July 15, 2006

Locked & Loaded

Allow me to introduce one of my best friends in the whole wide world, Curtis a.k.a. Champagne. He’s from Lubbock, Texas, ancestral home to musical and artistic pioneers like Buddy Holly and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Curtis and I met in New York City around 1990 through our mutual pal Joe when I was freshly off drugs. He’s been an older brother to me ever since. We share the sense of NYC as home, even though I’ve moved far away. He has a deep appreciation for art. Curtis to me represents the best the city has to offer; he’s interested in New York’s history and culture and the street spirit that’s been plowed under by “development” and bloated, insane real estate values, but his cynical good nature doesn’t allow him to dwell on the endless negatives. Like I say, opposites attract.

Curt plays bass in the Hillbilly Peckers. They are a power trio with Lucky Ray Tatters on guitar and a long genealogy of ex-drummers. Sometimes they’ll get a hotshot to play pedal steel on a couple of songs. They’ve been around forever and a day.

The Hillbilly Peckers Bar-B-Q TV Hour was a public access show we used to do on Manhattan Neighborhood Network in the early 1990s. The program was assembled by Curtis and myself, with help from our family of friends like Reuben Radding, Ivan Lerner, a pre-op Siobhan, Meredith, Paul Brodbeck and the Marlowe sisters. Each show started with the exhortation “Let’s get ready to rrruummmbbllllle” followed by the Hillbilly Peckers’ version of “White Lightnin’.” There was country, chitlin and metal music, retarded skits, guns, titty montages, cars, wrestling, crazy street people and bizarre videotapes procured from nationwide, with an occasional confused real-life celebrity trying to figure out how they got on our show. We took a lot of our inspiration from beloved local cable mainstay Beyond Vaudeville. Our show always ended with a hilarious racial soliloquy taken from a Jonathan Winters bootleg.

Curtis was the host, “The Hillbilly Terrorist” – an overalls-clad pro wrestler who never took off his ski mask – issuing threats, fatwas, throwdowns and dadaistic challenges to various Lower East Side music scenesters from a secret location deep inside our Avenue C apartment building. (If anyone tried to put forth that Terrorist concept these days, they’d probably have DHS storming the premises, but we were more innocent then. Hell, you could even tell jokes in subways and airports.) That’s my head there, on the right.

Curtis and partner Terri Marlowe kept at it after the TV show folded, and formed the video production house BBQ Productions, since responsible for lots of industrial work and several documentaries including a cool ongoing project about the New York 1964/65 World’s Fair.

The electoral politics of guitarist/singer/songsmith Lucky Ray Tatters are such that if we had met online I suspect we’d hate each other, but he’s never been less than a total gentleman in real life, and civility goes a long, long way with me. He has often flavored the Peckers’ big-bottomed, powerchord-laden “heavy metal honky tonk” sound with a pro-U.S. stance exemplified by their cover of Merle Haggard’s “Fighting Side of Me.” Lucky Ray gave the band a short-lived name change to “BULL” to rally the superpatriots after those big ‘ol buildings were destroyed, but – our nation apparently still stuck in a “September 10th” mindset, or perhaps just craving actual bull(shit) like Toby Keith – it didn’t stick.

The Hillbilly Peckers recorded and performed a lot of other groovy covers. Curtis introduced me to (fellow West Texan and) conceptual artist Terry Allen, who wrote the song “New Delhi Freight Train” covered by the Peckers. The band educated me about Waylon Jennings and George Jones (hey, I never claimed to know fuck about shit), even reinventing some yankee songs like this anthemic take on S&G’s “Celia,” but for my money, Lucky Ray’s originals were the best part of the set. Ray has the kind of rich, soulful, ragged vocal I admire in Scott Luallen, singer for country-punk band Nine Pound Hammer. (Hearing him sing, it’s hard to believe that Ray is NYC born and bred.) Once I was invited onstage to sing “Six Days on the Road” with them (there’s a long history of me trying to guest-front my friends’ bands and totally blowing it, and that’s what happened), but except for me forgetting the words and the key, and wandering way outside my range, it was fine. Nowadays the boys seem to not want to write much in the way of new material, preferring to tinker with, polish and buff about 20-odd classic Peckers tunes, forever and ever, like obsessive-compulsive housecleaners. That’s okay. For a honky tonk band, there are far worse fates.

Hillbilly Peckers – “Locked ‘n’ Loaded”

Hillbilly Peckers – “Wildwood Flower”

Hillbilly Peckers – “Set ‘Em Up Joe”

Hillbilly Peckers – “Celia”

Hillbilly Peckers (feat. Lloyd Maines) – “Heavy Metal Honky Tonk”

Hillbilly Peckers – “Knock Me Down”

Rick at 4:15 pm

3 CommentsÈ

i’d recognize that scalp anywhere….

Comment by wi11iam13 Ñ July 17, 2006 @ 2:40 am
Damas y caballeros! Bienvenidos al esta estacion del Hillybilly Pecker’s Bar-Bee-Cue Hora del televison! Un episodio mas fantastico con muchos canciones y otros estrellas del mundo!

I used to love doing those ridiculous voice-overs! Ahhh….

And I got to sing (poorly, but with heart) “The Ballad of the Green Berets” with the HPs!
God Bless America!

Comment by The Kid Ñ July 18, 2006 @ 7:15 pm
wow! now i can die a happy pecker.

“A sensitive adolescent at heart, he saw his beauty disfigured by an ugly hillbilly pecker.”

from Albert Goldman’s bio on Elvis Presley. we are all loyal servants of the hing!

Comment by hp Ñ August 9, 2006 @ 2:46 pm