Which is to say, the music is more inspired by the dirty realism of Seventies Americana-makers than country counterparts. Distinct from Cactus Lee's earlier releases, fuller production with some new instrumentation fills out Cactus Lee's hippie folk sound – more Gene Clark than Gene Autry, more Jackson C. The acoustic renderings Dehan played that day were released about a month later on a mini-album called Perfect Middle Hall. In a casual moment to a passerby, Dehan was crossing a creative threshold. The whole effort at the laundromat took about 30 minutes, and then everyone left.

Between songs, he took swigs of a beer wrapped in a brown paper bag that sat next to him. There was purpose to his singing, and he occasionally closed his eyes. He wore a Texas standard: cowboy boots, Wranglers, and a Western shirt. His stage was a bench set against the laundromat's front windows, and the backdrop, the streets and trees of Central Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood. The folks doing their laundry talked and yelled and folded, peeled wet clothes from inside the machines, and paid no mind to the crowd or the music. In the periphery, the boxes of metal shook and clanged. While the crowd arching around him was restrained, the laundromat was not. He didn't use an amplifier for his performance, just his voice and a guitar. The man was Kevin Dehan, who plays under the moniker Cactus Lee. But the audience quietly watched and swayed to the music. If the heat was oppressive outside, it was downright tyrannical inside Laundry Works on Speedway. On a Thursday last June, about 20 people stood sweating and watching a man play songs at a laundromat. Kevin Dehan, aka Cactus Lee (Photo by Jackie Lee Young)

Cactus music surealism