Critter's Gonna Critter

Mobile, Alabama sits at the north end of Mobile Bay, at the place where the Mobile River empties into the Gulf of Mexico and decides it's done traveling. It is not a city that is on the way to somewhere else. It is, for the people who live there, exactly where they are.

In 1987, four musicians had been playing together in Mobile for approximately two years. Dale Whitfield played bass and sang. Bobby Kowalczyk played lead guitar. Mike Tran played rhythm. Jimmy Fontenot played drums. They traveled in Dale's 1984 Ford F-150, covered in the truck bed with a tarp that worked approximately seventy percent of the time.

The show in Biloxi was August 1987. An outdoor stage in a parking lot adjacent to a bar whose name no one has been able to confirm, though three separate people have described it as "the one with the tarpon mounted above the door."

The raccoon was large. Reddish-brown. A notch in his left ear that suggested experience. He moved, according to Mike Tran — who had spent a year in wildlife removal in Pascagoula — like a professional.

For approximately fifteen minutes, four musicians stood at the edge of a parking lot in Biloxi, Mississippi, and watched a raccoon dismantle their merchandise. The cassette tapes. The Styrofoam cooler. The handwritten price list.

Nobody chased the raccoon. Nobody said anything. And then Jimmy Fontenot said four words: "Critter's gonna critter."

He has described it as a factual observation. Not a band name. Not a philosophy. Just a thing that was true.

Southern rock, technically. But Southern rock is a genre that performs urgency. What Critter's Gonna Critter played was something different — music that had thought it through and arrived somewhere. Music that didn't need you to agree with it.

A music critic named Darren Mouton drove four hours from Pensacola to see them in 1993. His review ended: "Whitfield sings like a man who has already thought it through and arrived somewhere, and is now generously allowing you to watch him be there."

That is the most accurate description of Critter's Gonna Critter ever written. The band did not know it existed until 2019.

They never broke up. They simply stopped showing up one by one between 1994 and 1996 until there was nobody left.

Jimmy's postcard from Pensacola arrived sometime in late 1995. It said "critter's gonna critter :)" with a smiley face. This was the last communication from him.

Dale played one final show as Critter's Gonna Critter to an audience of four people and a dog in Pensacola in 1996. The dog stayed for the entire set. One of the four people left after the third song. Dale considered this a reasonable outcome.

The dog's name was never recorded.