Reverend Horton Heat: A Texas revival

With stories and songs, Reverend Horton Heat returns to the road

By Ched Whitney

When you go to a Reverend Horton Heat show, you know what you're going to get. According to the good Reverend (the band's singer, guitarist, chief songwriter and lead psychobilly showman), the band constructs a six- or seven-song intro from which it rarely deviates. Bandmates make the same good-natured introductions of each other. And once or twice--in the middle of a song--the Reverend will climb atop James "Jimbo" Wallace's stand-up bass, sending the crowd into yet another frenzy.

It's just part of the band's formula for success. The Reverend Horton Heat--the man, Jim Heath of Corpus Christi, Texas--started the Reverend Horton Heat--the band--in the mid-1980s. Mixing Cramps- and Butthole Surfers-style punk with rockabilly and the music of old-school country-blues mavericks such as Carl Perkins and Junior Brown, the band developed a sound it calls psychobilly.

The Reverend developed a cult following in the late '80s, was signed to that most famous independent label Sub Pop (Nirvana's industry birthplace), advanced to a major label in 1994 where it released It's Martini Time (a nod to the retro swing craze) in 1996 and finally returned to an indie label by the time of 2000's Spend a Night in the Box. Yep Roc Records' advance notes for the band's just-released album, Revival, call it "a return to roots--musically and geographically." For his part, Heath says, "It's exploring different ways to do the Reverend Horton Heat."

But some things don't change, such as the Rev's approach to songwriting. "The lyric is what makes the song viable," Heath says. "But, hey, I've got a bunch of songs that all the lyric is is, 'hey, ba ba ba, be, ba ba ba.' In my lyrical style, I try to go for something straightforward. To me, a song about wanting to hold someone's hand can be more meaningful than having some kind of overbearing, over-the-top proxy for a new generation."

Heath is well-known for his favorite song subjects--beer, gin, fast women, gambling, drugs and classic hot rods (in fact, a recent attempt to sell the subject of the song "Reverend Horton Heat's Big Blue Car" failed when his eBay auction reserve was not met). But as he says about the new album, the themes "run from death to silly." Death? "Someone in Heaven" is a memorial to his mother, who passed away this year.

Other songs are often real-life stories, or at least close approximations. Wallace--Heath's closest friend and himself a frequent lyrical subject for the Rev--once related the story behind the 1996 song "Interracial Cowboy" and its chorus, "Interracial cowboy, homo kind of love," which might have been deemed offensive by sensitive listeners. As the story goes, Heath and Wallace found themselves in a sort of gay cowboy bar in Ohio. When a couple of guys offered to buy them drinks, the bandmates replied, "We're not gay." "We know," said the patrons. It turned out to be a good time, and at one point the Rev. leaned over to Jimbo and said, "There's got to be a song here."

On the other hand, "Bales of Cocaine," a Reverend standard about discovering mislaid drugs in a Texas field and converting the booty into a small fortune in Dallas, is, as one might guess, based on a daydream.

"I was cuttin' brush out in east Texas and a F-16 fighter jet went whizzin' by about 100 feet off the ground. And I was thinking, `Man, I wish that was a different kind of plane that would drop me a bunch of drugs so I could take 'em to Dallas and be rich.

"But that was back when I was a little wilder and I had all sorts of crazy things I'd think of. Actually, when I was out there doing that, I got the idea that the people who got rich off cocaine and drugs were kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies. Instead of them hitting oil, they accidentally got two big ol' bales of cocaine with a street value of $20 million. So that was kind of the angle on that one."

Still, Heath credits his longevity in some part to his tongue-in-cheek attitude. "You know, I gotta laugh, because I really don't take all this stuff I do too seriously."