BOB
LOG III IMMORTAL LEE COUNTY KILLERS
FEAST OF SNAKES @ Bar of Soap, Dallas,
February 2, 2001
Auburn, Alabama's no rawwwk Mecca, but maybe it oughta be, home as it is not only to a university but also to a thriving scene where a diverse array of bands - everything from rockabilly to emo to King Crimson-like prog - ply their trade at house party shows that can draw a coupla hundred people, where a band can make 150 bucks off the door without having to deal with a dickhead club owner. A lot of visiting road bands are getting hip and making the Auburn house show scene - recent notables to do so include the Candysnatchers and Raging Slab.
"Auburn's so small that there are no cliques, no trends," boasts transplanted Memphian, ex-Quadrajet, uni professor and doctoral candidate, and Immortal Lee County Killers howling axe maniac Chetley "Cheetah" Weise. There are few records released out of the scene, and most of the bands won't even venture 250 miles to play a gig, but from the sound of it, they're a committed bunch who play for the love of music only. How can ya not like/respect THAT as a concept?
The Killers are a worthy exception; they've been seeing a LOT of out-of-town action lately, since the release of their monstrous "Essential Fucked-Up Blues" slab on Estrus. A recent blitzkrieg tour took them as far from home as Chicago, Detroit, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. This week, they're in the Southwest, playing shows in Houston (where Chet made the mistake of telling his hostess, Geetha from Gun Crazy, that the Saints were his favorite Oz band and got to watch a shitload of killer Radio Birdman video for his trouble), Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Austin.
Regrettably, I missed their in-store appearance at Good Records in Dallas (a low-key setting where Chet inexplicably broke more strings than he usually does in the course of the Killers' full-blown club assault), but I caught up with 'em at Bar of Soap, a cool venue - never a cover, you can do your laundry while you rock out (no bullshit, citizen), and the jukebox was actually blaring the Five's "Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)" and "Shakin' Street" when I got there - on a bill headlined by Fat Possum recording artiste Bob Log III (an interesting, idiosyncratic one-man blues/noise band from Tucson who sings through a telephone microphone and wears a motorcycle helmet onstage) with support from locals Feast of Snakes (led by the guitarist from Fort Worth's Gospel Swingers, playing their first-ever show).
As Chet points out, punk blues (as practiced by the Killers and others like the White Stripes, Soledad Brothers, Poison 13, Gun Club, and a sizable portion of the Fat Possum stable) has been around for more than a little while, but only recently started garnering some mainstream media attention - the Cheetah was recently the recipient of a call from a Rolling Stone scribe looking to get the 411. It's no surprise to Prof. Weise that the mutated sounds of raw, primitive electrified country blues have a strong pull on the "punk" audience. "It's got the two essential elements," the Cheetah explains, "the Truth and the Beat." Both are amply audible in the Immortal Lee County Killers' show.
The Killers use the blues as a medium for restoring rawwwk to its most fundamental building blocks: big beat and loud electric guitar. "The idea," says Chet, "is to have a band that can open for Bob Log...or Nebula!"
Drum dynamo
Doug "The Boss" Sherrard plays a stripped-down set: kick, one cymbal, snare,
hi-hat, and a floor tom that serves as a table for him to set his tree trunk-like
Tommy Aldrich sticks (on a recent Scandinavian jaunt with the Killers, the Boss
discovered Black Oak Arkansas - "Southern rock never went away over there, and
Detroit is the center of the Universe to those people. I learned more about
bands like the Stooges and the MC5 than I ever learned in my whole LIFE!").
