REVEREND HORTON HEAT + Nashville Pussy + Grady @ Les Saints

By Angelica Calcagnile - BVST - 05/03/2008

Saturday was an extremely trying day for me, and while I generally face my problems head on, I decided it was in my interest to seek some solace elsewhere instead. Four hours later, after watching a barely clad Johnny Knoxville get hit in the balls in ever more inventive ways, I was feeling a whole lot better about myself, but hunger was nagging. I carbo loaded quickly, and as the sugars, starches, fats and chemicals surged warmly through my system, I knew the trifecta had to be completed. After all, what are sex and drugs without rock'n'roll? Luckily for me, The Reverend Horton Heat and the inimitable Nashville Pussy were bringing their brand of rock'n'roll revivalism to Saints that night, so I braved the rain and long faces in the rouge-blanc-bleu to catch openers, Grady. Or at least that was the plan.

The show supposedly started at 9:30, and while I realized that Montreal rock shows stopped being fashionably late ages ago, my Jackass-and-pizza stupor kept me bolted to the couch for longer than intended. I rolled in at quarter past ten to the sound of Pussy. Turns out that the whole thing started an hour earlier, which is a shame, since I've been looking forward to a second shot at Grady since I caught them with Nashville Pussy and Nebula down in NYC for CMJ 2007.

If you've ever listened to the local-classic-rock-station-that-shall-not-be-named for longer than five minutes, chances are that you've heard the plunderin', thunderin', honky-tonkin' instant classic "Diggin' A Hole" by Big Sugar. Well, front man Gordie "Grady" Johnson gave up on the Canadian music scene and moved down to Austin, TX a few years back to form the eponymous three piece Grady. He's still rockin' that fat double-necked guitar, only now the riffs are even more unabashedly bluesy and southern fried and topped off with a ten gallon hat. In any case, the show postmortem reveals that they were a great success, and I don't doubt it, despite not having witnessed it myself.

I did manage to catch a glimpse of the man later, as Gordie came out to play harmonica on a new and sacrilicious Nashville Pussy track with the catchy refrain... lemme see if I can get this right..."Lazy Jesus! Raise ye Jesus!" or something to that effect. Turns out he also engineered their new record, of which quite a few new tracks were previewed for the Montreal crowd that night. Thematically, not much has changed on Nashville Pussy's new stuff, but that's to be expected from a seasoned rock'n'roll band. After all, AC/DC and Motörhead have been essentially rerecording their greatest hits for decades, but only because rock'n'rollers understand that there's no sense in fixin' what ain't broke. Among the new songs was a catchy ditty about being higher than the sky or something to that effect (not to be confused with “High As Hell” from their second album of the same name). Seeing as the new album was recorded at Willie Nelson's studio and Willie knows a little about mood-altering drugs, I'm looking forward to hearing what kind of "influences" the new album will incorporate when it's released in the fall. As for the rest of the set, the band stomped through a bunch of oldies and some newly minted classics from the last record Get Some!, including my personal favorite and daily inspiration, “Hate and Whisky,” but clearly they're looking forward to coming out swinging again with this new album.

Performance-wise, however, it saddens me to report that I was less than impressed…Ordinarily, Nashville Pussy are a band that keep it together, even under extreme duress. I've seen the band more than half a dozen times, and in various states of inebriation, and they still managed to blister through without a hitch. Hell, lead singer Blaine has been so fucking high at times that his eyes were swelled shut, but the performance was still note perfect. This was the first time that I've ever seen them sloppy, and Blaine's "creative" delivery on some of the lyrics left me wishing I had been willing to brave the lineup for beer beforehand. In any case, the band left the stage to heavy applause, and I must admit, I wasn't ultimately disappointed with the set. Nashville Pussy are a true workhorse rock band, in the vein of Motörhead. I know I'll be seeing them tear up the stage for a few more decades yet.

The crowd really started to jump as the lights went down for his holiness the Reverend Horton Heat. Now, rockabilly is not my thing. At all. Yet I've seen The Reverend Horton Heat twice and wouldn't really hesitate to make it a hat trick. Musically, the Rev transcends genre with sheer musicianship, and the man himself is a sight to behold. He's casually Satanic, the way I envision Beelzebub would look if he actually walked the earth. He has the damp grey pallor of a decomposing corpse, the slick hair and sharp suits of a televangelist and the guitar chops that only the devil himself hands out at the crossroads. The ease and grace with which the Reverend's guitar sings gives this band such broad appeal, and the tongue-in-cheek songs and high energy just add to the package.

Alongside Jimbo on upright bass and Paul on drums, the Rev ripped through a slew of favorites to a wildly appreciative crowd, but the real surprises came during a set of covers further along in the show. Presented as an abbreviated musical history, the band started off with “Greensleeves,” and touched on some Bill Haley and The Stray Cats, but the real surprises came with a surprisingly faithful cover of Nirvana's “In Bloom” and an ambitious yet note perfect rendition of Sabbath's mighty “Paranoid,” sung sweetly by the drummer, who still managed to beat the skins while sounding like a less nasal Geddy Lee. What's not to like?

Well, the rock was hot, but the crowd was not, and my friends and I left early to avoid the fights, brewing and breaking out all around us. The atmosphere was tense and violent, people were being tossed out by the unreasonably unsympathetic bouncers by the boatload and quite frankly, the freak show was detracting from the action onstage. Certain concerts attract the kind of crowd that only go to one, maybe two live shows a year, and subsequently act like animals let out of a cage. Strangely enough, Saints seems to attract that kind of crowd on a regular basis, even for heavy rock shows. This is the second Nashville Pussy show I've seen there where a disconcerting percentage of the crowd was composed of dirty hippies in Che Guevara t-shirts swaying off tempo, greasy bejeweled club kids that quite possibly haven't left the club since the days of previous tenant The Dome, pregnant women, frat boys in Dockers and plaid button-downs crowd surfing and extraordinarily drunken middle-aged couples who finally found a sitter and have decided to celebrate by flopping like belligerent sock puppets all over the "dancefloor."

Saints has a bad reputation in Montreal, and while I've long defended its subterranean charm, I was disappointed once again by the sub par show-going experience. As with their last appearance, Nashville Pussy was forced to play in semi-darkness, and their sound was curiously subdued, The Reverend rocked while the ceiling above them dripped rain onto the stage, and the lines for bathrooms and beers were comparable to the Bell Center, for a venue with a fraction of the capacity. My friend attributes the generally bad vibe of the evening to the grievous hockey loss, but that doesn't entirely justify the less than stellar show-going experience. Saints is a venue that books rock'n'roll, but it's not quite a rock'n'roll venue, and it left me reminiscing about the last time I saw the Reverend and Nashville Pussy join forces, all the way back in 2002, right around the corner at Club Soda...

I'll stop writing now, but feel free to "say something nasty" to me about these bands, the show, shitty local venues, or anything else in the comments on the CJLO forums...

Tune in to BVST with Angelica every Wednesday from 7pm - 9pm