full band arrangements with whatever musicians happened to be in town.

In the mid-80’s, Logan created a comic book featuring guitarist Peter Buck — from Georgia-based band R.E.M. — as its featured superhero. This novelty briefly garnered some local underground attention, and in the meantime, he kept working at the car shop, writing and recording songs whenever he could spare the time.

Eventually, the comics and a cassette of songs found their way into Peter Buck’s hands, and he was suitably impressed. Calling on his musical connections, Buck suggested to Peter Jesperson, co-founder of Twin/Tone Records in Minneapolis, that Logan might be worth checking out, so Jesperson tracked him down in Georgia.

Logan met with him a couple of times but wouldn’t give him any tapes, not believing this record company guy could truly be interested, but eventually, Jesperson wheedled them out of him and procured over 600 songs worth of home recordings — everything from rock to blues to country to folk — stretching from 1979 to 1993. Richard Nixon was a rank amateur when it came to taping everything.

Jesperson spent months indexing and whittling down the massive collection (“15 Years In Indiana” is the very first song he heard) to a more manageable 42 songs, and in 1994 released Logan’s debut album — unsurprisingly, a double — aptly titled Bulk. Despite critical acclaim in every kind of publication, a few tours, and a brief time on a major label, Logan never quit his day job — he continued working on cars and having a few beers with his buddies while recording in the evenings, doing what he loved.

Because why would you do anything else?

I can’t write about a guy who records like it’s an addiction and releases an album called Bulk and then only present a single, barely over 2-minute song. So here’s another — it could serve as the prequel for previous: