~ Live Show Review ~

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The Asylum Street Spankers

Live at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz, California, 6/3/99, produced by Snazzy Productions. Reviewed by Snoozy.

 

Spank me! An entire show without a single microphone or amplifier on stage.

The Asylum Street Spankers, an eight-member collection of musicians from Austin, are not the least bit ordinary. For one thing, they specialize in a mix of lounge, swing, jazz, country and blues. But the real trick: everything, including vocals, is delivered minus amplification. "Music the way God intended it." As Mysterious John, their MC, kazoo player, and resident smart aleck warns (R) our crowd at the start, they cannot and will not compete with loud conversation. We want to hear all their notes, hewed with banjos, ukuleles, steel guitars, mandolins, standup basses, clarinets, saxophones, and washboards, doing what we like -- transforming the Kuumbwa Jazz Center into a front porch party.

If truth were told, the group originally convened at an all-night party on the banks of the Llano River. The musicians were protesting to each other about the fast, loud, electric bands of which each were members. Wammo said he could make music with a washboard . . . so somebody got up and got him one. The musicians eventually left the Llano and went back to their bands, yet something about the music they made that night wouldn't let them go. Telephone calls were made, the musicians reunited and practices were scheduled. Then came the gigs. The Spankers maintain that they couldn't get a sound system the first time out. Some say they never meant to bring one. Whatever.

The band members range in age from about twenty to sixty: there's stout ol' Pops Bayless in overalls playing mando, banjo, and ukulele; the blond vixen, Christina Marrs, with a voice that proceeds from Betty Boop to Bessie Smith in a flash; and long-haired washboard-and-harmonica-playing Wammo. Then there's drummer Salty John Salmon. And we hear from Mysterious John. There are also some new dudes, Dave Van Such on clarinet and sax, and hot pickers Pierre Pichon and Jake Erwin.

The Spankers do a lot of things very well, but they excel at lowbrow bawdiness. Pops sings about funny cigarettes and White House politics, wherein "You gotta go down to go up" (R//M). Wammo throws in with the autobiographical "I'm Trippin' Over You Baby" (R//M) and "Scrotum." Mysterious John hams his way through a paean called "Fanny," which closes with the band leaping into the chorus of Spinal Tap's "Big Bottom."

They are vaudevillian pros with serious musical talent playing tunes by Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt and Hank Williams. Several of the bandmembers take turns on lead vocals. Marrs stands out on one level as the lone female in the bunch, but it's her extraordinary vocal range that steals the show tonight. She sings one song in sex-pot caricature, and belts out the next in a full-bodied, sultry roar which makes it perfectly clear why the Spankers get along just fine without microphones. "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie" (R//M) is all about Marrs' high, sweet voice and ukulele, until Wammo and Mysterious John cup hands over nose and mouth and begin to scat like a warbled old 78 record. From there it's a swingin' ride down the line with "Superchief," complete with Wammo on train whistle - which looks like a field sobriety test considering the beer bottle he nurses all night long.

With the obvious fun these musicians have when they are performing together, there's no denying the collective talent and the way they make the kazoo and the harmonica perform like respectable instruments despite being completely at odds with much of the prevailing musical scene. For example, there's Wammo, doing "Startin' to Hate Country" (R//M), a total put-down of today's torch and twang: "Maybe country videos my soul to save/But them new wave Nashville's on the juke/Turned my gut fixin' to puke/I bet Hank Williams is spinnin' in his grave".

At the end the gang from Asylum Street asks the Al Jolson question, "Where did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?" The answer in the encore? To the year 2000: "Gonna Party Like Its 1999." If you missed this party then spank you very much!

 

(Photos by Meribeth Malone.) 

(Excerpted material recorded at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on 6/3/99. Mix by Julie Rix. Recorded by Dave Nielsen of Technica Gratia Artes.)

 

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