Fishnets and a life raft – rock’n’roll riot descends on Nelson
Fishnets! Wild guitars! A blow-up life raft! Brace yourselves, because two fiery rock’n’roll acts are about to descend on Nelson. Grant Smithies finds out more.
Bob Log III is a hard man to track down. When I’m awake, this mysterious American musician is generally sleeping in some fleapit motel on the other side of the world, or driving to his next gig.
And when I’m asleep, he’s in some bar in Manchester or Brooklyn or Antwerp, peeling out sleazy slide guitar riffs while wearing a human cannonball outfit, his face concealed by a crash helmet with an old telephone glued to the front as a microphone.
But soon, our paths will cross. This strange and wondrous performer is headed for Nelson, to play at Deville alongside Auckland band Labretta Suede & the Motel 6, in early May.
How did we get so lucky? I’ve been wanting to see both these bands play live for years.
News of the local gig took me by surprise, so I began chasing Mr Log hard via Facebook, text and email for an interview.
Eventually, an apologetic email arrives. ‘‘Hey, Grant – I’m so sorry
for the late reply. At this point on a 40-date tour, each day becomes just – drive, sleep, wash the duck, and play guitar. That’s about all I can remember to do. Ha ha!’’
Wash the duck? Yes, well – let’s just say that Bob likes to tour with a few inflatable stage props.
Besides the big duck, he carts around a blow-up raft so he can crowd surf in style, playing a mean guitar while he is carried over the heads of the audience.
Bob’s email suggests I call the following morning and – amazingly – we get through this time. He’s beside a highway in the English Midlands when he picks up, heading for Birmingham, then on to Sweden and Denmark.
‘‘What I do is basically a guitar party, man,’’ he tells me in a grainy Chicago drawl.
‘‘I play some wild guitar, and the audience starts doin’ crazy stuff when I play. It all turns into a circle of madness. At the end of a good night, the floor’s littered with popped balloons and spilled drinks, and if I did my job right, there’ll be a single shoe that’s been left there by someone.’’
Bob was born in Chicago, and now lives parts of each year in Tucson and Melbourne, though it might be more accurate to say he lives on the road, given his punishing global touring schedule.
He grew up equally enraptured by Chuck Berry, Mississippi Fred McDowell and AC/DC, and by age 16 he was playing his own mutant brand of punked-up delta blues.
Somewhere along the way, he decided to become an entire band, wiring up an old telephone receiver to his helmet so he didn’t have to hold a microphone, and perching on a stool to play drums with his feet.
At some point in every show, he likes to introduce his band: ‘‘On cymbals, left foot. Over here on the bass drum, we got right foot. This is my left hand that does all the slide work, and right hand does the pickin’. My mouth hole does most of the talkin’ and singin’.’’
Log is a ‘‘one-man punk-blues dance party’’, he reckons, and plays more than 150 shows per year throughout the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, with occasional forays into Mexico and Scandinavia.
And New Zealand, too, of course. ‘‘I’ve played down your way maybe four or five times, and the first time was nearly 20 years ago. You people are crazy, is all I’m saying.
‘‘Sometimes people get so wild they lose their jobs the next day after my shows, but I’ll gladly call up their boss and beg for them to be re-employed. I’m a really responsible guitar player, despite what you may have heard.’’
Bob is big on crowd participation. He regularly invites audience members to sit on his knee while he plays, partly as demonstration of the ‘‘monster thigh’’ he’s built up from foot-drumming.
‘‘That is pretty ridiculous, but the thigh of my right leg that operates the kick drum is huge, man. Ten thousand years from now, some archaeologist is gonna
dig up my mutant skeleton and say, ‘What the hell did this guy do? He must’ve hopped around in a circle for 30 years to have a leg like that!’ ’’.
As for the inflatable boat, well, that’s more of a sporadic treat these days – but he always brings it along, just in case.
‘‘Sometimes the ceiling’s too low, or you end up taking out a shelf of liquor bottles at the bar. Also, I’m almost 50, man! There’s only so much crowd-rafting a man my age can do!’’
Bob perks up when I tell him the Deville courtyard has no ceiling, only stars. This venue could be more seaworthy than most.
‘‘Oh, yeah, that’s great news. Every now and then, I still look out over the crowd and think, ‘This is the perfect room to go boating in’.’’
Bob has eight solo albums to his name, which contain such underground crowd pleasers as Boob Scotch, Bubble Strut, Goddam Sounds Good and the deeply boastful My S… Is Perfect.
But he is most famous for his joyous and chaotic live shows. One American reviewer noted approvingly that Log managed to balance two women and a man on his knee while playing drums and ‘‘making his guitar growl like a rabies-infested mutt, straight from the backyard of an Alabama brothel’’.
And there’s a great clip on YouTube of a gig in Hastings, England, where our hero walks out of the bar carrying his wireless guitar and peels off a few deathdefying solos while dodging traffic on the white line of the road outside, before calmly sauntering back inside to continue the show.
Some have suggested he’s
blessed with supernatural powers and might not be entirely human. An early press release from his record label, Fat Possum, claimed Log had a monkey paw grafted on to his wrist after a boating accident as a child.
Bob reckons whoever wrote that was ‘‘just drunk’’. His hand is simply ‘‘really, really hairy’’.
But whatever the truth regarding his past, you have to admire a performer who lives up to the job description.
I really appreciate the care and wit Bob puts into his stage show – the visual intrigue of his human cannonball jumpsuits, the loopy props, the mystery behind the helmet with the tinted visor.
