I don’t know jack shit about kepone, the highly dangerous pesticide from which the reunited noise rock outfit Kepone–whose lead singer Michael Bishop was reared in Hopewell, VA, home to a particularly notorious kepone plant–took its name. But I did work at an iron foundry in Littlestown, PA once, and in addition to being assigned to brain-rattling 7 a.m. jackhammer duty–not an ideal way to start your day when you have a blinding hangover and no ear protection–I had to help move the sludge tank, which was filled with this greyish bubbling hazardous glop that slopped around and got on your face and in your mouth. I should probably have cancer by now. Cancer, hell; I should probably look like Melvin Junko from The Toxic Avenger.
That said, Kepone–they’re Michael Bishop (formerly Beefcake the Mighty of Gwar) on bass and vocals, Tim Harriss (formerly of Burma Jam) on guitar and vocals, and Ed Trask (formerly of Holy Rollers) on drums–can give you cancer too: cancer of the soul. I don’t know why, but I find something ineffably sad about Kepone’s music. They channel their fair share of sheer adrenaline like any good noise rock band, but they also evoke heartbreak. It’s evident in the beautiful (a word you don’t often hear associated with noise rockers) “Brainflower,” the piano-driven “Idiot Ball Drop,” the pretty but loud instrumental “Dead Pop Ideal,” and the indescribably sad “Henry,” the greatest song about a pet since Killdozer’s “Knuckles the Dog Who Helps People.”
Kepone, which put out three excellent albums from 1991-99 before dissolving (I told you that kepone stuff is lethal!), is far more technically proficient on its instruments than most noise rockers. Or any rock band, for that matter. They’re noise rock’s very own Yes only they don’t suck, making gruelingly difficult arrangements, abrupt tempo shifts, on-a-dime stops and starts, heaps of improvisation, and lots of tension and release hoodoo look easy. If Emerson Lake and Palmer had been Virginia-born Americans instead of a trio of effete, classical-music-addled Britprogsnobs, this might be the music they’d have made.
Throw in childhood preacher Bishop’s ability to go from a mournful gospel keen–Kepone must be the only noise band in history to include Appalachian spirituals in its musical armamentarium–to a hellbound shriek faster than you can say Gwar, and it’s no D.B. Cooper why Kepone left us such a legacy of great songs like “Dickie Boys,” “Shit Talk,” “Stay Down,” and “Leadbreath,” to pick just a few titles at random.
Ironically, Kepone’s awesome technical prowess is the very reason I’ll never love them quite as much as Bachman Turner Underarm and Leo Slayer: er, make that Cows and Killdozer. I don’t want music that’s hard to play, I want music that’s hard to tolerate. Nor has Kepone ever made me laugh the way my favorites do. But no matter: I’m totally in awe of Kepone’s breathtaking instrumental razzmatazz, and I’m as giddy as Hitler watching a spinning human torchlight swastika at the Nuremberg Rallies that they’re back.
In an interview, Bishop recalled a telling incident from his holy roller childhood: “Once, they were preaching from the book of Jeremiah, hellfire and damnation. The preacher was yelling: ‘Who is Jeremiah? Who is Jeremiah?’ I stood up and said, ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog!'” Evidently the wee Jesus freak was preordained to rock, although we can all give a sigh of relief he didn’t adopt Three Dog Night as a musical model–to quote the Misfit from Ms. Flannery O’Connor’s famous short story A Good Band Is Hard to Find, “Three Dog Night would of been a good band if it had been somebody there to shoot it every minute of its life.”
Speaking of Flannery O’Connor, I’m told that due to Bishop’s upbringing there’s a strong strain of Southern Gothicism running through Kepone’s lyrics, but I don’t hear it–much. I find many of Kepone’s words to be either oblique or hard to make out, so I’ll just have to take it on the Gospel of St. Nick Cave that the Dixie grotesquerie is there. Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t detect the faintest whiff of William Faulkner whiskey breath in songs like “Jimmy Spit,” “Wrong,” “Ugly Dance,” “Joe,” and “Virginia Creeper.” Who knows? Maybe that’s why I find Kepone’s music so inexplicably melancholy.
As for Kepone’s show at the Black Cat on Friday, March 8, I skipped openers J Robbins’ Office of Future Plans and Daria because (1) I find the former band to be boring and (2) I find the latter band to be French. (That’s not prejudice, just closemindedness. I hope there’s a difference.) I arrived at the Black Cat and promptly ran into Dani Filth of Cradle of Filth, who bought me a triple absinthe and told me, “I’d just like to express my feelings for the record that I fucking hate emo music with a vengeance, I do I hate it, I can’t believe how much I hate it. They’ve all got stupid names like Dentists on Friday or Grant Smells of Cheese on Tuesday.”
Okay, so that never happened, although those are Mr. Filth’s real words. But I wish it had happened because instead I moped around in the dingy dank waiting for Kepone to go on, which has to be the dullest activity in the world with the exception of listening to Pentangle’s “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.” And please don’t listen to it to find out if I’m telling the truth. It will, as that guy from Florida found out the hard way, cause a sinkhole to open beneath you and swallow you up. God hears the pleas of the innocent, but not of Pentangle fans.
Anyway, Kepone finally came on, and they were magnificent. Drummer Ed Trask turned out to be a force of nature–a guy outside after the show compared him to John Bonham–while Tim Harriss played superbly in a slashing style and supplied plenty of mind-bending solos. As for Bishop, his vocal range was as amazing live as it is on record, and he and Trask kept it perfectly in the pocket the whole night long. I also loved the way Harriss and Bishop shared vocal duties; on some songs Harriss would sing one line, then Bishop the next, and so on. And their vocal harmonies were totally on target as well.
