GOOD SCARY That would be Skinny Mike Feudale (left) doing three-chord stomps about vampire girls and witches.
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There’s good scary and there’s bad scary. Good scary is Coffin Lids on stage, frontman Skinny Mike Feudale looking fearsome in his tattoos while doing three-chord stomps about vampire girls and witches. Bad scary is the sight of the Abbey Lounge with a padlocked door. It’s not clear which kind of scary you’ll find at the Inman Square hotspot this Saturday night. The Abbey was shut down a week ago Tuesday when fire inspectors found a few minor violations. The week’s shows were moved next door to the Z Wine Bar or cancelled. Among the casualties: a pre-Halloween show by the Downbeat 5’s acoustic alter egos the Second Cousins. They were planning a set of Queers covers. Their bluegrass version of "Ursula Finally Has Tits" will have to wait a year. Meanwhile, the Abbey is scrambling to make repairs in time for Saturday, when a garage-rock extravaganza — Coffin Lids, Konks, Lyres — is scheduled. Dee Dee’s in Quincy has offered to host the show. But Abbey manager Eric Anderson says the club is doing everything possible to reopen on the 29th. And everyone involved has emphasized that there’s no risk of the club’s closing for good. Still, even a false alarm is a little spooky at this point in Boston club history. It was barely a year ago that the Linwood closed "temporarily," and recent months have seen Man Ray shut down and the Overdraught stop booking music. The booking at Allston landmark O’Brien’s just changed hands: Shred is out, ex-Overdraught booker Martin Doyle is in. And the Middle East has largely turned its upstairs room over to the controversial, pay-to-play Emergenza festival. The Abbey is the kind of place that regulars feel protective about. Although it’s never been exclusively a garage-rock club (just as the Rat was never just a punk club), it’s those bands who embody the club’s grassroots spirit. Friendly management and cheap drafts count for a lot. And unvarnished rock-and-rollers like Coffin Lids, Muck & the Mires, the Dents, and the Rudds/Brett Rosenberg/Andrea Gillis axis have built a solid scene there. Indeed, some of those bands have members, like Feudale, who work at the Abbey when they’re not playing. "Rock-and-roll heaven," is how he sums up the place. "Hey, we’ve made the effort to play elsewhere, and when we do, we get treated like half a fuckin’ asshole. Here we get free drinks, we get a good crowd, and we get paid at the end of the night. Isn’t that the point?" But there was little joy in Inman Square last week when I met Coffin Lids — Feudale, bassist Coffin Jaye, and drummer Damien — at the Z Wine Bar. Not only was the Abbey dark and the show up in the air, it was also the one-year anniversary of Greg Shaw’s death. The Bomp! label founder and lifelong garage-rock champion was a California resident who never visited the Abbey, but he would’ve loved it, especially since all three of Saturday’s bands have Bomp! connections: Lyres main man Jeff Conolly recorded for the label with his first band, DMZ, and the Konks and Coffin Lids are two of the last bands Shaw signed. Signing with Bomp! never made anybody rich, but it has a deeper meaning in garage-rock circles. It helped Coffin Lids mount a national tour earlier this year, and they have a South American swing coming up arranged by a Buenos Aires Bomp! fan. "It gets our name out there, no doubt about that," Feydale says. "All our tours have been DIY, so the fact that I can drop the label’s name makes it so much easier." Saturday night’s show was booked to celebrate the release of Round Midnight, Coffin Lids’ sophomore Bomp! release and their third album in just over a year. (Last year’s studio debut was followed by a summer live album on the Abbey Lounge label.) The new disc marks a step forward in terms of production, which is to say that there’s any at all. The first disc was done in mono at their rehearsal space; for the new one they at least made it to a studio and roped in some guests. (Gillis and Heavy Stud’s Melissa Gibbs do backing vocals.) And they included a few songs that haven’t been played live much yet, including the disc’s most likely hit, "I’m Having My Way with the 5-6-7-8’s." The 5-6-7-8’s — an all-female Japanese band — haven’t heard the tune yet. "They haven’t sued us," Feudale says. "We’ve played some shows with them, but not since that song was written." Garage rock and B horror flicks have been easy bedfellows since the ’60s, when the Sonics wrote "The Witch" and "Strychnine." Roky Erickson, the Cramps, and the Mummies are just three notable bands who’ve kept the tradition alive. Feudale says he tries not to write too many horror-type songs, but his outfit is called Coffin Lids, and he does admit to being a big fan of the imagery. "I grew up in Philadelphia, watching Chiller Theater, two movies on TV every Friday night. There’s something about the imagery of Frankenstein that I’m totally in love with — in fact, I have a big collection at home and a lot of my friends call it the House of Frankenstein. The connection is probably the low-budget thing — you know, B-movies and B-bands." Feudale has joked in the past about throwing people out of the band for playing too well. But he maintains a day job at a music store, and he’s a better musician than he lets on. In his previous group, the Speed Devils, he played a mean stand-up bass. "I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none. When I started this band, I really did want to do something other than the ‘billy’ thing — enough rockabilly and psychobilly." That hasn’t kept promoters from using those terms when Coffin Lids play out of town. "There’s a song we’ve been joking lately about writing," he reveals. "It’s called ‘We’re Not a Fuckin’ Psychobilly Band.’ " Coffin Lids | Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon St. Somerville | Oct 29 | 617.441.9631.
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