Respect is the key for King James & The Special Men

The debut album from New Orleans’ King James & The Special Men may have hit the streets today, but Act Like You Know isn’t a project hastily tossed together by a bunch of folks who just met each other last year.
“It’s been a minute,” chuckles frontman Jimmy Horn when discussing the seven-year wait for this album. Yet as he explains, there was no better time than now to release it.
“I’m really glad that it’s coming out now at this time in history and in my life,” he said. “I’ve been a musician all my life. I got a guitar at the age of four, and that’s all I’ve done my entire life is study and devour music. So now at this age and this stage in my life, I feel like it’s a good time to do it because I feel like I have an armory. I have stores of material and the life experience to bring it out correctly.”
With that statement alone, you can hear the respect Horn has for the music, and that respect comes back for him and the band (Ben Polcer, Robert Snow, John “Porkchop” Rodli, Chris “Showtime” Davis, Scott Frock, Jason Mingledorff, Travis Blotzky and Dominick Grillo) with one listen of the record. And while he appreciates a response like that, it still circles back to the music for the Utah native, who has made New Orleans his home since 1993.
“This stuff is everything to me,” he said. “It means the world to me. It’s not a hat I wear. This is who we are, and if people respect it, I’m all for it. But it’s really about the fact that we respect it.”
If there is any skepticism about Horn’s devotion to his craft, you can take it up with him personally, as he isn’t hard to find. In fact, every Monday he and the band can be found at the Saturn Bar.
“On St. Claude, just across the tracks,” Horn said.
There, you get a real look at what King James & The Special Men bring to the table. It’s a rarity these days, but that work ethic shines through as soon as the first notes hit.
“It’s everything,” he said. “That, and the consistency of it all. In my opinion, other than the fantastic music, of course, the key to our success is being easy to find. We enjoy Monday. We have a large amount of people come in every day to this town and that’s another advantage we have here. ‘What should I go do?’ ‘It’s Monday? You’ve got to go see The Special Men.’ That’s everything, man. That and our shows, of course, and the red beans. I’m still not sure that they’re not just coming out for the beans.”
Word has it that the beans are pretty special, but it’s safe to say that Horn and his band bring in their fair share of patrons for the music, especially if they’ve heard the rumors that the group has a repertoire of 400 songs.
“It was several hundred songs, that wasn’t a guesstimate,” he laughs. “In our earliest incarnation, when we were playing at Ernie K-Doe’s once or twice a week, we were doing the starving artist thing for real and back then, I wasn’t writing for this band. We were students, we were hungry and really into it. And with the help of a couple record stores that took a shine to me, I was able to go through their entire collection and record every single last 45 they had from all the old labels.”
I tell Horn that he makes learning 400 songs sound easy.
“It was for me,” he said. “I didn’t have friends, I had records.”
But what about the rest of the band? How did the new folks get told that they had to learn a few hundred songs to get the gig?
“You know the old adage, ‘It takes two to know,’” Horn said. “Well, we were the two. (Laughs) They were just winging it. As long as me and (drummer) Chris (Davis) knew what was going on, it was a song.”
More importantly, that’s how this group became a band. And while they’re playing a mix of R&B, soul and blues that is a reminder of a great era in music, as Horn points out, they’re not bringing anything back. As far as he’s concerned, it never left.
“We’re not reinventing anything,” he said. “We’re not trying to resuscitate anything. We didn’t dig it out of the ground and try to present it as alive. These are living traditions. It’s alive and well in the 9th Ward, man.”
For more information on King James & The Special Men, click here

