HEY HEY, WE’RE THE GORIES!

You may already be familiar with The Gories, if you had an interest in good music around the time of all that White Stripes / Detroit hype a couple of years ago when they picked up quite a few namechecks in the music media. The work of Mick Collins you will hopefully be familiar with via his captainship of The Dirtbombs, the best high energy rock n’ roll destruction machine I have ever been lucky enough to see on a stage. If this man is capable of making music that doesn’t, to coin a phrase, “rip fuckin’ ass”, well I’ve yet to hear it.

Note regarding the MP3s in this post: the recording quality ain’t great, so for best results, TURN THEM UP LOUD.

The Gories are one of those bands, like Bikini Kill or The Beat Happening, who have come to stand for the ultimate expression of their particular aesthetic THING despite never really gaining much success as recording artists, and as such have ended up being referred to in writing about other bands a lot more than they’ve actually been LISTENED to. (Strange how this sad fate usually seems to afflict groups who kicked a hell of a lot more ass than their stylistic followers.)

The Gories started playing together in Detroit in 1988, comprising (L to R in my drawing above) Mick Collins, Peg O’Neil and Dan Kruha. They stopped playing together, still in Detroit, in 1993. Their THING, in case you need telling, was militantly lo-fi, riotously unprofessional garage-proud punk blues: no bass, no cymbals, no effects, no overdubs, no foolin’. As a quick shorthand, think Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers meet The Shaggs, and proceed to freak the fuck out in pure joy at the implications of that particular musical conception.

In 1990 The Gories travelled to Memphis to make a record with Alex Chilton (ALEX fucking CHILTON!) producing. As soon as I learned this, it became clear that the resulting LP, “I Know You Fine But How You Doin’?”, was one I should track down.

So I did, and well, it’s a bit disappointing initially. Chilton recording The Gories doesn’t sound any better than The Gories recording themselves at home, maybe even a bit worse. It sounds like Alex’s contribution to the sessions was to put too much reverb on everything, set the master volume too low and then pass out (much like most of his solo career). The album’s first few tracks are kinda throwaway or just don’t capture the energy and dynamics of the band at their best. But getting toward the end of side # 1, things look up as they drop some absolute primo material, leading to some of the best Gories gear ever. Stuff like this:

Goin’ to the River

Nitro-Glycerine

So much stuff to love about this band, I don’t know where to start. Actually, yeah I do – Peg’s drumming! In the groovy trading card style vital statistics on the different band members included in the CD booklet, she lists her dislikes simply as “bullshit”, and it is safe to say she didn’t entertain a great deal of it when playing in The Gories. She sounds like the girl who beat Mo Tucker up at school – just bass drum and tom-tom, Boom-Boom!, Boom-Boom!, beating a path of pure rocking simplicity back beyond Bo Diddley and straight through to 1,000,000 BC. I think I’m in love.

Then there’s those howling lead guitars, proving yet again all those people who decided Punk Rock = No Solos were fuckin chuckleheads of the highest order. Wild, cracked playing with no zero book-learned technique, running on blind faith and an instinctive understanding of what rules.

Peg and Dan both list “painter” amongst their previous occupations. I don’t know whether that means, like, art-painter or house-painter, but it’s a testament to the Gories close-to-the-ground genius that either would seem to serve as good preparation.

And just how plain righteous is Mick’s voice, even in these early days before he picked up his rep as garage-rock’s premier soul blaster? Wow. Mick’s hobbies are “Record collecting, writing, reading” and he dislikes “Intravenous drug use, racism/fascism, CDs, my mother’s dog”. Good man! I love the way the Gories all kinda holler along, backing up each other’s vocals in that really natural, unplanned way till you’re not really sure who’s s’posed to be singing lead.

CDs do allow for certain virtues though, like “I Know You Fine..” being bundled together on a single disc with The Gories’ first album “Houserockin’”, which is… even better! It puts me in mind of Lester Bangs’ response upon hearing the second Fugs album and being told that their first one was ‘more primitive’, “More primitive?? Any more primitive than this and they’d have bones through their noses!”

Well, yeah. Check this out;

Charm Bag

According to the sleevenotes, it’s a song all about voodoo, and thus eerie stuff went wrong every time they tried to play it live. Well ok, but clearly that’s got nothing on what happened when they tried to RECORD the damn thing! I’m reminded of that hilarious Ken Russell movie where that scientist doses himself up on super-strong acid in order to regress to a pre-human level of consciousness, and it works so well that he turns into a rabid apeman and breaks into the zoo to eat a live goat. (Altered States, if yr interested.)

But, ‘Charm Bag’ aside, the last thing I’d want to do is give the impression that The Gories aim at some kinda mindless neanderthal battering. True, there are moments on “Houserockin’” so blood-curdling in their descent into whacked-out caveman grunt they come out the other end looking positively avant-garde, with the ‘point-a-microphone-at-the-band-and-hope-for-the-best’ unproduction coming together with the group’s rabid energy and flailing, self-taught musicianship to produce a form-destroying mess of Pussy Galore / Dead C proportions. BUT, unlike those dullard dilettantes, The Gories are still playing rock n’ roll, and they’re not doing this shit to prove some stupid point (like, “we are assholes” presumably). Gories music carries a hefty rhythmic and melodic WHACK that speaks of a ton of practice, a lot of raw talent and a purity of purpose in the pursuit of making some straight-up, body-shaking Good Stuff. So when they get way out there and let the chaos off the leash occasionally, the result is electrifying rather than stupefying: they don’t encourage it, but it’s in there and when the hard-won boogie trips and collapses, it’s just gonna let itself out once in a while.

As a result, just about every cut on “Houserockin’” is a certified ass-ripper, covering a wider and weirder range of material to the Chilton album. The covers of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillun’ and Link Wray’s ‘Hidden Charms’ are tight on the money, ‘Feral’ is as righteous a Sonics tribute as has ever been conceived, and there are some strikingly good, heartfelt originals too.

I’m itching to post the whole lot for you, but I’m gonna take it easy on the freeloading MP3s because if yr picking up what I’m laying down, I want to leave you with some reasons to buy the damn records. If you’ve read/listened this far then you know that the blues stuff is obviously gonna be great, so here are a couple of more subtle numbers, starting with a Dan Kruha original. I fucking love this song, so treat it well;

I’ll Go

I like how most of the best Gories songs are about girl trouble. Guess it figures on some level that guys in stable, satisfying relationships wouldn’t be driven to start a band this good. And I mean, what else you gonna sing about, for christ’s sake? Well here’s one answer from Mick;

Sovereignty Flight

Apparently this song seeks to address the legitimacy of Canada’s territorial claim to the US Eastern seaboard. Now like I could give/know a damn about that, but I do know the second verse & solo is my new gospel. It’s like a wild, random, unknown tongue shot at a classic Arthur Lee / Johnny Echols Jesus Guitar Transcendence Moment! You get me? No? Well never mind, just listen.

So, in conclusion, what I’m trying to say is that if you were ever to look up “rips fuckin’ ass” in some non-existent dictionary of obscene 20th century phraseology, the questionable and drug-addled entry found therein would surely point you straight toward The Gories.

So go buy some Gories stuff from Crypt Records (Damn, what a great shop / record label!).