Reverend Horton Heat Readies For Residency

The good reverend’s six-night stand at the Continental runs Oct. 25-30, but he won’t be going it alone.  Special guests like Dead Kennedys co-founder Jello Biafra, El Vez and Deke Dickerson will join him and his band on select nights.

“We’ll maybe throw in a little bit extra,” Heat said. “Maybe on the Deke nights we’ll go a little more rockabilly.  Maybe on the Jello Biafra nights we might go a little more punk.”

Your upcoming residency is positioned as the first time you’ve played the Continental Club in about 25 years.  Has it been that long?

I honestly don’t think it’s that long. … I think the first time we played there was over 25 years ago.  It’s been a long time.  I do recall doing a gig there … but we play so many gigs, it’s hard to remember. Sometimes I’ll just go to the Continental Club to see other acts when I’m down in Austin.

They’ve got great acts.  [Owner / booker] Steve Wertheimer is one of the best guys at keeping the best of the best roots bands alive. It’s great.

How did the residency come about?

It might have been my manager’s [idea]. I think we did a three-night run … 10 years ago, or something. … I don’t remember how [the upcoming residency] came about, but [my manager] suggested doing five nights and it turned into six nights.  We probably could have turned it into seven nights [but] that was just too much.

Do you have any idea who is buying tickets?  Are fans coming to see three or four shows?

It’s hard for me to tell all that.  I will say, as we’ve been traveling over America and abroad, we have talked to fans who said they were coming.  I talked to someone in Australia last week who said they were coming.

With each night’s audience made up of fans attending just one night as well as fans seeing you on multiple nights, how do you plan the setlists?

That’s just hard.  Lately we’ve been focusing on having one good set.  If we’re going to try to pull a song out from our past … 30 years of songs, it’s hard for me to remember.  And my songs have kind of a lot going on.  I get a little wordsy sometimes, a little licky.  So all those licks and words and stuff, it’s like, “Oh, man!  I dunno … what was the second verse of that song?”

I tell the fans, “If I had time to stop right now and get out my iPod for 15 minutes and listen to the song I did 18 years ago, I might be able to do it.”

One thing that is helping us on this thing is that we have six nights.  Two nights are going to have a guest sit in … two nights of each.  We’ve been doing this a lot lately, where we have a guest sit in with us.  We learn their songs.  We’ve been doing it for quite a number of years.  We’ve had Lemmy from Motörhead sit in with us on a tour.  Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys sat in with us.  Deke Dickerson, Unknown Hinson, Robert Gordon, we’ve done tours with all these people.  We have to be, all of a sudden, their backing band.  It’s not a lot of work and it’s really been fun.  I think it really has helped our musicianship.

Two nights will be with El Vez.  Two nights we’re going to have Deke Dickerson come join us onstage and two nights we’re going to have Jello Biafra.

We’ll maybe throw in a little bit extra.  Maybe on the Deke nights we’ll go a little more rockabilly.  Maybe on the Jello Biafra nights we might go a little more punk.  The funny thing is, rockabilly wasn’t really a word even music writers knew about when we started touring America back in ’88- ’89.  We had to be very nimble.  To make ends meet, we’d play punk-rock clubs, but the next night we’d be in a blues club, the next night we’d be in a heavy-metal club and the next night we’d be in a country bar. This is playing our own original music. So we’d just adapt our setlist a little bit and make it, somehow, fit in.  We learned that lesson a long time ago, so I’m sure we’ll be pretty good on this.

How does a band like yours learn another artist’s songs?  Do you just need to listen to the recording a few times and then make it sound like something your band might work up?

I have a festival, “Horton’s Hayride” where we have four artists come in.  I tell them, “Look.  We’re going to learn the song just like the record, the arrangement.” It’s easier now because we’ll go on YouTube and find the most recent YouTube version of their song.  And even if we can’t hear it quite as good as the commercial recording, it can give us a clue to the arrangement.

So I’ll call El Vez and go, “We’re going to do it like this YouTube of this Pittsburgh show that’s out there.”  So YouTube is helping a lot with that.  We can see the twists and turns of their live version. 

A lot of these recordings … they might have two guitars, they might have steel guitar in there, like the Deke Dickerson stuff.  We just kind of take it song by song and learn how to do it.

When I was a kid, the way I learned, I was getting my favorite records and dropping the needle over and over and over on the parts that were really difficult.  I ruined some really valuable records.  Now with CDs and digital it’s really easy to listen to specific parts, the hard parts.

Did you ever slow those records down so that you could learn the songs?

