A Sense For How It All Works

Perhaps the one band responsible for the resurgence of rockabilly and rockabilly-infused punk music since the Stray Cats brought it back in 1980s, The Reverend Horton Heat still stands tall as a giant of the genre. This trio of raucous Texas musicians — The Reverend himself, Jim Heath, on guitar, Jimbo Wallace on bass and drummer Scott Churilla — are still the undisputed kings and the forefathers of the punkabilly genre, a musical form that infuses electrified hollow-body guitar, blues-y percussive movements and slap-style stand up bass with the heavy fuzz tones, nitro-driven rhythms and the balls-to-the-walls aesthetic of punk rock.

It all started 12 years ago, when The Reverend, backed by Jimbo and drummer Taz (who was replaced in the mid-1990s by Chuilla, whose talents The Reverend refers to as "unreal"), left Dallas to find their fame and fortune on the road, and since have pioneered a musical movement and provided a soundtrack for the social lives of folks for whom swing was too sissy and punk wasn’t stylized enough. Of course, to The Reverend Horton Heat, it’s all just music.

At 42-years-old, The Reverend’s Jim Heath is showing no signs of slowing down, still touring almost consistently, recording new material and keeping the torch burning bright and hot. The Synthesis managed to track down The Reverend at home in Dallas, did some digging into his musical past and learned a little about his recent foray into the world of low-budget live recording as his own technician.

That’s what I live to do, man. I’m a musician and I live to play music, you know, and we have to do it a lot. And I can’t ever imagine being in a band that doesn’t. Some of these bands, they spend a year doing their record, then they spend a year touring, then they don’t do any gigs for a year or two, or somethin’. Man, I can’t handle that. We play all the time.

Well, you know when I was a kid I had friends, and we were listening to Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and ZZ Top and all that — and you know, it might have been a little bit of the ZZ Top, the Texas thing, that got me kind of focused in on the blues. I remember there was a record store around when I was about 13, it was a mom-and-pop record store, and the guy had a lot of really cool blues and I really got way into the Chess Records’ recordings, guitar players like Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Albert King and that kind of thing, and I think that got me into the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing, and I started playing guitar and playing the blues. The first band I was in was a ‘50s band, which I think really got me off into the ‘50s thing, but at the same time, I was in regular old bands that would work up Lynyrd Skynyrd and Fleetwood Mac songs and go play sorority dances and stuff.

I had been in bands for a while, and the rockabilly thing has always been there for a lot of musicians down in Texas — you know, Carl Perkins and Scotty Moore, that kind of thing. I was always into learning little Scotty Moore riffs and the finger-picking thing. But at the time I was hanging around record collectors who really opened up my world, and I realized that the whole ‘50s rockabilly thing was so much more expansive than anything I had ever imagined, and a lot of the music was really much better than the schmaltzy hits that ended up on the radio in the ‘50s. It was the original alternative music, it was the original punk rock. So I went to see The Cramps play, and I was expecting a punk rock gig, and it was basically a punk rock gig, it had that whole vibe. But they played "The Way I Walk" by Jack Scott, and that lady, Poison Ivy played with a Duane Eddie-style guitar sound, but with lots of fuzz on it. They played "Surfin’ Bird," and I was sitting there thinkin’, you know, this whole punk rock thing is really a lot like a rebirth of the ‘50s rockabilly, and I could sense how it really worked, you know? At that point, I started focusing really heavy on the ‘50s rockabilly people. I eventually ended up with a PA system, and I started working at a lot of punk rock type venues and I was the token rockabilly guy. We [The Reverend Horton Heat] started playing gigs and became successful in that scene in Dallas. We kinda grew out of that, so we really started focusing on touring and going out and playing the alternative venues.

I can’t remember how many different drummers we’ve had, but we did some touring with a couple of different drummers before Taz, but when he joined, we really started touring a lot. Jimbo’s been with me for 11 or 12 years now, and you know, Jimbo’s gung-ho attitude really had a lot to do with all this, because he was willing to tour anywhere, and we didn’t care what we made. We drove to Seattle even though we didn’t have a gig. We got up there and we found some people to stay with and they called up a bunch of places and we eventually got a couple of gigs up there. That’s how we got our deal with Sub-Pop. You have to be really gung-ho, you know? If you sit around thinkin’ about how you’re gonna drive all that way and you’re not gonna make anything…whoever that guy is in the band, you gotta kick him out.

Well, actually, that was one of our incentives to sign with Interscope. They were showing a lot of interest, and they said, ‘Look, if you sign with us, we’ll put in a bus right now while we’re working on the deal.’ So we said, ‘Cool.’ Interscope actually gave us the money for our first bus, but we’re a band that rarely, if ever, takes tour support from a label for that kind of thing. So they helped out with a bus for one tour, and after that, we just paid for it on our own. But, oh yeah man, I remember we did over 750 thousand miles over the years in vans, and when we got into a bus, we were like, we are going to work so hard, because now we never want to go back to the van again. And actually, that’s kinda been one of our themes over the last six or seven years, how ever long we’ve doing the bus thing, is that we have to keep working so we can keep the bus. But it’s a cool thing because it enables to do these long trips all the time without burning out. And we can do longer trips, bounce around to where the money is. Whereas with a van, we’d have to be routed very tightly.

Well, I think it’s been great. We’ve had fun, and I think that we continue to get better as a band, and I try to continue to get better personally, and I think that, as long as we continue to do that, we’ll be going along pretty good. Musically, we’ve basically got our own sound, and by now it’s kinda so there, that we can go out on a limb and try some different kinds of stuff, and it still sounds like us.

Well, like I said, we’ve been touring a lot, we’re on ten days off here in Dallas where I live, and actually I’m working on all sorts of different things. We’ve got a new record deal we’re working on, though I can’t mention that too much. I’ve been working a lot trying to record the band live, but I’m doing it myself with my own equipment, so over the last year, I’ve been reduced to a roadie / technician, and the technician thing is not a good job for a person like me, but hey, you know, I’m trying to do something here, so… You know, I can actually figure out the technical stuff pretty good, but it’s not because I really know about it, it’s just kind of a voodoo thing I’ve got going with my equipment, a sense of how it all works. But it’s been really fun, and quite a trip, and I think that eventually, we’re going to get some good stuff out of me trying to do the live recording thing. We’ve never done a live album, and I’d really like to do one but I never really liked the idea of having the whole truck rig out. I want to do something with a little more of a homegrown feeling. For the last year, it’s kind of changed my life a lot, and it’s cool because I have more of an appreciation for what my crew guys go through, because I’m there with them every day. I’m even startin’ to dress like a roadie. Of course, we went through years and years when we didn’t have any road crew. If we were lucky, we’d have one guy with us to sell merch and help us load in, but I had to set everything up. Then we got big enough to where I could have a guy for that stuff, and I got lazy, real girlish: ‘I’m gonna go to the hotel and take a nap. We go on at midnight? Call me at 11’ — that kind of thing.

Oh no, no. Well, I like to have a few drinks, but I don’t really go out much anymore. I like to have fun at our gigs, and our gigs are a party and everything, and that’s enough for me. I don’t go out too much anymore, which is kinda hard because that’s what I love to do, man. I’ve been going out to see bands almost every night for my whole life. I still go out and see music and stuff, I just don’t hang around and rage and play pool and bet somebody we can make some girl show her tits. But, oh yeah, we still like to have a drink or two, we still have our parties.

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