They opened with the funky “Loud” from Ugly Dance, which featured Bishop singing “I’m a necessary challenge to your organized crime” over Harriss’ slash and burn guitar and Trask’s simply unbelievable drum pummel, went into the uptempo “Dickie Boys” (“Dickie Boys cruisin’ the scene/Lookin’ for fun baby”) a “guitar showcase” (as the critics like to say) that had Harriss on lead vocals and both Harriss and Trask singing the chorus. “Why are you afraid?” shrieked Bishop. “What are you afraid of?” before Harris went into a real treat of a guitar solo. Next up was “Shit Talk,” in which Bishop sang “I’ve got an itch/I’ve got no time” before the band shifted into a brief segue that sounded remarkably like Aerosmith. The vocalists traded off lines, Harriss played monstrous power chords, and Trask battered his kit like it was an attacking she-wolf while Bishop screamed, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” They then segued seamlessly into the firefly-lifespan-short “Fly Bop,” a fleet and throbbing instrumental with a frenetic guitar solo by Harriss.
“Silly Sally” came on like a Motorhead song, with Trask attacking his kit like he had a grudge against it and Bishop supplying some blood-curdling shrieks followed by a vicious guitar solo by Harriss. The song had all kinds of parts, like a Swiss watch made of rock, and ended not with a whisper but a scream. Kepone then went into “Leadbreath,” another speedfest that came at you like a man wielding a lead pipe. Bishop and Harriss swapped vocals, Trask proved that drums can be a lead instrument (or at least the instrument you find yourself listening to) and Bishop sang “Yeah, mama/Breath like gasoline” with his gravel voice. Then came “Henry” a melancholy and stately homage to a pet monkey (“Henry touched a light bulb/Burned his little hand/Then he fell to the ground/But touched the light again”) that slowly built in power; Bishop shrieked the chorus, although at one point (or was it two) he approached the microphone only to start laughing, and had to start over again. It all led up to Bishop singing “La La La La Lay La La” and ended with some mighty power chords by Harriss. No shit, was it sad; I almost had to wipe a tear from my jaded eye. Then again I’ve always been a sucker for songs about pet monkeys, even if “Henry” is the only one.
“Prisoners,” a whippersnapper of a ditty with both vocalists singing and Bishop shrieking and Harriss supplying a guitar solo that was all over the place, was followed by “Superfucker,” a midtempo number that opened with some Minutemen guitar and Bishop talking in his raspy voice then singing “You were meant to be lonely.” Then things slowed down, the bass and drums lockstepped the song forward with the kind of attention to precision usually associated with NASA space launches, and Bishop talked some more, faster and faster, before screaming “Superfucker!!” to end the thing. “Thin Solution” started with Bishop talking (“People in this town will cut you off at the knees/They don’t want to see you leave”) then shrieking/singing before the song exploded, switched tempos, switched tempos again, switched tempos again–and you get the idea. It all led up to Bishop offering up the greatest shriek I’ve ever had the good fortune to hear in my life short of the one my ex-wife let out when she discovered a raccoon in our apartment eating from the cat bowl, and another tempo change with Harriss playing some blitzkrieg guitar, at which point the song fell dead from sheer exhaustion. Small wonder Bishop said afterwards, “Song’s got a lot of parts, man.”
“Eenie Meenie” was a dragstrip fast number with a jazzy and complicated arrangement ala The Minutemen. Bishop shrieked, “Let him go!/Let him go!” and then the song stopped on a foreign dime that is much smaller than the ones we have here. A tiny dime you can hardly see, like a microdot of acid. Next up was a song whose title I didn’t recognize, but was fast, featured a guitar like a freight train and lots of “Hey Hey Heys!” and Bishop singing the immortal lines, “I can take a lot of things/But I can’t take a smartass.” Kepone followed it up with “295,” a single they released on Alternative Tentacles in 1995 that was really short, featured Bishop singing really fast, and that I liked and intend to get my hands on even if I have to mug Jello Biafra in a dark alley to do it. They then ended their set with “Loud Dance,” a slow dancer (if you’re deranged that is) about a woman named Tammy that included a big bad bass line, more slashing guitar by Harriss, and machine-tooled drumming by Trask. If you like power chords, this one was definitely your bustle in the hedgerow. And there was no resisting Bishop’s song-ending shriek of “Drunk as shit/She got bit by the dumbass!”
Kepone then left the stage, only to return like 20 seconds later, which is the way encores ought to work. No abject groveling by a pleading and groveling audience required. They immediately launched into the short but sweet “I Am an Alien,” which was really fast, boasted some monstrous drumming and a short freakout guitar solo, and had Bishop singing, “I’m ready” like nine times really fast before returning to the planet from whence he came. They ended the night with “The Ghost,” from a split 7″ with Pegboy from 1996. Once again Bishop laughed (hey buddy, Ian MacKaye says rock is no joke!) as he approached the mike and had to start again, then the band went into hypersonic speed. Trask’s drums owned this one, but the vocalists did some nice harmony singing and Harriss played his guitar like it was a thresher running straight through your brainpan.
What can I say? Kepone was a glory to behold, and the finest live band I’ve heard in a long long while–perhaps since I saw Cows way back in the day in Philadelphia–and it was a damned shame that the Black Cat was less than half full. I hope they see fit to put out a new album; I will buy 95 copies myself and give them to all my friends and coworkers, thus making the world a louder, happier place. All in all they kind of reminded me of the foundry where I used to work; they were loud, forged dross into exquisite metal, and shook me like that jackhammer that used to rattle my brains. And there was no sludge tank to turn me into a human deformity. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a doctor’s appointment to make, to see to these weird buboes that are appearing all over my body.
Photos: Julia Lofstrand
