E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cocked and loaded The Konks shoot to thrill, and the Marvels get soaked BY BRETT MILANO

From the Monkees and Bad Company up through Motörhead and Public Image Ltd., one thing has always been true: only the good bands get to have themesongs. So it is that the Konks, who won the Boston leg of Little Steven’s Underground Garage competition on April 17, have a tune called "29 Fingers" that sums them up nicely: "We got 29 fingers, and man are we having fun/29 fingers, and only six are thumbs. . . . We play cheap guitars, and just two lousy drums/We’re the Konks, and we don’t care!"

For winning the contest, the Konks got a bunch of equipment that they’ll probably never use, including a fancy gold drum set and two examplars of that classic arena-rock guitar, the Gibson Flying V ("I feel like Rudolf Schenker from the Scorpions," joked Konks guitarist Bob Wilson displaying his winnings on stage). With celebrity judges including Willie Alexander, former Missing Persons frontwoman Dale Bozzio, ex-Cars keyboardist and Greg Hawkes (reported to be a fan of the "29 Fingers" song), plus Boston Phoenix Music Editor Matt Ashare and WBCN’s Albert O, the Konks weren’t the most obvious choice to win: they’re raw and primal, but not strictly a garage band in the Lyres/Sonics sense. But their victory added the right note to an event that was already pretty surreal: it’s not often that you get to see the Konks, Triple Thick, Rock City Crimewave, Downbeat 5, and the Lyres play in a near-empty Roxy before sunset on a Saturday evening, especially when Dunkin’ Donuts reps are carrying trays of lattes and doing their hardest to get people to drink the stuff. But they’re the Konks, and they don’t care.

"It was really a chance to get together and get drunk with all our buddies," says Wilson when we all sit down at the Middle East. "We didn’t realize we were in the finals," adds bassist Jon Porth. "Somebody called me on Saturday morning, and I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ We didn’t even make the first cut for the contest; we got in only after some other bands dropped out." Adds singer/drummer Kurt Davis (known as Yukki Gipe in a previous life, when he fronted Bullet LaVolta), "I’ll guarantee that we’ll be too raw and sloppy for the next round. Where else are they going to get a garage band that comes on stage with their drums sitting on two milk crates?"

Sloppy and raw are what the Konks are all about, but in the best possible way. The band’s unusual line-up — with Davis standing up front, hitting the two lousy drums while he sings — came about because that’s all they had at their first rehearsal; it sounded good, so they stuck with it. There’s a bit of blues, a bit of MC5 blur, and a lot of three-chord trash. And plenty of weird, fun covers, including Flipper’s "Sex Bomb" (once played for most of a set at the Abbey), Aerosmith’s "Let the Music Do the Talking" (recorded for their as-yet-unreleased album), and Soupy Sales’ "King Kong," which was obscure enough to sneak past the Little Steven contest’s no-covers rule. No surprise, the Konks’ fan base doesn’t seem to overlap much with that of Bullet LaVolta, one of Boston’s first major punk-metal bands. In fact, Davis has pretty much stayed out of the LaVolta groove since that band broke up, playing with Burma drummer Peter Prescott in Kustomized during the ’90s.

"I never did anything like Bullet LaVolta before I joined them either," he notes. "My first band was a silly hardcore band in Indiana; then I moved to Boston and answered a flyer to join LaVolta. So neither of those was really my own band. When you’re younger, you want to take over the world, but I got over that. All I knew when we started the Konks was that I wanted to do music that went below the hip instead of above the shoulder. Something like Hasil Adkins, where it’s a little fucked up from the get-go."

"We’ve had eggs and bottles thrown at us, but they’re the good kind of eggs and bottles," says Porth, who previously played with Wilson in both the Racketeers and the Coffin Lids. "The fact is that we used to be just players in other people’s bands, so this one is really us." Davis also reveals that the Konks drew up a set list’s worth of song titles for their first rehearsal even though the songs didn’t exist yet. One of those titles — "God Says Whoa, Motherfucker" — didn’t need much fleshing out; the title became the song’s entire lyric. (Warned against using profanity at the Little Steven show, Davis managed to sing "mother for ya" all the way through.)

"It was an artist in the South who had those words on a sign outside his house," Davis explains. "And that just stuck with me; like, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ So that was the making of a hit." As for the 29 fingers, most fans are aware why there’s one missing: two summers ago on an Abbey Lounge booze cruise, the index finger of Wilson’s right hand had an unfortunate encounter with a really heavy steel door. (Not quite the luckiest guy in local rock, he also fell from a 25-foot ladder the same year; the Konks began playing a song called "Break My Back" soon afterward.) Not many bands would have the gumption to make a joke of such an incident, much less one of their best songs. "It was a pretty weird feeling to see my finger sitting in a cup," Wilson recalls. "There’s been no Chet Atkins covers since then. But that’s fine, I was starting to play too well for this band anyway."