Los Straitjackets with the Mezcal Brothers at The Turf Club on 5/3/07

By: Max Sparber

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Los Straitjackets - Photo by Max Sparber

It was rockabilly and surd revival night at the Turf Club, and the usual sorts of suspects were there. There were an assortment of heavyset men in bowling shirts, generally sporting facial hair, including soul patches and long, carefully tended sideburns. There was a gang that I presume came from a local swing dance club, mostly doing five or six basic moves (step-rock-step), and never venturing into the sorts of daredevil aerials that more advanced or suicidal lindy hoppers favor, in which the female dancer is sent spinning through the air, or over her partner's shoulders, or, in an episode of The Simpsons , through the roof and then back in through a window. Two from this group danced laconically, never looking at each other, both snapping matching wads of bubble gum, as though swing dancing were as plodding a task as working on an assembly line; surprisingly, they were great fun to watch.

Also on hand were drag racers, all in their late middle age, usually quite gray, all wearing T-shirts or leather jackets or James Dean-style windbreakers, and on each of these were logos proudly declaring their affiliation with local hot rod and custom car clubs. These guys had probably been drag racing since well before Michael Landon attempted it in "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," and I seem to recall them hanging out at the Turf Club long before it was reborn as a popular rock venue.

There were some great hairdos on hand—several men boasted mile high pompadours that looked as though they had been darkened and shined with crankcase grease. There were a half-dozen women boasting Bettie Page bangs, although few shared anything more with the pin-up queen than her hairstyle; this look seemed particular popular on dour, clunky girls who hovered near the bar. And there was a puzzling contingent of drunken young men in baseball caps who shouted at each other through the show, sounding as though they were impersonating Will Ferrell's frat boy from Saturday Night Live ("Whooo! Come on, don't live me hanging, Colin!") They slammed Pabst beers out of cans, crowded the front of the stage, and left early.

The evening opened with an act called The Mezcal Brothers, a rockabilly quartet from Lincoln, Neb. Lead singer Gerardo Meza was a handsome, grinning man who played acoustic guitar in the manner of early Elvis Presley and sang rockabilly in the style of Ronnie Dawson, including a cover of Dawson's legendary "Rockin' Bones." As rockabilly bands go, The Mezcal Brothers were terrific, especially their superb guitarist Benny Kushner, who had the face of an accountant from the 1960s, thickly rimmed spectacles and all, but boasted a wild grin, stood like a guitar hero from an Eighties hair band, and had an inventory of ferociously hot roots rock guitar licks.

Now, rockabilly tends to be a showy genre, given to all sorts of gimmicky stage antics. Kim Lenz, for example, dresses like a cowgirl, while Deke Dickerson not only plays a double-necked guitar, but actually does so on a unicycle, if I remember correctly. And for some reason, rockabilly bass players seem exceptionally given to lunatic stage behavior, hoisting their bull fiddle onto their knee and playing it like a guitar, or flopping over onto their back and playing the bass from the floor while they spin in circles like Curly from the Three Stooges. The Mezcal Brothers's bass player, a newsboy cap-wearing fellow named Charlie "Fireball" Johnson, seemed to want to raise the stakes considerably. First of all, he demonstrated a disquieting aptitude for scampering up his upright bass like King Kong up the Empire State building, perching precariously atop the thing while he continued to slap out the bass line. Eventually he ended up posing up their, arched backward, with one leg thrown casually over the very top of the bass, looking like some sort of Chinese acrobat and affecting a serene expression, as though balancing atop a massive musical instrument were an everyday affair, and nothing to make much of a fuss about. Additionally, his bull fiddle, which is illustrated with all sorts of glittery, if gnomic, images, from reflective stars to all-seeing eyes, also has what looks like a series of resonators, the sort you would find surrounding the sound hole of a Dobro guitar. They are not resonators, however. At the opportune moment, at the climax of the Mezcal Brothers set, Johnson flipped some sort of switch, and suddenly the resonators lit up the stage and the audiences with strobing floodlights, which instantly produced howls of joy from the crowd.