Doug's done the two-piece thang before, with an Auburn band called Spam that
featured him playing stand-up cymbal and snare along with a guitarist and was
often augmented by as many as half a dozen other musos playing "random instruments
- we'd have two trombones sometimes!" The Boss is steeped in funk - another pre-Killers aggro "used to play like P-Funk, without a bass player or any of the things commonly associated with funk" - and hip-hop (when not beating the shit out of the skins, he also does the sampling-and-mixing DJ thang; you can hear the influence in some of the breaks and tempo shifts in his trap work). With the Killers, he plays with the non-stop energy of a D.C. go-go drummer (the obscure funk subgenre indigenous to this nation's capital, where bands will play continuous sets that might last an hour, and typically have two or three drummers for a gig, so when one drops from exhaustion, another's ready to take his place). He digs Hank Williams, too. (The Boss' best story: he and some friends formed a death-metal band called Cuntera - a play on nearby Arlington, Texas' resident Cowboys from Hell - wrote half a dozen songs, played 'em every day, opened a coupla shows, and broke up...all in FIVE DAYS! A year later, they played a reunion show!)
Similarly, the Cheetah's ears are big enough to take in Mississippi Fred McDowell, Pussy Galore (whose "Revolution Summer" the Killers cover in live performance and on the flip of the Estrus "Let's Get Killed" single), and King Crimson ("I saw 'em back in '97...I was STONED...they had these weird guitars [Chapman Sticks], and in the middle of the set, they changed the sound of 'em so they sounded like a symphony!"). Having adopted the two-piece format "when I got through playing with the [Quadrajets] 'cos I don't have the patience to deal with that many people," the Cheetah may have found the Final Solution to the troublesome Bassplayer Problem. (Tell it to the Thermals, right?) While he's admittedly hardly, uh, a FINESSE player, he's a master of his tools, employing three amps (piggyback with one 15-inch speaker for low end, two small 15-watt amps - Fender and Ampeg - chained together to handle the high end), an A-B switch, and a fuzzbox to vary the textures of the wall of noise he wrings out of his semi-hollow electrics (Yamaha and, uh, is that a Washburn?). Having just started using a booster and wah again myself, I was quite impressed by the fancy pedalwork he employed to control the aural assault as he rocked around the floor (walking on his knees into the audience - there's no "stage" at Bar of Soap) and bar (which he climbed atop to blow harp during an extended "Big Damn Roach," pausing for a moment to draft an audience member to take over while he ordered a bourbon and Coke!) like a man possessed (which, in a sense, I guess he was), howling like a banshee, capping it all off with his patented playing-guitar-atop-wobbling-half-stack-followed-by-flying-leap move. A man who works hard for your enjoyment, he uses space (often filled with apocalyptic feedback shrieks and always underpinned by the Boss' relentless riddim) as judiciously as Miles Davis (albeit at MUCH higher volume) to build tension in the toons.
The music, which sounded like complete fuckin' chaos (and I LIKED it!) the first time I heard 'em at SXSW last year (in the same way as Beefheart sounded that way to me for the first hundred or so listens), is familiar by now from the album, and I could dig how tuned in the two musos are to each other's time after playing the toons together for months.
The standard Dallas punk crowd (fairly diverse, ranging from what appeared to be the Original Biker and a guy with dreads to yr typical black denimed and T-shirted, black-or-red-with-no-highlights coiffed claque; I even saw one of the guitarists from the Rock'n'Roll Disciples - the one who looks like a Skynyrd survivor - lurking outside) appreciated it mightily, too, with several fine young thangs (highlights: black-clad, long and lean, moody and menacing; collegiate-cute in turtleneck, glasses, and pigtails; Betty Page bangs, short skirt, and plunging neckline) and the usual complement of dorky guys shaking their moneymakers. Standouts included the aforementioned "Let's Get Killed" and "Big Damn Roach," as well as the mutated Fred McDowell of "Train She Rides" (another highlight from the album that's also featured, in original and remixed versions, on a recent self-released single on Homo Habilis).
The only non-snazz aspect was the omission from the set (due to lack of time) of a version of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues" that Chet says is "one third Robert Johnson, one third Killers, and one third Gun Club." Sounds like a winner to me. Maybe they'll do it at Emo's in Austin this Sunday (if I can only make it there), or in May when they're back for Garage Shock. Me, I can't wait. The Truth and the Beat - what more do ya need? - Ken Shimamoto
