The
Knoxville Girls, The Gimmicks, Oblivion Seekers
Satyricon
125 NW 6th Ave., 243-2380 10 pm Sunday, March 5 Cover
The Knoxville
Girls' impressive rock-and-roll pedigree: Jerry Teel played
in the Honeymoon Killers and Chrome Cranks; Kid Congo Powers
pulled shifts in the Cramps, Gun Club and Nick Cave's Bad
Seeds; Bob Bert played drums in Sonic Youth's early days
and in Pussy Galore.
In the Woodshed
is a limited-edition record, available only at live
shows on the Girls' current tour.
The men of New York City's Knoxville Girls possess a distinct
and learned sensibility.
Elders (of sorts) of the Lower East Side noise-rock scene,
they seamlessly infuse the primal throb and scree of their
punk-rock pasts with a deeply held respect for Sun Studios
country and Stax label soul.
Featuring Jerry Teel on guitar and vocals, Jack Martin
and Kid Congo Powers on guitar, Bob Bert on drums and Barry
London on organ, the band pilots the shimmer and shake of
its wide-ranging rock purely on gut impulse. The results
is a stellar confluence of grit and grace that plays as
comfortably in county-line roadhouses as slumland punk clubs.
Despite these palpable influences and leanings, in a recent
phone conversation during a practice-break, most of the
Knoxville Girls made it very clear that they don't worry
about trying to be anything. They simply are.
"Once we actually just played together," says London, "we
really kinda clicked. We all get along great. We all play
off each other really well. As far as the band is concerned,
I'm having the most fun ever playing music with the least
amount of overly involved effort. It just works together."
According to Bert, who likens the Knoxville Girls to a
meeting point between '66 Dylan and the Velvet Underground's
Sister Ray, "This is the most natural band I've ever
been in."
"There's no grand vision behind the Knoxville Girls," adds
Powers. "It's its own little monster. A monster with a life
of its own. The main goal is to make music that satisfies
us. It has to feel good, man! Pleasure! We want pleasure.
Nick Cave had a song on Die Haut called 'Pleasure
Is the Boss.' I'd subscribe to that."
Most of the Knoxville girls have known each other for years.
They're pals. "To a certain degree, I've always just played
with friends," Teel says. "That's how I started, and that's
when it was fun."
Teel began pairing up with good friend Martin to play as
a pure country duo. "When I was growing up I really liked
psychedelic music and garage," Teel says. "I was into the
Velvet Underground and the whole New York scene as a kid.
But I grew up in Alabama, so there was country music around
me all the time. I thought that was for rednecks or whatever.
Then I went on, and it just sort of came full circle. It's
definitely in my blood, I can't deny that. It's where I'm
from."
They recruited Bert to play drums, laying the groundwork
for the Knoxville Girls. With this informal association
hardly a weekend old, a label with an extensive reputation
for messy rock and semi-deconstructed rhythm and blues took
a keen interest in the project.
"When I told Larry Hardy from In The Red Records about
it, he offered to put it out before it was even anything,"
Bert says. "Before ever hearing it. That was sort of an
inspiration. Like, wow, somebody wants to put us out on
a record. We put it together like a puzzle, you know. It
basically was the three of us doing basic tracks and just
listening to all the stuff we had and building up from it,
making songs and calling in different people for overdubs."
"All the original songs on the first album came out of
jams," says Teel. "That's how we write. Some of them were
first takes even, the words and everything."
This kind of wide-open permissiveness allows all the sordid
histories and influences behind the Knoxville Girls to be
drawn into their music. The result is a roiling, hyper-traditionist
stew of sounds, where elements of country, blues and garage
play out on a field leveled by a punk-fed understanding
of limitlessness and noise. Oh, and you can dance to it.
More so than the studio LP, the Knoxville Girls' new live
record In the Woodshed demonstrates that the band
can whip up some wildly abrasive, out-of-this-world butt-shaking
action. That's right: Good-time music. Check it out. In
the words of Kid Congo Powers himself, "As morbid and gross
as it sounds, I think we are a very enjoyable concert."
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 1,
2000
|
