"Turn It Up And Be Somebody!"
By Zayne Reeves

You like to see your old friends doing well.  Often we drift from those with whom we were once so inseparable during the long, boring summers of childhood.  Which is part of the natural process of life, I suppose.  The scary thing is that it feels natural. One day, the neighborhood kids you spent countless hours with playing Duck Hunt and reading Marvel's Secret Wars series (I'm dating myself, I know) just aren't that important to you anymore. High school introduces your world to dating, grades (gotta go on to college) and new friends, and that's usually enough to break up the old band for good. You still see them from time to time, but you can never quite get a rhythm going and you're kind of glad when it's over so you can go back to being you. But you always hope the best for them and are genuinely glad to hear through the grapevine that they are getting married, getting promoted, going into rehab (we all had that one "troubled" friend) or moving to Portland in the fall for grad school. Sometimes they tell you they are in a band.

Moving back home after being away for years will get you into a thousand such situations where you continuously run across people you used to know but with whom you now have nothing in common with and yet, out of courtesy, can't exactly brush off.  I was better friends with Abbot Henderson than that, but it still made for a lot of shuffling and sideways glances when I saw him at a local coffee shop and found myself on the receiving end of a "you should come check out my band!" pitch. We grew up in the same neighborhood and he, along with his brother and a few friends, tried to start a rock & roll band as teenagers. I was to be their lawyer, which was just them trying not to hurt my feelings since I was deemed cool enough to hang out with them but not cool enough to actually be in the band itself. Abbot was the bass player and, like most beginners, he was awful. Untold hours of sitting in a room with him while he mangled the bass line to “Ride The Lightning” again and again did more to turn me off heavy metal than the Seattle explosion and the colossal disappointment of Megadeth's post-Rust In Peace... output combined.

After listening to him tell me about how The Last Gunslinger (his band prior to forming The Ne'er Do Wells) put on a great show the night before, I mumbled half-heartedly that I would be sure to check them out next time. I had no intentions of the sort, but I didn't want to be rude either. Problem with this was that Abbot liked to hang out at the exact same places as me so I kept getting approached about missing another killer show and promising I'd come see the band this time around while simultaneously formulating my next excuse. It got to the point that I was starting to resent both the tireless stumping he did for me to see his band play as well as the increasing lameness of my cop-outs.  It wasn't as if I no longer liked this person or wanted to make up stories about why I wasn't at the show, I just had no interest in spending an evening at some dive bar listening to a band whose most obvious influence was The Misfits.  I’ve got nothing against the original Misfits lineup, it’s just not my language. Still, I could feel myself being worn down by his tenacity as well as my residual guilt for "borrowing" his Lobo vs. Santa Claus comic which I never quite got around to returning.

I never saw The Last Gunslinger. By the time I made the decision to actually go to one of their shows, Abbot had left the band. Several weeks passed after this before I saw Abbot again. This time he had a new band, The Ne'er Do Wells, and he was as excited as I'd ever seen him. After listening to him talk about the reaction his electric banjo was getting, I asked when they were playing next. He told me they had a gig at Boo Radley's, a perfectly decent local bar I liked anyway. I told him I would come see the show and this time I actually meant it.

I got off work that night and drove in the pouring rain to Boo Radley's so I could get the guilt monkey off my back and enjoy the $1.50 Pabst that I like entirely too much for my own good or anyone else's. I should say something about the local music scene in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  It lacks variety. While every town has its share of what you might call "Two frat boys with guitars" music, it often seems like Tuscaloosa has nothing else to offer. Backwards baseball caps, Big Johnson t-shirts (if you don't know, you really don't want to know), blue jean shorts (even in fall and winter months), $40 flip flop
sandals and armed with the same Dave Matthews Band, Jimmy Buffett and Beatles covers, these guys may have different names and faces but they are all the same and they are all blessed with the uncanny ability to suck the marrow out of art. Most of the patrons at Boo Radley's that night had already seen The Ne'er Do Wells perform and were eager to continue supporting any local band that was at least trying to give them something different.

The Ne'er Do Wells went on around 11:30 that night and launched into “Got My Wife Beater On,” the first of several clever send-ups of alpha male posturing written by Abbot that they played that night.  Where a lot of groups struggling to find their voice and hit their stride take themselves too seriously, The Ne'er Do Wells are smart enough to have fun with it and they also work without ego on stage where all four members support and feed off each other. Michael Oswalt and Bobbie Dunlop, drummer and bass player respectively, have real chops and kept the rhythm steady and churning throughout the show while Ham Bagby ably held down the guitar chores. Abbot proved himself to be an entertaining stage presence with his deadpan humor and energetic banjo picking as well as his talkin' blues style singing. Their choice in cover material such as “Sitting On Top of The World” and “Make Me A Pallet on Your Floor” smartly sidestepped typical bar band fare and their energetic, rocked-up arrangements kept the dance floor moving and it was nice to see everyone grooving to songs first made popular by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt.

"Turn it up and be somebody!" a drunk yelled out after the first song. Obliging, The Ne'er Do Wells tore through a ten song set with gusto, barely slowing down to wipe away the sweat or catch their breath. While all of Abbot's original material seemed focused on
drinking, excessive partying and saluting white trash behavior, he redeemed his narrow focus with obvious smarts and a satirical bent that suggested something more than just nudge nudge jokiness.  “Blame Tequila, Tequila Is The Devil” sounds like something you'd hear right before Otis Day took the stage at the Delta house but it’s a genuinely funny catalogue of the narrator's woes, all of which can be blamed on that devil tequila and it stays interesting even after the punchline.  “Fat Guy, Skinny Girl” talks about, um, an obese man who dates a waifish girl and the difficulties inherent in a physical relationship between the two.  “Hard Night's Drinking,” the best and funniest of the lot, plays like gangbusters in describing a wild group of friends who drank every single drop of liquor in town only to wake up with amnesia and encountering frustration at every bar they go to as they are told again and again that they drank up the entire stock the night before.

Finally, the have to settle for a glass of milk since that is the only thing they didn't drink.  Closing their set with “Big John Lee,” an update on the classic “Stagger Lee,” The Ne'er Do Wells showed a tightness, discipline and song craft that sets them apart from so many other anonymous bar bands, and I wouldn't be surprised if you hear a lot more out of them before this decade is done.

Although no band photo was produced and they have yet to create their own website, Zayne would like to assure readers that The Ne'er Do Wells do in fact exist.

Click here to discuss this article in our new forum!