Don’t give a damn for the corporate scene

Straight from the woods and packing steam

Texas rocks with a Texas T"

- Sinis, ‘Texas Rock’

I don’t really have to tell you what a band called Dixiewitch sounds like, do I? They’ve got beards, tattoos, they’re from Dallas, and they name their many amps after chicks they’ve fucked. I think Clay Mills, their guitarist, said it best. "We’re from Texas, man. We play big rock." Clay and the boys are spending the summer on a devil sweat, van to glory national tour with perpetual road dogs Alabama Thunderpussy and Suplecs in a brass balled, smoking chrome campaign to save rock and roll from itself . I caught up with Clay on the eve of the Witch’s departure to talk about bar brawls and Ozzy.

Yeah, I was outside fucking with the lawn mower.

Well, there’s not going to be anyone here to do it for 7 weeks…

We’re getting all our amps together. This is serious rock. We’re bringing 9 heads with us, brother.

We’ve been to the southwest, but this is the first national one.

(laughs) Well, maybe they’ll be some when it’s over.

Yeah, Eric from Thunderpussy masterminded this tour, he got it all together. It’s cool to be playing with a band that already has a draw. I’ve been with other bands when we went out on our own, and you end up playing all ages gigs in trailer parks in Mississippi or something weird like that.

No, but luckily we’ve got guarantees for every gig. We’ll probably have to live off of merchandise money. Hopefully we can end up with 20 bucks a day in our pocket. That’s if we’re doing really well.

Yeh, I’ve seen a few of those.

We’ll see, man. I’m a small dude, but I’m pretty scrappy.

I’m really good at running my mouth and getting into shit, that’s part of being from Texas, but it should be all right, all those guys are cool with us. If there’s any fist-fighting going on, it’ll probably be between Dixiewitch.

Naw, it’s never happened, but fights break out at the gigs sometimes, and that’s always interesting. There was this one time in Austin, a fight broke out right when we started playing, so there’s this guy slamming this other guy’s head against the stage, knocking the shit out of him. I just looked down, and said, "Hell, yeah, man, give it to him!"

This was just some drunk asshole. A punk rocker with a mohawk beat his ass.

It’s pretty mixed. Here at home, there aren’t many bands like us, so we have to play with all different kinds of bands. It’s always the older guys that like us, like we have to play with all these nu-metal bands, and somebody’s older brother shows up and ends up really digging us. In places like Texas and Louisiana, I think it’s refreshing to hear a band like us. Last week we just played a biker rally.

Yeh, we broke out some Skynrd and James Gang for those guys. We hollered a lot. Lot of rebel yells for the bikers.

Most rock bands of a tender age in Texas grow up wanting to be Pantera. Not Dixiewitch. They wanted to be Black Sabbath…

We started jamming together about a year and a half ago.

Yeah, NIB. We found a singer that could pull it off, so we did some Halloween shows around Texas, and it really took off, so we started writing our own shit. That’s how Dixie Witch got started.

The drummer spontaneously combusts or something, right? No, not yet. But y’know, we only did it for a short time, and we did it with respect. We did cool songs, we never touched "Iron Man’ or ‘Paranoid’. Hopefully we beat the curse when we started doing our own songs.

No, man, he won’t stop coming back lately. The Ozzfest is rolling though town in a month.