I'll assume most of you aren't too familiar with the bustling metropolis of Lubbock, Texas. I wouldn't be if I hadn't spent my college years there. To be honest, I'm not sure there are many people who were meant to spend a lot of time there, beyond those born and bred in the "hub city." The locals, generally conservative (politically, and often otherwise), are polite, mostly soft-spoken and hard working. But life in Lubbock is different than the big city carnival I was accustomed to before heading out west. The rodeo is big, the cinema is packed every weekend and on holidays, and the minor league baseball team is always a draw.
Lubbockians also like their music, but don't expect a big club scene. There's something of a good Tejano music circuit, and bar bands grow there almost as plentifully as the cotton. Downtown, in the depot district on Buddy Holly Avenue (Avenue H, for anyone who lived there before 1996, when the name was changed), the Cactus Theater is something of an institution. From the outside, it has all the charm you'd expect from a 50-year old converted movie house, with the old-fashioned marquee and box office straight out of Pleasantville. Inside, the theater walls are covered with murals of the West Texas plains, while the red curtain onstage still reeks of smoke from all the years Don Caldwell and the Texas Rhythm Section were blowing fire up there. Actually, they still are.
Old Don leads his band through rock and roll rebirth, putting on shows every weekend at the Cactus. Tunes like "Respect," "Great Balls of Fire," "Tequila," "Black is Black," and "I Want You (I Feel Good)" get the shit blown out of them on a weekly basis, and the crowd, white-haired as they are quickly becoming, act like it's the end-all of existence. They literally dance in the aisles, yelping and hollering like kids with no sense of either responsibility or the last 25 years. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, or maybe Don and his merry old band really are onto something: just rocking the house like it used to be done can still turn normal folks into rock animals.
Which brings me to the problem that some newer bands like Nashville's Los Straightjackets will encounter with the unconverted: chiefly that there simply isn't any irony or emotional obligation in their music. The rock they (and others, like the Reverend Horton Heat, or even Man or Astro-Man) play isn't the kind that emphasizes its ties to the Velvets or New York Dolls. And while those bands certainly did know a thing or two about rock, their music was entirely their own. At some point along the line, rock stopped being the music people danced and fucked to, and became a kind of therapy or surrogate family for all the young dudes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that those "golden oldies" probably served a similar purpose for the first kids to hear them. But times have changed, and when you throw out the same, relatively straightforward statements 40 years after the fact, the new kids may not have the same reactions.
Of course, none of this is criticism of the music. Whatever image qualifiers Los Straightjackets don't have in common with their second cousins in the indie world they account for in sheer love for their music. The band has mostly been known for its attempts at bringing back the surf rock instrumental, a noble goal to be sure, but at odds with a core audience who stopped praising Pulp Fiction when their parents started liking it, and Dick Dale showed up on "Good Morning America."
All of the Los Straitjackets' other records (four, previous to this one) are instrumental, and approximate all that is surf and twang. They've put out mostly original stuff, though they do occasionally pull out a classic cover (like "Sleepwalk" or the theme from "Rawhide" on the excellent live album Damas y Caballeros). In fact, live is best way to hear this stuff, because I'm not sure you can really translate the infectiousness of a good surf instrumental in an airtight environment-- the exhilaration and fury of the band's playing isn't really evident on any of the studio stuff I've heard. Including this release, to an extent.
Sing along with Los Straightjackets is immediately different from any of the band's other albums because it features vocalists on all but two songs. And because most real surf rock is purely instrumental (the Beach Boys weren't surf rock), they play it closer to trashy garage and 60s white soul here. All the tunes are covers, and the band hires a cast of about a dozen to run through them (literally, most tunes in the 2-3 minute range).
I should state that, from the get-go, this album aims to party. When I first heard it, it was somewhat underwhelming because I didn't have the opportunity to really play it loud. When I did, the gems started to shine. Big Sandy is arguably the star of the show, especially when he performs Spanish versions of "Tallahassee Lassie" (made famous by Freddy Cannon) and "Mother in Law" (Ernie K-Doe). Yes, I realize these are songs that you might not normally admit to your mother admitting she likes. I had many of the same thoughts when I was playing the stuff at the Cactus Theater. But like me, if you give this half chance, you may just start to see the light.
The Reverend Horton Heat (perhaps the closes musical relative to Los Straightjackets' raucous revival) lays it all out on Roy Orbison's "Down the Line." And leave it to the Reverend to remove any and all tenderness of the original, giving the song a pair for which the old Black Prince may have been too much of a gentleman to thrust upon his followers. X's Dave Alvin takes a similar approach to "California Sun," trying a little testosterone to spice up the tune's inherent bubbly beach factor. You really can practically smell the pomade in this stuff.
It's not all boys, though. Exene Cervenka (also a member of X, of course) turns in easily the most surprisingly great performance on this disc ("I'll Go Down Swinging"). She sings with some kind of faux-country whine that I would never have thought could sound good, and she's something to behold here. Her voice is thin-- maybe struggling to keep afloat among the completely assured, Nashville-bound wall of guitar and drums-- but she ends up standing out like a cow-punk diva, decked out in what appears to be actual heartbreak, and enhances the song with the persistence that only a woman let down by one too many men could. "At least I'll go down swinging, what a swinging way to go." Reads corny, sounds like the gospel.
There are down spots here: Alison Moorer & Lonesome Bob don't exactly light it up on "I Ain't the One," which suffers not from a lack of heart, but from some seriously bland production ("drop the needle music," for any of you ad hacks out there), and L-Bob's eerie similarity to lounge crooners like Gordon MacRae. It seems a shame to dump on classic songs, and my only real complaint with the album in general is that it sometimes gets a little too straightforward, like the reverence these guys may have for the material might be prohibiting their ability to bash and clang. The way I get around this is by turning it all the way up. Much better.
Of course, there are always going to be the non-believers out there who say that old music is old music and if it was any good in the first place, why don't I already have the originals? To this I say, "I don't know, why don't you?" I would also urge naysayers to take a road trip to Lubbock. Take the tour, see the rodeo, and then grab a date and get yourself a couple of tickets to the Cactus on Saturday night. Don't get too close to the stage-- just close enough to the aisle that you can see just what this music does to people. And then try to sit still during the show. Los Straightjackets is betting you can't do it, and so am I.
