Despite having been named the best band in Austin, Texas along with a Top 10 American Music Association album for 2008, the critical recognition hasn’t always translated nationally for Band of Heathens. Being recognized as best in Austin is like being named best Mormon in Salt Lake City. As Austin is now the epicenter of the American music scene the title is no minor platitude.
The band centers around Ed Jurdi and Gordy Quist who share and split vocal, songwriting and guitar duties. However, keyboardist Trevor Nealon, drummer Richard Millsap, and bassist Nick Jay are not the supporting cast. This is a b-a-n-d whose whole is greater then the sum of their respective parts.
At $10 a throw, Great Scott’s was jammed. Despite a cold, April night outside inside the club’s AC was on high. TBoH took the stage around 10:45 PM. Quist standing stage left opened the night with the melodic, subdued “Rehab Facility”. In a foreshadowing of things to come the band and Jurdi (stage right) then stepped it up with their Hunter S. Thompson tribute, “LA County Blues”. Half way through the three-chord rock song meandered into an extended jam. The pace then slowed again with the blue-eyed soul groove of “Second Line”.
TBoH formed when three Austin songwriters split a showcase stage. They eventually decided to play together under the name “The Good Time Supper Club”, but for reasons unclear a local paper kept referring to the act as The Heathens. The band has since played over 300 shows and is as good as any live band out there today.
About 45 minutes into the set Jurdi told the crowd, “Settle in. The set list is longer than we thought it was. We’re going to be here for a while”. The band, crowd and show then hit stride with the eerie, blues of “Hurricane”. In light of Katrina, the lyric “High black water, a devil’s daughter/She’s hard, she’s cold, and she’s mean/But nobody taught her it takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans” was simply haunting. The band followed with the gospel, “The Other Broadway”.
TBoH is an extension of Gram Parsons’, “Cosmic American Music”. A slow boil stew of folk, country, soul, gospel, rock and blues. But TBoH adds a pinch of Owsley acid for good measure. The night was spent with the players’ trading guitar, keyboard, and harmonica licks and extending songs well beyond their original versions. While the band repeatedly hit lift off, drummer Millsap and bassist Jay deftly kept the set from disappearing completely into the ether.
Lyrically many of the band’s songs focus on shortcomings: personal, “Yeah, you got to rise up and put on your hat/You ain’t good but you ain’t that bad”, (Second Line”) and societal, “Blinded by a quart of rum/And a dose of mescaline . . . The failure of a generation /For a couple bags of weed” (LA County Blues). The beautiful “Jackson Station” and “Gris Gris Satchel” highlighted the band’s as sweet as Tennessee Honey four part harmonies. Or maybe it was five part as I swear I heard, The Band’s Levon Helm somewhere in there.
At the show’s peak Jurdi’s vocal twists traveled the commercial sounding, “Don’t Call On Me” in and out of Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue”. Gordy then drove the boys through the swamp bluesy, “Medicine Man”. “I’m your healer, your dealer your only one”. After over an hour and a half of musical bliss TBoH gradually let the audience back down with “Look at Miss Ohio” which started mellow but built into one last over the top, soaring guitar jam. The encore featured, the traditional prison spiritual, “No More Cane”.
Kudos to Harley Stumbaugh who provided a spot on mix in a difficult room. Thanks to merch man Joshua Cain who provided a copy of the night’s show, great time to be a live music fan. Back before corporations started sponsoring rock tours and bands began playing homogenized set lists to sterile crowds real music used to be played late at night in the big cities’ clubs. TBoH’s show last night wasn’t music as it used to be, it was music as it should be, not good, but as good as it gets.
photos by Marc Lacatell
