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Beasts of Bourbon |
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 While various members of Sour Jazz or
the Cheater Slicks might be willing to accept some of the blame for
introducing yours, to his favorite band, and ongoing musical influences,
THE BEASTS OF BOURBON; It was indeed, my blood and guts brother,
SLEAZE, who instinctively knew this little CD was likely to change my
life. I'd been reading about 'em in all the rock mags of the day, like "Bucketful
Of Brains", and probably "Noise For Heroes, Music For Zeroes",
but their name was so dumbly Stones-derivative, that I was loathe
to investigate. I was kind of oversaturated with Stones tribute
bands at the time, as all my room-mates were listening to The Black
Crowes, The
London Quireboys, The Cynics, The Jacobites, The
Bounty Hunters, Chesterfield Kings,
Snatches Of Pink, Dogs D'Amour,
Primal Scream, Mystery Girls, Chatterbox, The
Standells, etc.,etc., night and day, 'til I could hardly stand the
originals. Then, one frigid winter, sometime back in the blurry 90's, the
legendary S.G. darkened my doorstep, shivering out in the brutal
Cambridge, Ma. cold; smoking furiously, and uncharacteristically
jittery, cos well, he was on the wagon in those years, trailing his own
black clouds of unintentional arson and despair, and makin' one of his
infrequent appearances at, like, Whiskey Central.I lived with a hysterical houseful of loud, dramatic alcoholics, frustrated musicians, junkies with borderline personalities, and a nice pothead couple, and the chick who ran the Alien Sex Fiend Fan-Club, in a huge rent-controlled apt. in Central Sq.- I think it was like, four bedrooms and a gross-out basement inhabited by a sinister former sideman, for $600/mo. One of our roommate's Aunt had sub-let it since the sixties, everyone was insane, and truthfully, I don't remember much at all about that era of my life, only that I was surrounded by loads of booze-doomed cats and sexy broads, who all kinda condoned my wayward behaviors, somehow almost believing in my own delusion, that I, myself, was destined for some kinda Flash Metal Stardom. It was just assumed by all my various record company employers, in those years, that I would be drunk, and three hours late for work, if I managed to show at all. Lotsa stories, but that'll all come out in my dumb book, later this year, provided I live through the current shit-storms. __________________________________________________________________________________ |
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| The other stuff I'd been listening to, myself, back in those days, like: Smack, Thee Hypnotics, New Model Army, Uncle Sam, The Coma-Tones, The Pogues, Birthday Party, "When I'm With You" and "Jesus Shooting Heroin" by the Flaming Lips, Jim Thirwell's Wiseblood EP, "Cherry Orchards" by Celtic Frost, were all fine for blowing your sour mash, L.S.D., and speedballs-twisted, little trainwreck-mind. THE BEASTS OF BOURBON were for when your mind was long, long gone. Alot of record collectors, (he snorts derisively), dig their early tribute to psychobilly and THE CRAMPS, "The Axe-Man's Jazz" ( Bigtime, 1984), but "THE LOW ROAD" really nailed the seemy, sociopathic, blues-drunk spiral of the beautiful and the damned, like nobody else has, ever since. |
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I still have the photo from inside the jewel
box tray, of their double album, "FROM THE BELLEY OF THE
BEASTS", thumb-tacked to the wall here, in spite of having moved roughly,
156 times, since he first gave "THE LOW ROAD" to me. My dead former
guitarist lost the discs when he met a girl and moved out West to become a
singer. It's a cut-throat world, this shit called rock'n'roll. Weirdly,
I'm lookin' at the same damn pic right now. You can't make this shit
