Hickoids

The Hickoids

Hell, lets just cut to the chase right at the outset. The Hickoids defy easy and neat description, or even messy description, though messy was often applied to the bands members and their shamelessly uninhibited punk rock run for the wilted Texas yellow roses from 1985 through 92 one of the mildest descriptions, in fact. The tags hung around their scrawny and unruly necks like name and number slates in arrest photos include but are hardly limited to cowpunk, white thrash, glambilly, hard-corn, psychobilly, hick rock, acidbilly and out on bail. All in a way apply, but none and even the sum of those terms do these magnificent musical reprobates full justice.

To truly get The Hickoids as they were in their original wild, wooly and damned loud and raucously ragged magnificence, combine tequila with beer chasers (not the other way around), psychedelic shrooms, demon musical seeds spewed by The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and Iggy & The Stooges, honky-tonk and Hee Haw, hay bales scattered in the air, power chords and toxic twang galore, battered cowboy hats and tattered thrift store dresses, and their Austin hometown in all its late 80s cheap rent/booze/pot/living slacker splendor. Thatll give ya a bracing taste of what was and now, nearly 20 years after they sputtered to a halt, returns anew. Or simply mix the notions Texas and punk rock, multiply that to the Nth exponential, and shake vigorously. Voila! Hickoids.

Now in 2011, The Hickoids throw another wrench into the cogs of preconception on Kicking It With The Twits. Yeah, theyre an American band in ways that Grand Funk Railroad could never have dreamed of in their worst nightmares. But proudly flying the Union Jack of the Disunited Kingdom across the pond on their latest release makes perfect sense for this resolutely renegade rocknroll band.

The eight-song mini-album shouts never mind the corn, heres the Brit-rock bollocks that are as much a primal musical scream within the Hickoids consciousness as the magic mushrooms found growing in the cow patty of the bands twisted American roots. Anyone who has wondered where the cross-dressing, splashes of glam and elegantly wasted decadence that The Hickoids have ingeniously perfected into the highest levels of low art will find the origins here on songs by superstars like The Rolling Stones, The Who and Elton John as well as such quintessentially English groups as Mott The Hoople, Eno, Slade, The Move and punk pioneers The Damned.

The disc abounds with transatlantic twists like a billowing blues harp on Pete Townshends ode to onanism, Pictures of Lily, and Sir Eltons #1 hit Bennie and the Jets neon lit by rolling Texas tumbleweed steel guitar. The Jagger/Richards 1965 social commentary of Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow and the first Brit-punk single Neat, Neat, Neat are reborn in the colonies and supercharged new millennium garage rock nuggets. The Saville Row savoir faire of Enos Needles in the Camels Eye gets transmogrified into a swirling psychedelic storm and The Moves Brontosaurus becomes a heavy metal guitar squall. The stompnroll of Slades Gudbuy T Jane gets amped up to 11, and Motts Whizz Kid becomes a roaring slide guitar fever dream. Just as The Hickoids have done with everything theyve musically touched since their mid-1980s breech birth, this set sparks a roaring American heartland prairie fire from the fuel of the bands seminal British inspirations.

The Hickoids are to country music what a stick of dynamite is to firecrackers. Back in the days when no one had to worry much about keeping Austin weird, The Hickoids were doing their best to make it the weirdest place in Texas, if not on earth," observes William Michael Smith of the Houston Press today. Although its nothing short of a miracle that the group even survived their sordid past, the truth be told they sound as big and badass as ever, raves their hometown rag the Austin Chronicle. Key members Jeff Smith (aka The Thin White Duke of Hazzard) at the microphone and Davy Jones on his gnarly guitar still lead the charge, ably abetted by Jonie Hell on drums, Rice Moorehead on bass, Jacob Schulze on guitar and keyboards and Scott Lutz on steel guitar.

There are some things about The Hickoids that will never be known, confesses Smith. You could only know them by being there when they were happening. And even those who were there debate the facts and/or try to remember them. But this much is known and not in dispute: Three original and we do mean bracingly original vinyl (somewhat) long-playing record releases titled Were in It for the Corn, Hard Corn and Waltz a Crossdress Texas, plus a holiday spirits 45, We Got the Eggnog If You Got the Whisky. Thousands of miles in run-down stinking band vans and hundreds of gigs whose memories linger for those who witnessed them like Gods own worst hangover after a damned and devilishly f