‘‘Well, there’s no point just going on stage in your street clothes, man. That’s so boring! I grew up loving people like Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who were all about looking good. And it was AC/DC who made me want to play guitar.’’
As a teenager, Bob would go to see AC/DC play live and laugh until his stomach hurt, he says, but it was also the coolest guitar he’d ever heard.
‘‘That’s the combination I’m aiming for, and costumes help with that. Did it make AC/DC’s guitar sound better that the guy playing it was wearing a schoolboy outfit? No, but it was 10 times more fun.’’
He admits that the relentless touring takes its toll. ‘‘But then I think, hell, there’s people getting tired digging ditches, or working in banks. I get to travel the world playing guitar for a living. A man can’t complain about that.’’
Speaking of which, it’s time for Bob Log III to get back on the road towards tonight’s gig in Birmingham. As he revs up his rental jalopy, he has a few last words.
‘‘Make sure you pass on my love to Labretta Suede, man. That’s who I’m on tour with down your way, and they’re one hell of a rock’n’roll band!’’
Agreed. Indeed, to say that Labretta Suede & the Motel 6 rock is akin to declaring that the ocean is damp, or that a welding torch is a trifle warm.
This Auckland-based quartet kick up a mighty garage rock ruckus, their fuzz-drenched riffs honed by many years spent based in New York City, with months of road-hog touring throughout the US and Europe in between.
The fact that the band are led by a scantily clad married couple and play primal rock’n’roll has led to inevitable comparisons with American rockabilly-punk legends the Cramps.
‘‘Oh, yeah!’’ says lead singer Labretta from the Auckland home she shares with her husband, Jonny Moondog.
‘‘We lived in New York for seven years, and people over there were always calling us, like, ‘the Cramps from Down Under’, which was annoying at first, because we have our own sound. But it was intended as high praise, so we took it like that in the end.’’
Formed in Auckland in 2005, the band returned to New Zealand three years ago, but still head over to Europe and the US for three months every year.
‘‘We get to play a lot of killer festivals alongside our musical heroes – all these weird underground bands that really excite me. But we take it seriously, you know? I’ll put on the same kickarse show if I’m only singing to one person as I would if it was a crowd of thousands.’’
Born on the Greek island of Lesbos, Labretta looks like a pintsized Amy Winehouse, though she gets tired of people pointing this out. She’s quick to sing the praises of the other members of the band.
‘‘You’ve got Johnny Moondog, who’s my right-hand man and also my hubby. He’s a really wild and woolly garage rock guitarist and brings an element of danger, distortion and yummy feedback to the party.’’
A critter named ‘‘Stewy Waterpig’’ is on drums.
‘‘He’s just passed the bar, so he’s a lawyer now, prosecuting out in Henderson. We turned up to play a protest march recently, and half the dudes there were like, ‘Hey, thanks, dude, for getting my brother off the hook!’.
‘‘Stewart looks really bored when he plays, like he’s in the kitchen frying eggs, but he’s the most amazing, groovy drummer.’’
Motel 6 bass player Tweedy Bird is only 22, and this is his first serious band. ‘‘He’s a crossdressing Adonis who likes to wear tights and heels when he plays,’’ Labretta says.
‘‘And as for me, I’m a mixed bag. I probably look pretty fierce on stage, even though I’m only five foot three. People are amazed that such a big voice comes out of such a small package.’’
Labretta admits that she found it hard moving back to this country after so long in New York.
‘‘New Zealand seemed to have become a lot more conservative, materialist and competitive during the time we were away. But I suppose you just gotta carve out your own weird art and music niche and make things happen.’’
Labretta remembers a time when Nelson, too, had a far more vibrant alternative scene, back in the days before the property boom, when you still had a lot of young people congregating in cheap crappy flats and learning to kick up a ruckus with electric guitars.
‘‘Yeah, I used to live in Hardy St, in a really loose flat above the takeaway chicken joint across the road from the McDonald’s driveway. Back then, there was a spacies parlour down below. This was probably the early 2000s. I wanted to get out of Auckland, so I did a film course down there. Most of the people were these Gathering dance party kids and I was just a dirty little punk, you know?’’
Somewhere along the way, she fell hard for primal rock’n’roll and early garage rock and rockabilly.
‘‘It just speaks to me. I love the way it sounds, and also the visual aesthetic. It’s an exciting alternative to the more cookiecutter pop styles that are popular in this country, with a lot more adrenaline and sex and sass to it.’’
Touring the country with ‘‘our bestie’’ Bob Log III is ‘‘just perfect’’, she says, because the two acts have a similar level of pumped-up passion.
‘‘We have no interest in bands of surly boys shambling around playing guitars and staring at their feet. We love entertaining people and bringing some energy.
‘‘Bob is this lovely, giggly guy off stage, then he gets up there and turns into a one-man band as loud and raw as AC/DC. And we do our thing wearing underwear and corsets and rad shoes – and that’s just the boys . . .’’
Labretta’s aim is to transport the crowd to a ‘‘weird, freaky, ridiculous, sexy’’ world so they can ‘‘blow off steam and forget their boss doesn’t pay them enough’’.
‘‘We have people getting naked, throwing their clothes at us, jumping up on stage. I just love inciting that kind of riot. We often pull up some random from the audience to play drums on our final track. It’s all about creating a level of trust to all lose it together.
‘‘We create a safe place, I guess. You’re safe with us, and nearly anything goes.’’