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Photo Ann Wood
Angry Johnny and The Killbillies at their last gig in Provincetown – the band plays a hard loud show. |
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WANTED: Johnny and The Killbillies
The outlaws of Western Mass. music come to town
By Ann Wood
Banner Staff
Angry Johnny describes The Killbillies’ songs as “extreme forms of retribution.” And they are. With gritty vocals, open guitar chords and often a Spanish-sounding mandolin, the band could have been the result of Johnny Cash joining Black Sabbath. Or it could be compared to the soundtrack of a Robert Rodriguez film — maybe “Sin City” or “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Definitely “Desperado.”
That’s because The Killbillies’ haunting stories are often coupled with lonely country melodies that take no prisoners. “Jerry Lynn,” one of frontman Angry Johnny’s favorite songs and one the band plans to play this weekend, is a love story derived directly from an angry mind.
“When I last left Jerry Lynn she was crying at the bar/ Had to go down to the city/ Had to move a couple cars/ For old Shelburne Montgomery and his partner Alomar/ Jerry Lynn kept crying/ She begged me please don’t go/ Alomar and Shelburne are bad trouble don’t you know/ I said I owe them one last favor I’ll be dead if I say no … Up on the Chesterfield Highway the blue lights all came on/ I looked for Alomar and Shelburne but they were both long gone/ Just me and a trunk of cocaine and a bunch of stolen guns … They offered me a deal but I didn’t say a word/ Three months into my sentence that’s when I finally heard/ ‘bout my darlin’ Jerry Lynn and what they’d done to her/ Took me to the office warden sat me down/ Told me that our trailer heaven burned down to the ground/ The car was in the river but her body was not found.”
These songs may be stories, but Angry says they’re meant to be heard.
“These murder ballads and tales of woe weren’t meant to be read about in a magazine, they were meant to be listened to full-blast on a crappy stereo in a fast car, barreling down a dark and lonely highway,” he says.
They were also meant to be heard live. The Killbillies, which besides Angry include drummer Sal Vega, mandolin player Goatis T. Ovenrude and bassist Jimmy Rat Fink will play twice this weekend. (No, Angry will not reveal their real names. “I don’t want any freaks hunting down our families. You should see our fans,” he says.) The group will perform at 10 p.m. Friday at The Wicked Oyster, 50 Main St., Wellfleet, and at 10:30 p.m. Saturday at The Squealing Pig, 335 Commercial St., Provincetown. Admission to each venue is free.
“I grew up in Killville so you know a lot of the stuff [I write] is sort of warped versions of my town. I don’t know where ‘Angry’ came from. It was back in the early ’80s or something. I’m stuck with it,” the 43-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist says.
He may say he’s not sure where “Angry” came from, but it’s not too hard to figure out. For one thing, he’s pissed off that his band has been virtually black-listed by the “Killville” (aka Easthampton) area press and radio.
“We have no trouble filling the shows. It’s just that if you didn’t know about us, you wouldn’t know we existed because you don’t hear about us in the newspaper or on the radio,” Angry says, adding that the band has been written about in countless other places, such as Billboard magazine, Stereo Review and Entertainment Weekly. Its songs have been featured in five independent films, including “11:14,” starring Oscar-winner Hillary Swank. The Killbillies also don’t have a problem landing gigs that often take them on the road. In fact, the band is heading down to North Carolina in April to lay down a CD of some previously recorded material and perhaps add some new tracks. Angry talks about this and how he hears Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan is difficult to be around. He talks about how most everyone in Lowell, Jack Kerouac’s hometown, couldn’t stand him.
“Maybe we’re all hard to take in big doses,” he concludes.
Or maybe Easthampton-area residents don’t appreciate that Angry has renamed the town, giving it a perceived negative connotation. But he loves “Killville,” which he calls, on his website, “a dirty little town nestled between the Berkshire mountains and the mighty Connecticut river that most folks would prefer did not exist,” and worries that it is becoming gentrified.
“The train’s going through town and now there’s that goddamn bike path. That was like the nail in the coffin,” Angry says. “It’s getting high-priced. It’s getting spill off from Northampton.”
But that just gives him another subject to write songs about on all those lonely nights he’s driving down to Norwood to pick up newspapers and back home again. Newspaper delivery is the day job that he works at night, in between playing with The Killbillies on weekends.
“I think a lot of [the songs], I write the lyrics and the melody in my head and hopefully when I get home I remember them,” he says, adding that he then brings them in to the rest of the guys. “And they pretty much add what they want.”
Angry is prone to write songs such as “Walpole Prison Blues” and “I Chose the Gun,” all of which are on the band’s excellent last album “Puttin’ the Voodoo on Monroe” (Pete’s Pig Parts, 2004), so much so that he doesn’t think he can change The Killbillies’ signature sound so that it’ll get some air time on popular radio. Not even for his hometown.
“Being the one trick pony that I am I don’t think it’d be possible for me to sell out. Even if they wanted it to be nice it’s come out as a Killbillies’ song. I wouldn’t change the music, but I’d love to get a good beer commercial,” he says.
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Feb 23rd, 2006