Yeah.  Still, to this day, I wonder why they had that.  I had a turntable that would go to 15 and a half [RPMs]. I don’t know what records were ever done [at that speed].  But thank God they did.  It wouldn’t put you exactly an octave lower, but it would put you close so I could kind of tune my guitar to it a little bit and still be in the same position but an octave higher.  I would figure out the fast parts that way.

This is a great thing for up-and-coming-musicians. They have these aps on your phone that will slow [a song] down to however … 70 percent, 50 percent or whatever without changing the key.  That makes it a little easier now.

Even after decades of shows, is touring with another artist still a learning experience?

Yes, I would definitely say so.  I’m always trying to pick up something from people. That’s one of the fun things about this is trying to pick up on what people are doing.  Maybe pick up on a kind of concept of guitar playing, drumming or something along those lines, that I’m going, “That’s cool.”

That’s part of the creative process. That’s how you learn to play music.  You do that off of the recordings.  Before recordings, musicians learned to play from their father, uncle, mother, something like that.

Part of it, too, might be my competitive nature.  I’m always trying to pick up on stuff.  One of my heroes is Junior Brown.  He’s one of those immaculate musicians. He’s an unbelievably talented guitar player.  I’ve seen him walk on the stage with his git-fiddle and tune by ear.  I’ve always thought, “I’ve never seen this guy with a tuner.  He’s tuning by ear.” I always thought that he was the most perfectly in-tune guy.

I saw him at a gig, recently.  It was an outdoor [show] with humidity and all of a sudden his guitar went way out of tune.  So he was asking his wife to give him an E.  So when you’re out there on a gig and you got 3,000 people watching you, you’ll get an E from somebody else.  I watch Junior Brown very closely to try to pick up on stuff.

Frankly, it can be daunting because some of the guys I watch are the most incredible guitar players in the world.  Unless I, maybe, get thrown in prison and they let me have a guitar, I’ll never be that good.  Because I don’t have the time to get that good on guitar. 

Will you be recording the Austin shows for a live album and DVD?

We probably should.  Right now I don’t have any plans to do that.  I’d kind of like to bring my recording setup and do something there, but I dunno if we’re going to do that or not.

How much of the six nights will be planned versus going with each night’s vibe and what each audience will be like?

I will say this thing is, in a way, a little bit of the history of Reverend Horton Heat.  Or the history of Jim Heath.  I have a couple of guys who were in bands with me before I started Reverend Horton Heat.  And their bands are going to play.  Then some bands from our first early years in Austin, bands we used to play a lot of shows with, like Two Hoots and a Holler, current bands we’ve done tours with, that kind of thing. It’s going to be very heartfelt in that respect.  We’re going to have guys I’ve known for 35 years and have been in bands with.  It’s a heartfelt deal to be able to be there and see my buddy Ted Roddy, who I knew in Corpus Christie when I was in high school.  [Ted Roddy & The Talltops] will be there, playing.  It’s going to be good.

Is the residency something that Reverend Horton Heat may only do once every few years or is this something you’d like to repeat each year, maybe even in a different town?

We may try to do some type of residency somewhere else.  It could happen.  Especially the way we’re going now, we’ve already had all three of our guests sit in with us before.  It won’t be that big a rehearsal to get up to speed on Jello Biafro’s songs, Deke’s songs.  We had El Vez on Horton’s Hayride for three or four songs already.  We’re kind of up to speed on it.  That might lead us to more of these types of shows.

Is there anything you’ve been wanting to tell the world about the Continental Club residency but haven’t had the chance until now?

The odd thing about it is, Steve Wertheimer is the guy who really made the Continental Club happen.  But we used to play there before he had the club, and that’s going back almost 30 years when it was nothing but a really, really smelly seedy punk-rock club with mattresses up against the walls everywhere.

I guess the main thing to take away from all of this that I want to get out there is that it’s a heartfelt deal.  These bands playing with us are people I have a long history with.  These are going to be some of my musical mentors.  We have Homer Henderson as one of my musical mentors.  He’s going to be doing his one-man band deal.  It’s a heartfelt thing.

Reverend Horton Heat’s residency at the Continental Club in Austin, Texas, runs Oct. 25-30.  Here are the special guests for each night:

Oct. 25 – Jello Biafra, Barfield The Tyrant Of Texas Funk
Oct. 26 – Jello Biafra, Lucky Tubb
Oct. 27 – El Vez, Los Skarnales
Oct. 28 – El Vez, Teddy & the Talltops
Oct. 29 – Deke Dickerson, Leroi Bros.
Oct. 30 – Deke Dickerson, The Bellfuries

For more information, please visit Reverend Horton Heat’s website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel.  And don’t forget to check out the Continental Club’s website via this link.