His secret is really, really expensive shampoo. No kidding. Photos by .
Since my job requires that I attend at least twice the amount of shows I used to as a civilian, it’s really helpful when I see an act that puts the lifeblood back in me. The formula is somewhat simple, but, as I’ve learned from experience, awfully hard to attain. It goes a little something like this: wild, wooly, and loud.
A great show, in retrospect, is often reduced to this holy trinity, illustrated in the memory only by brief flashes of bright lights, dark, moving shapes, and the soothing feeling that you came away satisfied. With this in mind, I went over my notes, incomprehensible from being written in the dark, and I eked out something linear from the blissfully drunken recollections of the night before.
Dressed up (or down?) in a fright wig and a bikini bottom that exposed his downy leg hairs, King Khan wiggled his junk in the face of the crowd. His turbaned ally, Mark Sultan (BBQ), was perched atop a stool behind the tiny kickdrum at his feet, shoulders wrapped in a cheap cape.
Littered at their feet was a boneyard of half-drunk beers and empty shot glasses. As a twosome, they embodied the hell-bent glee of a thousand Rat Finks, fez hats, rubber chickens and pin-up devil girls exploding simultaneously at the cue of a mad-eyed b-movie villain. All metaphoric glut aside, I’m making an effort to steer myself away from musical distraction. Garage, psychedelia and surf-rock are about a half-century old — all those bands! All those possibilities for comparison!
With the same vigor at which the nimble post-punk monster chooses younger and younger mates with which to breed, the brutal, knuckle-dragging ’60s-nostalgia beast continues to amble unabated (although he is often caught blurrily on film). Luckily, although the music of the King Khan and BBQ show is an adoring, slaphappy send-up of garage, Damned-style punk, surf, doo-wop, and rockabilly, the result is considerably less ham-fisted than much of their competition’s. Lyrics like “I don’t give a fuck / I don’t give a shit”, PAs set to 11 and a mosh pit help; the energy is high and the high kicks are mirthful.
Flooring the audience with merciless blasts, the two guitarists riffed maniacally with loose wrists as they screamed and bounced in time. The crowd, dancing furiously with their hair whipping, sent up a few surfers every few minutes. Cushioned by the hot wall of lip-curling reverb and the vibrating bodies, I thought… um… this is painfully excellent. I was a little sloshed, but it was true.
It was easy for me to lose myself in the noise, as happily as I could with my ears tucked behind a giant pair of headphones in my high school bedroom. The songs, varying mostly in pace, marched out in uniformly awesome succession. In the brief pauses between, shouts of “Turn it up!” and “Everything LOUDER!” perforated the air. Mr. BBQ (shocker!) spit right on the stage.
Just it had begun, the set ended with the crackle of electric fuzz. Not forgetting their punk influences, King Khan and BBQ managed to insult a few people in the crowd before bowing out. No matter — the duo was met with thunderous applause and shrill whistling anyway, and off the stage stepped Khan in his tennis shoes and bedazzled shirt. The buzz from the performance remained with me for several hours afterward; the show had set the bar high for any raucous tomfoolery to follow. Slobbery 60’s-nostalgia beast had claimed another victim — this time, a formerly fickle listener with veins running hot.
Alex Edgeworth is a Denver freelance writer and regular Reverb contributor.
writes the Cause=Time blog and contributes regularly to Reverb.
