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Bottle rockers

The drunk punk of the Neckbones

by Ted Drozdowski

I first saw the Neckbones on a sweltering Mississippi night at a college watering hole in Oxford called the Gin. What struck me immediately was the way drummer Forrest Hewes held a beer cup in his teeth, a big graceless animal tilting his slope-browed head back to sip as he hammered away. Then Hewes spat the half-full cup away and started howling lyrics about incest and crack smoking.

I was also captivated by guitarist Tyler Keith's balletic poise as he drunkenly tripped over a cord, pirouetted, and lurched back-first off the stage onto a table covered with 40 or 50 empty beer bottles. A veteran of many such falls, he didn't miss a note. And within seconds he clambered back to his roost alongside bassist Robbie Alexander and guitarist David Boyer.

The music was punk rock -- not unlike the punk blues I'd been listening to at Junior Kimbrough's juke joint an hour or so before. The themes of sex, drinking, and going to Hell were shared. So was the high volume and the sodden, hollering audience, sweaty with enthusiasm and alcohol fever. And as at Junior's Place, the Gin's sound was raw as roadkill. The difference was that the Neckbones came off like a cross between the early Rolling Stones and Cleveland punks the Dead Boys (who were themselves a cross between the Stones and bad sperm). Junior sounds only like himself.

Now the Neckbones have something else in common with Kimbrough: they're on the same label, Oxford's feisty blues renegades Fat Possum. So their second CD, the new Souls on Fire, which bears a picture of a stripper on the front, will be distributed nationally via Epitaph, the California indie-punk label that brought us Offspring and Rancid. The Neckbones' debut, Pay the Rent, was a self-pressed affair that they sold out of their back pockets and probably got no farther north than Memphis and no deeper south than Oxford.

Souls on Fire was cut live with battered microphones and a creaky portable digital tape recorder, like all Fat Possum albums. Shitty equipment is the key to Fat Possum's lo-fi sound, which in a perverse and sad way creates its recordings' authentic jukehouse feel. This idea works remarkably well for the Neckbones, and it's resparked my initial joy at seeing their sloppy-playing asses on the Gin stage. The sound is ugly, but distinct. Every zit and ripple of unseemly flab, every puff of halitosis breath, every compulsive mania possessed by the Neckbones has somehow crept through the crackly wiring onto the CD.

In "Dead End Kids," their theme song, Keith sings about torching Oxford and watching it burn as he and Boyer churn out Keith Richards-like chiming chords and sliding licks. On "Gambling Fool" Keith howls like a Gamblers Anonymous dropout who's nervously waiting for the leg breakers. The drums crack flat and toneless, senseless things being pummeled, punished. The bass is out of the '50s, fronting simple-but-driving riffs found on Chuck Berry's and Bo Diddley's Chess records. But the 'Bones have been listening to the local blues leadership, too, because you can hear echoes of Kimbrough's languorous six-string lines in "Skronky Tonk" and periodic eruptions of R.L. Burnside's rhythmic gallop. And the guitars -- whether the lyrics are celebrating excessive partying ("It Ain't Enough") or cars and girls ("Superstar Chevrolet") -- get in fat, messy pig piles more typical of frathouse football games. In short, Souls on Fire is raw, dumb, messy, and hip enough to make the Neckbones the new darlings of the punk underground.

I say more power to 'em. They could use the boost and the cash, especially since Fat Possum owner Matthew Johnson tells me that Tyler Keith lost his job at Uncle Buck's record shop. Seems he closed the store to run home for something, then fell asleep there. So I'm hoping you'll want to rush out and fill your ears and your craw with the Neckbones rootsy sourmash of humor, bile, and rock octane. Maybe then they'll get booked to play Boston.

Of course, that didn't work out so well last fall, when they were supposed to play Bill's Bar. Just a few days before the gig, Tyler had a seizure smack in the middle of Oxford's town square. He got hauled to the hospital with a swollen liver. Wasting no time, bassist Alexander got in trouble with a cigarette machine. It wouldn't give up his smokes . . . or his hand. The fire department pried him out, but not until his fingers went numb, and not without his leaving a fair patch of skin behind. Nonetheless, they lived to cut Souls on Fire. Which is proof that God does indeed watch over punks and small children.