Asylum
Street Spankers, Mumble
and Peg
Berbati's Pan 231 SW Ankeny St. 248-4579
10 pm Saturday, May 22
$6
Drawling through a bad cell-phone connection from her home
in Austin, Texas, Christina Marrs sounds like someone who
wants to brawl with the world. The question is, why?
Her band, the Asylum Street Spankers, kicks out a rich
blend of Tin Pan Alley jazz, moss-grown blues and gonzo
backwoods barbecue anthems. Lyrics about sexually inspired
alien invasions, drunk urban terrorism and extraordinarily
raunchy lust are tempered by heartfelt shout-outs to the
likes of Memphis Minnie and Benny Goodman. The ever-shifting
10-member ensemble favors a gleefully anarchic range of
instruments, from handsaw to ukelele to washboard. Critics
laud their live shows--the Spankers eschew all electric
amplification, including mikes--as riots of gutter humor,
vaudeville swagger and avant-garde improv.
So, in the Spankers' world of sweetness and light, where
does the defensive, weary tone haunting Marrs' twang come
from?
Well, you could start with retro chic, for one thing, particularly
the commercially ransacked and musically bankrupt swing
craze. Although this atavistic trend seems to have peaked,
Marrs says the Spankers still must fight promoters' fond
wishes to lump them in with the likes of Oregon's own Cherry
Poppin' Daddies. In fact, Marrs, whose lush, elegant voice
should be the envy of every hack on the zoot-suit bandwagon,
sounds like she'd like to march across the nation and punch
every single over-dressed, pomaded Rat Pack wannabe in the
face, one at a time.
"It's a disgusting trend, and we get associated with it
immediately," she says. "We have to screen our venues very
carefully. A lot of the time, we'll get promoters who say,
'Oh, perfect, we have this swing night...' Well, I tell
them right away that we're not a dance band. You've got
these cats that come out to see so-called swing music, and
they're dressed to the nines, all dolled up from head to
toe. Most of these people wouldn't know swing if it bit
'em in the ass. They're not there to have fun with everybody.
They're out to dance with their little clique and sneer
down their noses at everyone else."
That the Spankers have to work overtime to keep from being
confused with neo-swing clearly frustrates Marrs. And well
it should.
Plain and simple, the Spankers are a kick in the ass. Hot
Lunch, their latest album, steams from start to finish
with wit, hormones and a pure, unaffected joy in the sounds
that made American music great. The Spankers have performed
without amps since they started playing together in 1994,
and their anti-electric rigor leaves them well-schooled
in the deep, dark arts of arrangement and dynamics, able
to rave or whisper according to a particular song's demands.
Marrs, the group's lone woman, shares vocal duties with
a contingent of fellas who leer delightfully through their
songs, Al Jolson's ghost propped on their shoulders. Multi-instrumental
threat Wammo extols the romantic possibilities of hard hallucinogens
on "Trippin' Over You"; the plummy Mysterious John praises
a new girlfriend's most notable attribute with the ode "Fanny."
Still, Marrs steals the show with her fecund barroom sexiness,
a style she proudly says she claimed from the barrelhousing
women of old-school blues.
"I'm a white girl who sings the blues," she says, warming
up to a topic closer to her heart. "I've got a big, powerful
voice, but when I was younger I never knew what to do with
it. I couldn't apply it to anything I heard on the radio,
and it's definitely not a punk-rock voice. Then I head Koko
Taylor, and I thought, 'Oh, my God, that's what my voice
is meant for.'"
The Spankers' live shows shove that loud, proud aesthetic
right out front. Dispensing with the layer of machinery
that usually separates bands and audiences, the Spankers
insist on total attention.
"We're a theatrical band, a very visual band," Marrs says.
"We don't stare down at our shoes while we play. We make
the audience participate, but the first step toward earning
that participation is to make them be quiet. We don't use
mikes, and what that requires is that people actually stop
and listen to the music.
"We feel we're playing this music the way it's meant to
be played," she says. "A ukulele was never meant to go through
an amp. Everything you amplify, even the human voice, changes
when it's run through speakers."
Ironically, right when the band should be reaping the rewards
of its purist approach and the name-taking Hot Lunch,
the difficulties inherent in keeping it so, so real leave
it at something of a crossroads. Once kings of the Austin
scene, the Spankers no longer feel very welcome on the city's
rapidly changing club circuit, and the band's revolving
membership makes touring a challenge. In fact, Marrs says
the band is now soldiering through some of its worst personnel
problems ever, with nearly half the players on Hot Lunch
gone.
"Suffice it to say, we've lost people in the past, and
it's seemed like the end of the world," Marrs says. "But
then we find someone new, and the first time they sit in
with us this amazing new thing will happen.
"We've picked a lot of people up on the road, y'know? That's
just how it seems to work with us. We're an unstoppable
force."
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 19, 1999
|
