Week 59: Dirty Little Heaters

Last week I mentioned the Dirty Little Heaters. A couple of weeks ago, after a year or so hiatus, the Dirty Little Heaters resurfaced at the Local 506 with a new lineup. And they proceeded to single-handedly renew my faith in rock. The new lineup is Reese McHenry on guitar and vocals, Dave Perry on drums and Rob Walsh on bass. Reese is the remaining member from the previous lineup, and Dave and Rob, well, Dave and Rob are rock and roll survivors who have pretty much sold their souls for rock and roll.

Dave Perry, at one point or another, has played drums with almost everybody in the Triangle Area (that’s Chapel Hill-Durham-Raleigh), and he is easily the hardest hitting drummer I’ve ever encountered. I played a show with him at the Cat’s Cradle which has a fairly large stage, and I could feel the air from his bass drum hitting the back of my legs every time he hit it. Someone (I don’t remember who) once gave the perfect description of his drumming, he plays the drums like they owe him money. Don’t expect a lot of fancy work, but when it comes to a rock beat, he can lay it down like a train full of bricks .

How is it that a drummer can get a beat out of a drum set the way Dave does? Dave is a strong man, but physically there is a limit to how hard a person can hit a drumhead with a stick, so it’s not a matter of strength. The equipment has something to do with it, there are louder and quieter drums, and Dave plays a booming set. But again, this only goes so far. I’ve seen very heavy beat drummers playing dinky sets and rocking the shit out of them. So it’s not strength and its not equipment. So what is it that makes a drummer like Dave be able to rock so much heavier than others? Is it the way he lays into the beat with his full body, pushing the beats out like cannon balls? Is it the way he plays subtly behind the beat, using the bass and guitar to open up the way for each punch of the drums? Or is it the way he seems to be able to stretch each beat so that they build on top of one another in a relentless attack on the gut? Probably a combination of all of the above, but to me it seems like some kind of magic trick.

Then there is Rob Walsh, who is probably best known as the bass player for The Spinns, one of my favorite garage rock trios, and of whom I’ve spoken before on this blog here. Rob has spent many years touring clubs as either soundman or bassman. His favorite band is the 13th Floor Elevators and his bass playing reflects that, but he’s fed that love for the psychedelic with a healthy dose of Venom and the result is a swirling bass style that runs circles around the chords, much in the same way that the jug player in the 13th Floor Elevators did, except heavy, heavy like heavy heavy. And it's a dizzying style. It feels like a whirlwind lifting a locomotive. It wants to take off to the skies, but it’s so damn heavy. So instead the locomotive hovers a few feet above our heads where Rob with those swirling basslines, like some mythological Atlas, holds the heavy threat from falling over our heads and smashing us to bits.

The combination of Rob and Dave makes for a very imposing rhythm section under which most front people would shatter like so much fine glassware. Enter Reese McHenry. I imagine fronting this rhythm section must feel the way it might have felt fronting John Entwistle and John Bonham on a three-piece band, if that had ever happened. If I hadn’t gotten to the show after it had already started I might have wondered how Reese was going to keep from blowing off the stage. But when we got to the 506, they had already started playing. I tried to stop at the bar for a beer, but the sound coming off the stage was not going to let me do that, it grabbed me and pulled me to the front like some giant magnet.

And let me tell you, Reese had stepped between two giants and was riding their giant wave like she was born for it. First of all, she has the most perfect rock voice I’ve heard since Wendy Case of the Paybacks. She has a voice that doesn’t need a microphone, right out of the box it comes with built-in overdrive. She could be on top of the Statue of Liberty, and you’d probably be able to hear her from the ground. And it’s not because she's loud, though she is loud, but it’s more in the way that her voice cuts through frequencies like a hot knife on butter. Add to that an effortless rock phrasing and a natural bluesy feel, like maybe her nanny was Janis Joplin, and you get a howl that cuts straight to the belly of the beast.

Her guitar playing, smartly enough, stays simple; she plays chunky chords and rhythms with the occasional arpeggios or quick flourishes. It adds the perfect amount of crunch and stagger to her vocals so that the combination these three make on stage is what I will use from now on as the definition of a rock powerhouse. And it brings up the question, what is the point of recorded rock music?

I saw the Dirty Little Heaters twice in about a week, an official show at the Local 506, and again at an impromptu show on Thanksgiving at the Cave. Getting blown away twice I couldn’t help but wonder, how can rock music this good ever be conveyed on record? And I remembered standing in the audience being smashed to bits by the rock of those great bands of yore, like the Ramones, the Buttholes, Motorhead, Sonic Youth, Jesus Lizard, etc, etc. And I remembered that rock recordings are nothing but a front, nothing but a thin, faded picture of what rock music has to offer.

Most rock bands with successful recording careers have to resort to bringing something else to a recording, they focus on songcraft, or the sound, or the concept, but the pure rock, that remains on the stage. Even live recordings, which theoretically would offer the most accurate document of a rock concert are nothing but fluff compared to the real thing. Producers bust themselves editing these live documents in an attempt to convey the live experience, and fail. Unedited recordings fare no better. Listening to a record to get the rock is like headbanging to AC/DC in your car while stuck in traffic on the way home from work. It might have a taste of rock, but it’s not, not by a long shot. Much like a joke on paper, rock music loses every time you replay it. Even just the fact that it is re-playable immediately takes away from the ability of the listener to fully appreciate its gift.

Which goes back to what Ramon mentioned last week, you can’t judge rock music from a MySpace page, and I will add, from any recording of it. You have to get out there and see the music in its natural habitat, otherwise you're thinking you know what a gorilla looks like just because you saw one at the zoo. Well, then you don't know. Which brings us to this description here, which if it does anything, I hope it makes you want to go out and see some live music in your area. But don’t think that this post even comes close to describing the pure rock that was laid on us by the Dirty Little Heaters. For that you'll have to see them yourself when they come to your town.

Reese's photo is by Ross Grady.