up. Anyhoo,THE BEASTS OF BOURBON were scabby-knuckled, Australian blues-punk motherfuckers, I mean, severely haunted, whiskey-twisted, savage, doomed, old hard-asses, ruined, fat, mean guys in filthy t-shirts... NOT yer local tattoo-shop fonzies singin' 'bout "Sin" and "Hell". These dudes weren't greasy kids, even back then. They were venomous and aching, former members of THE SCIENTISTS and HOODOO GURUS, and the talent pool of this revolving door operation remains astonishing. Beasts frontman, TEX PERKINS, my personal all-time favorite vocalist, is a debauched and tortured, genuine article, outlaw-singer, with a real gift for story tellin' and emotional range, gruffly conveying the whole filthy rainbow of human emotions- from drugsick and paranoid; to lovesick and tender; to grief-stricken and suicidal; to dumb, fanged, and hairy snort snort bluuuurrrggghh woke up in the psych-ward, cos I scared everybody shitless, and I didn't have no cab-fare home. On "THE LOW ROAD", Tex Perkins reminds us of all our other favorite singers at once: Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Bon Scott, Hank Williams Sr., Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, George Jones, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Lux Interior, Leonard Cohen, Claude from Smack, and Nick Cave. Shit, I don't even know if I want you cut 'n' paste "punk" plagiarists turned on to Tex, really, I'm just handing you something else I love, to probably try to ruin with all your weak and craven imitations, I know you just can't help but try to "assimilate" everything you find out about, into your little bowling-shirted rawk-personas, but fortunately, what TEX has, is kinda hard to fake with money. It ain't in the cowboy shirt. It ain't about sideburns. It ain't for sale at rockabilly dot com. So, you take the "high" road, and I'll take... ________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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THE LOW ROAD |
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"Goodbye Friends" is a swampy suicide
note set to music...."Junkie Girlfriends" was the story of my own
soon to completely disintegrate life, back then: "We've had enough of you
JUNKIE
GIRLFRIENDS! Takin' all our money, and puttin' us down! We've had a gut
full of you unclean women! Get it together or get outta town! Forget it
girl, you just get UGLIER AND UGLIER! Go back to your Mama! Get on that
bus! Listen, babe, we weren't no Shit 'N' Nancy! We're more like
Samson-and Delirious! In the event you should come to your senses, go take
a blood-test, and gimme a call! I'll tell you all the things you meant to
me-a nagging bag of bones-that's all!" I really don't know if you had to
be there or not, to understand how brilliant this shit is, but if you
lived through that exact experience, day in and day out, for nearly a
decade, believe me, you just MARVEL at the economy of Mister Perkin's
scalpel-sharp poetry. He spits out every last, little detail so nastily,
and so full of just dead-on, sick to your stomach, dread and pain. The
crazed, splatter-film guitars moan and throb all over the place- Exile In
The Funhouse? Meet "Songs about Fucking!" KIM SALMON went on to form KIM
SALMON & THE SURREALISTS, and was one of psycho-blues' most influential
guitar stranglers, ever. Probably the real boss of 'em all. |
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Tex has what they call, a euphoric-recall, so he always remembers the bedazzling highs, and intoxicating effects of new love, the golden-lit honeymoon spell, when you're first seducing some beautiful woman, and a real heart connection's being made, and fireworks are goin' off in your belly (or was it just all those pills mixed with rot-gut vodka and Johnny Walker Black?) when you know you're in trouble again. And the always nearly-fatal comedown, when she leaves you for some fancy man with a cigar in a black limousine, stranded on the side of the road, thumb in the air. These hard-luck stories of broken hearted saloon-urchins gone to drink, singin' with the alleycats about their one true fine love(s), will naturally, sound alien and ugly and senselessly violent to students, and cultural-tourists, but anybody who's ever been sent to drift by mean-spirited little sewing circles of bitch-ass poseurs, and money-grubbing swindlers, all vying maliciously for anything the outcast's ever set his bloodshot eyes on, will instantly recognize all the love and loss and grief and blame and shame and |
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naked screaming devastation that the BEASTS have gone through.
