Dax Riggs spent his formative years pounding the pavement on Saturday mornings as a Jehovah’s Witness posing questions about Armageddon.
He was a child born into a faith, raised in a split family and living with his mother. “May I come in for a moment?” he would ask the people peering out their front doors.
But then Riggs encountered David Lynch in the second or third grade – through the filmmaker’s “The Elephant Man,” which was showing on HBO – and discovered a world outside his own. The movie explores the life of John Merrick, the 19th-century Englishman whose physical deformities masked a soul of surpassing sensitivity.
“It was kind of the first time I was ever confronted with something that, given what I had been taught, couldn’t be explained properly to my satisfaction,” Riggs said earlier this week on his way to Toronto. “I was haunted more by the idea that the world was not all I’d hoped it to be as a child, more haunted by the idea that, in the form of this grotesque, deformed man, he was actually artistic and gentle.”
This duality enthralled Riggs. Ultimately, that afternoon in front of the TV was the beginning of his band, the ’60s-informed Deadboy & the Elephantmen, which plays the Bluebird Theater on Monday.
“I was terrified, troubled, sleepless at first, and then it became a love for this character,” he said. “And then I could see the music as beautiful and grotesque, at moments.”
Riggs left his mother’s household for that of his more liberal father, who lived in Houma, La. He soon found himself flunked out of the seventh grade, semi-fatherless (his dad worked on an oil platform 40 miles out in the Gulf), and in love. As Riggs tells it, he and his girlfriend drove to Florida, a bohemian journey that lasted as long as the relationship, which is to say not very long. Soon he was back in Louisiana, playing in a heavy metal band with his buddies.
“I didn’t feel like I was learning anything important in school,” said Riggs. “I felt that experience was what I really needed. And I wasn’t getting it sleeping at my desk at school.”
That Louisiana garage band evolved into Acid Bath, the cult favorite-
turned- proto-grunge outfit that might be a household name right now save for the untimely death of bassist Audie Pitre, who was killed, along with his parents, by a drunken driver in 1997.
Riggs played in other bands after the disbanding of Acid Bath, but Deadboy & the Elephantman is something the singer-guitarist has been working on since 2000.
“It started out with more guitar players, I guess more of a progressive, King Crimson, early Genesis, but mixed with a lot of other stuff going through my head at first, but it eventually evolved into this,” said Riggs, 28. “I had to figure out the best way to dress these songs, and to have people playing all over them was not necessarily for the best.
“So it was just a long period of experimenting and realizing what really worked the best.”
In 2004, Riggs connected with Tessie Brunet, and the two found an aural place together that is as unusual as it is familiar. “We Are Night Sky,” their 12-track debut released in February on Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records, boasts stark contrasts in tone and tempo.
The White Stripes comparisons go beyond this group being a guy-on-guitar, girl-on-drums duo. The two bands share an aesthetic. But instead of comparisons to The Stooges, Deadboy is more inspired by the artful Velvet Underground – and the assaultive AC/DC. Most of the music is an exercise in subtlety, but occasionally, as in the end of “Stop, I’m Already Dead,” they’ll pull no punches in the name of a heady riff.
And the blues chords that are native to Deadboy’s living spaces – Louisiana and Mississippi, over the past couple of years – pepper “We Are Night Sky” like a shotgun blast. The band’s sound is intoxicating, and it’s impossible to not be yanked in by the record’s first two songs, “Stop, I’m Already Dead” and “No Rainbows.”
The two tracks are the lone leftovers from Riggs’ early incarnations of Deadboy. In “Stop,” he and Brunet perfect the balance of the rock rager that is their specialty. It skips and stops before tearing into a full-stride sprint. Hot as it is, it leads into the disarmingly quiet rock ballad “No Rainbows.”
Riggs minces few words in talking about each style’s inspiration.
“Originally, ‘Stop, I’m already Dead’ was a major melody, and that happens sometimes, when the vocal melody will switch into a minor,” Riggs said. “But it was always some kind of Velvet Underground song to me, no matter what it sounded like.”
” ‘No Rainbow’ was me trying to write a Nick Lowe song or a Lucinda Williams song.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Deadboy & the Elephantmen
INDIE ROCK|Bluebird Theater, 7:30 p.m. Monday with Wolfmother|$15| TicketWeb, ticketweb.com or 866-468-7621
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BOB LOG III If you like your punk rock served up with five olives and a scowl, don’t miss Bob Log III’s show at the Larimer Lounge on Friday.
WOLFMOTHER Apparently Australia is quite the breeding grounds for hard rock bands imitating the greats of the ’70s and ’80s, but Wolfmother is the only one breaking through right now. With its White Stripes-on- a-Zeppelin bender approach to metal, evident in songs such as “White Unicorn” and “Dimension,” the band’s show Monday at the Bluebird is not to be missed.
MOBB DEEP These boys have been practicing hardcore rap for nearly 15 years, and so their recent Interscope release “Blood Money” hits hard. The group takes over the Gothic on Monday.
THOMAS DOLBY Is there more to Thomas Dolby than “She Blinded Me With Science?” Find out Tuesday, when the synth-pop icon rocks the Bluebird in a rare appearance.
– Ricardo Baca
