Interview with The Reverend Horton Heat

When it comes to modern rockabilly and psychobilly these days, the consensus is that The Reverend Horton Heat is a pioneer in both styles since his ascension in the mid-’80s. The living legend will be performing in the ballroom at Fete on Jan 21, and we chatted about seeing The Cramps in Dallas, being a sound guy for warehouse shows, the changes in the music industry and life as a musician in 2015.

Rob Duguay: I heard a story about an epiphany you had after seeing The Cramps in Dallas during the late 1970s that had a huge impact on you as a musician. For people who are not familiar with the story, what happened on that night in Dallas?

Reverend Horton Heat: Well during the late ’70s in Dallas, punk rock was still kind of a fresh thing in ’79 and ’80 — it didn’t really get off the ground until ’77. I was hanging out with a friend of mine and he said, “Hey, I wanna go see The Cramps.” I said, “Okay.” I’ve never heard of them so I thought it was just a punk rock show and there were so many of those types of people there. It was at a club that normally had heavy metal bands and it was super wild because that’s what The Cramps do. Lux Interior was half naked and rolling around on broken glass and all sorts of crazy stuff. It was really wild and there were a lot of people there; the whole time I was thinking that it was ’50s music. They were playing “The Way I Walk” by Jack Scott, “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen, a lot of twangy Duane Eddy type guitar licks, except it was a little bit fuzz toned out and with all those types of songs and rockabilly stuff it just made me realize that rockabilly and the music that I was connected to would work in this new punk rock way. That kinda led me to realize that the ’50s rockabilly can be considered the earliest form of punk rock. A lot of it got rehashed, The Ramones did stuff like that. Then again a lot of rockabilly bands like The Blasters and The Rockats when they came through Dallas would play the punk rock club and we had a really good punk rock club called The Hot Klub. I asked my wife, Ivy, about that show because what happened that night was that the heavy metal guys did not like the punk rock people in their club. There was a giant rumble in the parking lot after that show between the heavy metal guys in their Camaros with guns and the punk rock kids who were waiting for their parents to come pick them up. It was a dangerous scene; the cops showed up and it was just crazy. The cops forced us to leave Dallas. They said, “You gotta leave town right now.” The cops followed everyone out to the Dallas city line and ran them out of town.

RD: Now there’s this other story of people knowing you as “Jim the sound guy” where you would do sound for shows that took place at a warehouse in Dallas during the mid-’80s. While doing sound, what was the weirdest experience you’ve ever had with a band? Did you ever have to deal with any divas? Did you ever have to deal with anyone who was flat-out weird?

RHH: One thing that I discovered back then was that sound men get yelled at a lot. If something doesn’t sound right they obviously will blame the sound guy even though the show is in a big, square brick and concrete warehouse. You could put the best PA system in there and it’s not going to sound good. I kinda learned to get yelled at a lot. I was always the last to leave those shows because I would be tearing down my PA and loading it into a trailer by myself. One night I finished loading out, I was kinda tired and I just sat myself down out in the alley and here come the skinheads. Twenty of them come marching down the alley and I was thinking that I was about to get my ass kicked, but they walked right by me and they left me alone. Late at night, weird stuff happens and I avoided getting my ass kicked and stuff. But I was into rockabilly and a lot of these clubs were into punk rock and there were these hippies and punk rockers who thought I was from outer space.

RD: In those situations have you ever identified with being an outsider?

RHH: By that point I was focused like a laser on all things rockabilly, surf guitar, hot rods and all that. I used to work at an art gallery where  these hippies would hang out and I would think to myself, “Man, these people really think they know art,” when I actually thought that they were a bunch of idiots. My thing was that I pretty much tried to fit in with everybody, I like people. Sometimes it’s cool being the token rockabilly guy so I did pretty much fit in.

RD: You alluded to this a bit earlier but people consider you a pioneer in modern rockabilly and psychobilly. You’ve also have never been afraid to put some sort of country tinge on your music. In American music there’s this folk revival happening in terms of popularity where you have musicians like Justin Townes Earle, Bobby Bare, Jr. and Ray LaMontagne drawing crowds and touring around all over the place. As a musician who kind of puts that spin on his music, what do you think of folk music becoming popular again?

RHH: To be honest with you, I don’t know that much about it. My job is kind of the opposite of what a music writer does. A music writer is someone who has to stay on top of the new trends that come out and all of the new artists and stuff. My job is to completely ignore that, so I don’t really care. If some of those people come out and I like it, and there are a lot of new trends that come out when people do stuff, then I’ll think it’s okay. Jimmy Rogers and Woody Guthrie — that’s folk music to me.

RD: That’s completely understandable with a schedule that must get pretty hectic for you from time to time. For the past 15 years or so, the Internet has become an accessible outlet for a lot of bands to get their music heard. Do you like the notion of the Internet becoming an open forum for music?

RHH: It really is a double-edged sword because on one hand it’s freedom, and I’m all about that, with there being a really big push from politicians to censor the internet — especially Democrat politicians who have ties to Hollywood. Hollywood really wants to censor the Internet and I’m totally against that. At the same time, the music industry is part of that crowd that wants to control what’s on the internet because they’ve lost a lot of money due to piracy. I don’t like Internet piracy because it hurts my industry, but it also gives me creative freedom, so it’s a double-edged sword. I really see how it has hurt musicians a lot, but the good thing is that it’s hurt the big boys in Hollywood who act like they own the musicians as some sort of property. To see the big boys all of the sudden having to scramble around because their once unbelievably lucrative business in selling CDs is now not very good. It’s cool and I like that, but of course the musician is the one who has to take the fall in the end. For instance, I enjoyed getting royalties from the songs that I’ve written and I don’t like seeing those types of things go way down. It hurts to see old guys that I really respect and have made some of the greatest records in history and guys who I’ve know who’ve produced some of the biggest albums ever who are counting on that money see it just drop to zero. It’s heartbreaking.

RD: Nearly a year ago today you put out your 11th studio album titled Rev. Do you plan on making another album in 2015 or do you plan on just doing a bunch of touring and maybe hitting the summer festival circuit?

RHH: We’ve already started working a bit in the studio, but the next album is not going to come super quick because we’re still really on a roll promoting Rev. One thing that’s really interesting for us at least is like you said, we have 11 CDs out and once a band has that many CDs if you start releasing more in a short period of time it can really piss off your fans. It doesn’t make them happy, so I’ve found that whenever we release a new CD it takes like two years for the songs off that CD to start sinking in to the fans. Early in our career we surely would wait for two years in between albums, but now at two years after the release, a new album hits and people are just getting used to the one that you just did. It’s almost too much for them to handle, so we’re just going to take it easy, we got 11 CDs. It’s kind of hard to make all this music, write all these songs and there’s no way to really to fit it into our live set. People pay money to come see us play and they want to hear the songs that they love from our back catalog. It’s not really fair to them to just go out and say, “We don’t care what you want to hear, we’re going to play everything off our new album.” It’s really not fair to them, so then we’re in a situation where I’m writing all these songs and some of them may be great and some of them may not, but we can’t play some of these songs ever live. You don’t want to pile up too many albums in a row.