While we're thankful for these hard-born mash-notes from the edge, we also
profoundly empathize,
and lament the price Perkins and Jones and company have had to pay for their forbidden knowledge and first-person accounts of true love gone bad
and the ghostly chill out there bumming menthols in front of the Macon
Greyhound station. THE LOW ROAD is sort of like the musical equivalent of
ZODIAC MINDWARP'S "FUCKED BY ROCK" auto-biography. A no holds-barred,
first-hand testimony, recounting all the goin' up and comin' downs, of
life on the razor's edge in used cowboy boots. This is the stuff that
heals, AND the stuff that kills, so you've been forewarned: THE BEASTS ain't for rank-amateurs. If you've never come-to, in a strange place, with
one shoe missing, and the war blaring on CNN, or woke up strapped to a
gurney in the back of an ambulance, or been forced to wander 'round the
great outdoors, hated, lookin' for a warm place to lay your head, that
don't stink of piss, well, then, the BEASTS probably ain't gonna talk to
you about much you'd care to hear about. These ain't no pretty boys
pretending to be hard up for some kinda ingénue's attention they've been,
thus far, unable to purchase. These weren't guys whose parents threw them
parties at bars, everytime they got out of jail for drunk-driving. These
unloved Beasts Of Bourbon were US--hard livin', hard lovin', street
hustlin' blues scum with an achin' in their chest and the starlight in
their eyes, forever cast to ramble in search of that one redemptive love
who could banish all these damned demons for a little while, and cleanse
their eyes from the atrocities they'd seen. Real Rock'n'roll!!! __________________________________________________________________________________ |
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| The Beasts Of Bourbon featured the immense talents of Perkins, Salmon, Spencer P. Jones, Charlie Owen, and many others, amidst their vomit-wet Cassanova ranks, and all these various Beasts-affiliated ramblers, went on to produce one of the most prolific and consistently awe-inspiring discographies in the pantheon of rock'n'roll, ever. Problem is, all their discs are like, $28 each, imported from Australia, so when your own junkie girlfriends have pawned off your entire album collection to bespectacled record store clerks for $3/pop, it's sad, cos you rarely ever get to hear 'em anymore. My resentful and abiding suspicion is that anybody I haven't already completely alienated with this very rant here, is likely in the position to purchase their entire back catalogue online immediately, in the interest of urgently assimilating still more foreign ideas and spooky messages into their lame band's silly pretense of hot-rodded white trash villainy....ZZZZZZZ... |
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| Let me help you real music lovers discern something crucial here about hard soul and real rock'n'roll, as I know it's getting harder and harder to weed through these bajillions of bands, all proclaiming themselves "outlaws" and "outsiders". Real losers, I mean, actually, poor people, what hipsters refer to, romantically, as "white trash" people, don't WANNA be stuck in some ghetto, they're TRYIN' to escape the Jerry Springer life. It's only EVER the upper middle-class Mama's boys who wanna act out all those retarded fantasies of being mechanics who live in some heavy metal trailer park where everybody sniffs glue and worships the debbil and fucks preggos and drinks "Pabst! you fuck", all day. If you really WERE born down by the River's Edge, you'll be forever scrambling, like a motherfucker, to get the fuck OUT of poverty and dysfunctional behavior patterns, to escape from all the weird, bad, dark, tragic, fucked up shit that goes on here. To leave the crack-pipes and screw-top wine bottles the fuck alone. It ain't fun, when it ain't fantasy. When you ain't there by choice, and you see no real way out, it all hurts. There's too many consequences and bad memories. Emergency rooms, hand-cuffs, suicides, o.d.'s, child abuse, broken hearts, funerals. It ain't some quaint little video you can turn off after you get to watch Halle Berry's sex scene... People get hurt badly, live in fear, generations are stuck repeating sick patterns, non-violent drug-offenders get victimized by the system, real folks go crazy, go without, up and die, lives are ruined, it ain't nothin' LIKE watchin' "Barfly" on VHS with the doctor's daughter, with the cocaine, in the dirty wifebeater, on the white leather couch, in front of the free-jazz painting. It ain't like it is for all them rich kids sittin' in their local, with money in their wallets, quoting "Swingers" all day. When you're damned to travel the real low roads, you WISH you could go to some Ivy League University and "just get a job" or "just make a record" or "just inherit