The Mezcal Brothers knew enough to leave a good thing alone, and immediately exited the stage.

Big Sandy - Photo by Max Sparber

For those of you unfamiliar with Los Straitjackets, they are a true oddity of a band hailing from Nashville, Tennessee. They play mostly instrumental rock with a strong surf influence, and they all dress in Mexican wrestling masks. Their most recent album is a rather ingenious collaboration with Big Sandy, a California performer who has spent decades exploring the roots of American rock, releasing albums of music in such diverse genres as country swing and Memphis soul. In collaboration, Los Straitjackets and Big Sandy have released an album of Spanish language rock and roll called Rock En Espanol, a look at one of the forgotten byways of popular music, the vast Spanish language rock scene that emerged in the early Sixties. (Bill Hailey, for example, toured extensively in South America, and released dozens of albums in Spanish; Latin and Central America responded with hundreds of their own bands, with names like Los Locos Del Ritmo, who performed original music coupled with wild translations of songs on the American pop charts.)

After a bilingual, Drive-In movie-style countdown ("Los Straitjackets will be starting the show in five minutes!"), the band took the stage. They wore simple two-piece single-breasted suits, black, with thin black ties, and performed with dour expressions, barely visible beneath their leather masks (one of which sported fins like a Jesus lizard). They have a charming habit of engaging in very simple stage choreography, such as simultaneously thrusting their guitars skyward, or lining up and bobbing their heads at the same moment. Last night they played a rousing instrumental rendition of Louie Prima's jazz standard "Swing," and during the song's extended drum solo, which has always been an opportunity for drummers to show of their expertise on the tom-toms, the other band members surrounded their drummer with arms raised like they were in a religious devotional painting, and they held this pose throughout the solo. Perhaps half of the songs Los Straitjackets performed with instrumentals, including a dynamite version of the Munsters theme, but after a few swirling, almost psychedelic surf tunes, one of the guitarists, Daddy-O Grande, would approach the microphone and in rapid fire (and badly accented) Spanish would bring Big Sandy to the stage.

As his name implies, Big Sandy is a big man, resplendent in a two-piece suit, greased hair, and wraparound glasses, looking like a Latin version of John Candy's glacially cool performance as Dean Andrews in "JFK." Every time Big Sandy was called to the stage, he would saunter onto it like he had all the time in the world, and then shimmy in place with surprising fleet-footedness. He's an amiable man with a taste for dopey jokes, and he would seem like a second-rate comedian were it not for the fact that he has an electrifying stage presence and an expressive performance style clearly borrowed from the Memphis soul singers he's studied in the past. His sets mostly consisted of covers of popular standards, sung mostly in Spanish, and the selection of songs was surprising, including Ernie K-Doe's "Mother-in-Law" and The McCoys' "Hang on Lupe" (although, in the manner of Mexican cover bands, this songs have been subtly -- or egregiously -- mistranslated into Spanish; the latter song, for example, is now "Hey Lupe"). A few of the covers chosen by the band were genuinely inspiring, such as their version of Richard Berry's "Have Love Will Travel," which the band performed in the manner of The Sonics, replacing Berry's chipper saxophone riff with a wailing wall of guitars while Big Sandy strutted the stage like a Spanish Mick Jagger, howling his mistranslation of the lyrics.

It was the sort of image you see sometimes in late-night movies, in nightclub scenes, just before the hero ducks backstage to fistfight with whoever is chasing him, and you think "Why can't there be shows like this in the real world? Why can't masked guitarists play music like this while a massive black-clad singer in sunglasses howls garage band songs in Spanish?" But you know those images in movies aren't real; they're just an invention of the director, who wanted a rock band in his movie, but, you know, something wilder than your typical rock band. And you turn the movie off, and go to bed, and before you fall asleep you find yourself wishing bands like that existed in the real world, and that night you dream disappointed dreams.

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Location Info: The Turf Club
Artist Info: Los Straitjackets, The Mezcal Brothers

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