Speedball Baby & Chrome Cranks: Let it Bleed

Crazy, man, crazy.

No truer words were ever spoken about rock and roll in its most primal incarnations. More than 40 years later, we're still trying to (as Elvis first admonished us in his first Sun session) get real, real gone for a change. New York wouldn't be New York if it weren't fucked-up, and all manner and number of its artists try their damnedest to convey the true breadth of their town's -- the world's -- fucked-up-ness by getting gone, by going crazy, by being the sickest motherfuckers they can be.

This Friday the 13th, two of the most convincing casualties to stumble out of New York in the past couple of years make their way to the Middle East: Speedball Baby and the Chrome Cranks. Both got their start on NY's PCP label -- the former having moved on to major-label status -- and both release their best albums to date this month, unleashing new takes on one of rock's most deeply ingrained postulates: the best rock is made by sickos, perverts, ghouls, and delinquents. Their music rings with a horrific, turbulent immediacy.

Speedball Baby are, superficially at least, a rockabilly band for the lunatic fringe. The trappings of rockabilly are there: the sharply coiled reverb, the clatter of drumstick on bass-drum rim, the sucked-in gasp of harmonica, the regurgitated, garagified roots-rock licks. But from their 1994 homonymous debut EP through their forthcoming Fort Apache/MCA CD, Cinéma!, the rockabilly has been a façade they cast off at the nearest convenience to get to the real filth and blood of the moment. Their aim is something more chaotic, with frontman (and former Blood Orange) Ron Ward drawing on downtown junkie mystique, street-corner paranoid schizophrenia, B-movie beatnik soliloquies, and the cackling, hiccupping ghosts of long-forgotten hillbilly madmen from Mack Self and Carl Perkins to murderous freestyle trailer-park pariah Hasil Adkins. There are moments on Cinéma! when Ward is corralled into something approaching a traditional song: hellfire punkabilly scorchers like "Dancin' with a Fever," "Shakin' It Loose," and "Rubber Connection." But more often the band simply provide cinematic flavoring for Ward's savagely discombobulated nasal drawl -- a frazzled, surrealist shrieking that jerks like a taut rubber band given a good pluck.

What Speedball Baby share with the Chrome Cranks (and both share with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) is a deathly romantic obsession with rural blues mythology, if not quite actual rural blues. When Blind Lemon Jefferson pops up on the Chrome Cranks' new Love in Exile (PCP) -- in a version of his "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" -- it's not because the Cranks can play the blues, but because even though they can't, they've got that worried, lowdown chill just the same.

The Cranks' version is stark and morbid and messy, the sonic equivalent of a low-budget drive-in fright flick. Featuring Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore alumnus Bob Bert on drums and former Honeymoon Killer Jerry Teel on bass, they're the closest musical relatives to the '80s noise-garage scene that Spencer inaugurated. Peter Aaron's wail suggests a man constantly on the verge of tears, a man (as Greil Marcus described Nick Cave's The Firstborn Is Dead, another valid reference point) "less making the music than carried away by it." Jon Spencer may have fooled the world into thinking he's a genuine bluesman, but when the Cranks close out Love in Exile with the gothic, spare piano dirge "Curtains for My Baby," they've created a much more sinister -- and in a way more faithful -- tribute to the hair-raisin' voodoo blues than Spencer's yet been able to muster.

-- Carly Carioli

(Speedball Baby and the Chrome Cranks play the Middle East this Friday, September 13. Call 491- EAST.)