multiple properties" or "just be normal" and have what the haves, have. You can't help but think you want all that rich-people power and shit, even when you know it's all a mirage, it's like a carrot on a stick, you're hopelessly programmed to believe you don't deserve to live unless you can automatically command $32 thousand/yr. Not all of us can. When it's your own real, grim fate, your grisly little curse, you try to change it, evolve out of it---somehow! You long, and yearn, and pray, 24/7, for some of that that insulation and protection and privilege and opportunity you see the other half all enjoying, so obliviously. No one in their right mind WANTS to live in homeless shelters and little old man bars, cos it's just too much, believe me. Too fucking real. The crack just makes whole towns full of people go so crazy it ain't even remotely charming or funny in any way, whatsoever. It's bloody, awful, horrific. Spend even five minutes loitering on the fringes of the real drug culture, and you're extremely liable to get burned beyond belief. You'll be begging your more prosperous associates to help you up out of it. Otherwise, it really is graveyards, jails and institutions, destination lonely, or worse. When you come from a real place of unwholesome fuckedupness, people can sense that down and out "otherness" on you, and instinctively, deny you entry into any job that pays a livable wage. All you puffed up, judgmental rich kids who think Wal-Mart IS a livable wage, ought to enrich your own perspectives by going undercover, and just trying it for one day, and then, looking at the take-home math. You'll be shocked, floored, disheartened. | |
| I read that your "President" is trying to have fast-food jobs reclassified as "factory jobs" so he can inflate his phony employment statistics some more, in time for the next rigged from every possible angle-election.Once you're caught-up in that permanently-exiled, outsider-vortex, it's nearly impossible to escape it, without a real support network of some kind. You end up goin' fuckin' crazy, or wrong, or you die. Oh yeah, and nobody gives a flying fuck in the end, because you've already been summarily JUDGED, and dismissed, and dehumanized, as "worthless", referred to as, "human garbage", in order for your former families to allow for your pointless descent into oblivion. But you'll still be holding on for as long as you can. You WONT be bragging and blustering about how much ass you can kick, or shit you can shoot, or makin' much talk no more about dying, ever. You'll be seeking God and forgiveness, and minding your own business, and trying not to answer the door, when the hell-seekers come lookin' for you, with their shop-lifted bottles of life-threatening chaos. You'll be avoiding mayhem with whatever sense you have left. |
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____________________________________________________________________________________ Broken-hearted desperados and actual vagarants are earnestly advised to implore their more-together, old allies, who still have record collections, to burn 'em copies of the, been there and back, BEASTS OF BOURBON....Tex, Don, & Charlie... Spencer P. Jones. The Cruel Sea. The Scientists. Salamander Jim. Tex Deadly & The Dum Dums. The Surrealists. Charlie Owen. Anything related to the BEASTS OF BOURBON is likely to either console you in your worst, most agonizing A.M. hours, or rock your motherfucking socks off, whenever you're finally feeling a little bit better, and thinkin' you're almost nearly gonna be able to stand up again sometime soon. I recommend Tex Perkins' "Far Be It From Me" for those in the throes of love, or out of love-for those who've loved, let's say. The Cruel Sea's "The Honeymoon Is Over" or "This Is Not The Way Home" (country/world-beat experimental, cinematic, crazy cocktail jazz, not for tough guys, really) Sad and weary beat poets and ragtag wanderers can be soothed by "Black Milk", and "Sour Mash" by the BEASTS. "THE LOW ROAD", "From The Belley Of The Beasts", Like I said, anything related to Tex & Co. is likely to really rock you real rock'n' rollers somehow. Obviously, NOT for poseurs, or the faint of heart. Spencer and Tex both have new material available. The BEASTS have recently reformed and are currently gigging in Australia. FLASH METAL SUICIDE? IN SPADES, FUCKERS....Every manner of seedy or deviant self-destruction and fuck it up right when it's getting good again impulsive behavior can be found out here on the low road. Go home, while you still can. www.texperkins.net www.spookyrecords.com http://www.i94bar.com/intro.html
*This just in, seems in late February,
Beast Of Bourbon, Brian
Hooper, fell off a balcony, he has a broken back, punctured lung and
broken ribs. Doctors are hopeful he will walk again. |
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