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	HEAVY TRASH AND THE CAMPBELL BROTHERS TWISTED ROOTS AND SECULAR SERMONS

Jon Spencer & Matt Verta-Ray’s Heavy Trash had just started their Tuesday-night show at T.T. the Bear’s Place and already they were rocking on 11, both men tilted over their guitars at almost 45 degrees, slashing away as their pompadours and the wide-lapelled ’70s shirts took flight. The following night, next door at the Middle East, brothers Chuck, Darick, and Phil Campbell hunched over their instruments across the front of the downstairs stage, laying down a heavy mesh of sound built on Phil’s tight-locked James Brown–style six-string funk chords and the purring, whinnying, steel-guitar cries and shouts from Chuck and Darick. The Campbells flirted with atonality, or at least melodic deconstruction, and they upped the ante with keyboardist John Medeski’s probing organ and electric piano tones.

Both outfits were playing roots music, but a decidedly twisted version. Spencer and Verta-Ray charge and goof up theirs with alt-rock consciousness — part punk energy, part irony, part smug self-awareness. The Campbell Brothers, for years a staple of the sacred-steel circuit, go for groove, trying hard to reach the jam audience that’s embraced youthful fellow church pedal-steeler Robert Randolph.

The performances illustrated one side of roots music’s great divide. Ardent fans define their tastes along ideological lines. Purists believe that any significant deviation from the texts of classic bluegrass, blues, and gospel diminishes the music’s character. Mavericks like Heavy Trash and the Campbells with Medeski look on the foundation of the past as a point of embarkation. Their goal is to bring the music they love into the present; anything less would be a betrayal of the traditions they respect and want to pass along to a new audience. Songwriter Otis Taylor speaks for the most committed of this breed when he observes, "If an art form doesn’t evolve, it dies or becomes fossilized."

Nobody would accuse Heavy Trash or the Campbell Brothers of fossilizing, though both performances had some drawbacks — Spencer’s tired hucksterism, the Campbells’ mid-tempo overconfidence. Heavy Trash’s homonymous Yep-Roc debut CD is a ripper — trimmer than any of Spencer’s Blues Explosion albums except Orange (Matador), his one wholly focused effort with the group. The moment Spencer and Verta-Ray, the former Speedball Baby guitarist, hit the stage, however, Spencer was back to his cartoonish ways, howling and mugging. Despite the Blues Explosion’s diminishing returns, he hasn’t learned that every number doesn’t need to begin with "u-uh" and end in "yeah." The songs were almost buried under his distracting veneer, which made everything about his high-energy stage presence seem phony. The Sadies were Heavy Trash’s backing group, but their last-minute arrival after a van breakdown in Burlington seemed to throw them off.

The Campbells pulled beautiful, conversational harmonies and melodies from their steel guitars. And singer Denise Brown led the crowd in energized call-and-response chants for Jesus and his affiliates. But when Malcolm Kirby’s bass got too pushy, or when "Rallytime," from their jammy new Can You Feel It? (Ropeadope), stretched its New Orleans–flavored groove over 10 minutes, it became clear that the transition from sacred to secular isn’t easy. The difference between Randolph, who has crossed over, and the Campbells is youthful energy and a broader embrace of influences. Good as they are, the Campbells don’t know how to make a gospel explosion like the Stevie Ray Vaughan–inspired Randolph. And their steady mid-tempo material, though serving the church, won’t shake much secular booty unless Jesus himself intervenes.