Jul. 28, 2010 - Issue #771: Young at Heart

Prevue

Turning up the Heath

Texas psycho-pioneer brings his trademark fire

Jim Heath, more familiarly known as the Reverend Horton Heat, speaks with a laid-back drawl that kind of moseys in from the Texas expanse, but his calm air is blowing over things far more hectic on the other side of the phone line. Taking one of his rare and brief respites at his Dallas home, he's still got yet another tour to get ready for and he is frequently interrupted by requests for directions and barely audible questions that need responding. Not that he isn't used to a hectic life.

"I got into this because I just wanted to play my guitar and party," he says in a kind of audible grin, "but now that Reverend Horton Heat's a successful band, I need to change my job description from 'musician' to 'email and text complier.' That's about all I do."

Even for one of the legitimate legends of the psychobilly movement, someone who's been stomping out country-fried punk for better than two decades, life as a touring musician ain't easy, and you can tell Heath takes a certain pride in being hands-on, earning his way around even after all these years. No doubt a lot of that comes from the fact that, in Heath's view, it's playing in front of crowds that's the legitimate part of his job: holing up in a recording studio doesn't suit his temperament one bit.
"From my point of view, being a recording artist is not even a valid art form," he lays out plainly.

"Music is—I'm not comparing myself to Beethoven or Mozart or anything, but they didn't sit down and write out the notes of a symphony and then sit back and say, 'I can't wait to do that again.' It was a means to an end for the live performance. Music isn't like writing a book or painting a painting: music breathes with an audience."

That is something that should be perfectly evident to anyone who has seen one of the Reverend's fiery live performances—where his boundless energy is matched by upright bassist Jimbo Wallace and drummer Paul Simmons—but his love of the crowd also bleeds over into the less artistically gratifying world of his records, especially the latest, Laughin' and Cryin' with the Reverend Horton Heat.

Though it tones down some of the faster, punkier influences that have come to define him in favour of the guts-country undercurrents that have always been around, it seems crafted almost solely with an audience in mind. A kind of parody of those old hurting-blues country songs, it has an evident humour that amounts to a rib-nudging insistence to have a good time with the boys. And, maybe unsurprisingly, Heath has found that it goes over a lot better in bars and clubs than it does through headphones or speakers.

"A lot of people don't understand the new album, and think I've really slowed down or something," he explains bemusedly. "I wanted to do a country album, although it didn't completely work out that way. But once you're on stage, people seem to get what's going on and laugh and get into it. That's really what your hoping for." V

Tue, Aug 3 (8 pm)
The Reverend Horton Heat
With Split Lip Rayfield, Hillstomp
Starlite Room, $25  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus