Big Sky — The Reverend Horton Heat
#365Songs: February 21
So Smitty texted our group chat. He says, “I went to L.A. and got a bug. Can someone cover for me?”
And I say to him, “Let us pray.”
For there is only one man, one spirit that can save us at so late an hour. Since we are standing at the confluence of Los Angeles degeneracy, a Hail Mary #365Songs post, and pure desperation… it is time to summon the good Christian powers the holiest of all holies… The Reverend. Horton. Heat.
FUCKING 90s WEEK IS IN OVERTIME, YOU COKED OUT FREAKABILLIES.
I didn’t say any of that because he’d probably die right there in the text message. Beggar Smitty can’t be chooser Smitty.
We’ve all heard those aww shucks rockabilly music 1950s. It was like country’s drunker and rock n’ roll-obsessed cousin. When I first heard the spiritual sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat, the year was 1991 (maybe 1992) and I couldn’t name anyone associated with the genre but Buddy Holly.
So try to picture the look on my face when I heard this for the first time.
Praise Jesus.
What did I know about the type of geeeetar plucking that made James C. Heath’s guitar sound like that? Nothing. So I’m not going to go into the things I’ve learned since. The technical aspects of his playing? Doesn’t matter. Not right now. What matters is the way it makes you feel in your loins.
Fucking alive. That’s how it makes me feel.
Call it what you want. Rockabilly. Psychobilly. The Reverend Horton Heat — consisting of Heath on vocals and guitar, Jimbo Wallace on upright bass, and a rotating cast of drummers — plays some stirring combination of surf, punk, rockabilly, and big band swing. If Rockabilly is country’s drunker, rock n’ roll-obsessed cousin, The Reverend is Rockabilly’s coked-out uncle.
I’ve mentioned cocaine twice now. It’s no coincidence.
The Reverent Horton Heat might play something that borders on novelty music — see above — but they do so with such a straight face, such a commitment to their sound amalgamation and method (drugs, booze, women, repeat) that the end result becomes a celebration of wild nights, zero regrets, and no more fucks to give.
So let’s celebrate the Reverend with the song that I put on at least three different mixtapes back in my mixtape-making 90s, “Big Sky” the opening track on their 1994 album Liquor in the Front — deftly produced, with a selective ear for the joys of frivolous kitsch, by Ministry’s Al Jourgenson.
It’s a bawdy, grungy, surf-guitar-by-way-of-Ennio Morricone instrumental that prefaces the Rev’s most complete and consistent record. “Big Sky” bleeds into “Baddest of the Bad” in such a way that inspires solo fist pumps to nowhere — catapulting the band into catalog staples like “Liquor, Beer & Wine,” “Five-o Ford,” and the punk/anti-surfer ditty “I Can’t Surf.”
There’s also the wonderful novelty of Liquor in the Front opening with such a precise volley of guitar-driven aggression and concluding with the stumble-drunk cover of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”
Did I mention that the back cover of Liquor in the Front features the subtitle “Poker in the Rear”?
Hallelujah.
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
