One imagines New Year’s Eve weekend gigs as big dress-up affairs, with champagne toasts, balloon drops, and an overall classier sort of celebration. Southern Culture on the Skids, as their name implies, works against most of that, with swampy, stomping anthems about dirt tracks, fried chicken, mobile homes, moonshine, and generally déclassé down-home living.
The band’s stage set Saturday at the Pearl Street Warehouse in DC, had a few strands of sad looking garland on amplifiers, some cardboard ribbons to denote the recent Yuletide they never mentioned. Bassist Mary Huff, in her bouffed up hair and go-go boots, looked the most done-up for New Year’s; she cracked open the Lite variation of what was once known as the champagne of bottled beer.
On the first of the two night stand, they didn’t have to worry about countdowns at midnight—or any kind of particular arc to their typically woolly and wayward show. The closest they came was a cover of The Pretty Things’ 1966 “Midnight to Six Man,” but that was about it. Mostly they stuck to their greasy, down-home formula, which was certainly welcome from a band that recently marked its 40th anniversary.
Throughout, guitarist and front man Rick Miller is the only mainstay, but they’ve remained the same trio for 36 years, still sounding vital, though they looked a little odd all spread across the bar’s stage with Miller center, Huff over to one side thrumming her pink bass, and the hard-hitting drummer Dave Hartman way over on the left, standing at his sparse kit of a snare and two toms.
Miller, in his seed cap and grey pappy chin beard is a demon on the guitar, kicking off with a stinging surf instrumental, “Skullbucket,” cracking a smile every time he hit a sweet riff. On harder rockers like the “Voodoo Cadillac” that followed or the boogie “Greenback Fly,” he gets a little lost in his driving solos, extending them into extended guitar workouts, cutting further and further into the groove until Huff shoots him a look as if to remind him its time to wrap up. Hartman, for his part, just keeps whacking away, with nothing to slow this engine.
Pearl Street is kind of an odd spot for music—the vocals are generally hard to hear on the floor as the PA is set up way up near the ceiling; the stage lighting is either vague disco wagging or non-existent. Sometimes they just played in the shadows. Through it all, the band shouldered on. You get the feeling they’ve played more difficult settings.
Huff, in her ‘do, is always fun to watch, and should probably be used more often on lead vocals—she’s got just the right bracing tone to bridge the country of Shirley Ellis’ “Nitty Gritty” or rockin’ country of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love.” She connects well with the audience and knows how to entertain. And when she sings things like “Daddy Was a Preacher but Mama Was a Go-go Girl,” well, it’s convincing. Huff usually sings that to close the shows, but it came in the middle of Saturday’s show as a way to seemingly cap the show early, if only to clear the stage after things got a little raucous—and crowded—on stage.
After a run that included “Dirt Track Date,” “Cheap Motels,” the snarling instrumental “Meximelt,” and a cover of “Goo Goo Muck,” the Ronnie Cook song better known from its version by The Cramps (possibly Southern Culture on the Skids’ closest antecedent), someone requested “Eight Piece Box,” the anthem about fast food chicken. The bucket had been sitting on stage, presumably getting cold, all that time.
Volunteers were sought to dance on stage, eat the fried chicken provocatively and throw out pieces to the crowd, and a half dozen women took up the challenge with varying degrees of success (some held onto their drumsticks the whole time; others flung their pieces into the maw of the audience immediately; all danced behind the band).
Then at one point one woman who had apparently imbibed a bit too much fell right over. And one song involving food as props led to another—the band had brought a carton of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies up so they could be similarly flung to the audience during the infectious “Camel Walk,” whose lyrics exclaim “the way you eat that oatmeal pie, makes me wanna die!” Again, this is the kind of thing they usually save to the end, so it was understandable Huff kept saying to her bandmates, “What are we doing?”
It was less a climactic end of show than a reset: They came back out to do nine more songs, from the throbbing “For Lovers Only” to the country western weeper “Drunk and Lonesome (Again).” They conjured up another food song, “Banana Puddin’” (but luckily didn’t bring samples to throw). And they finally ended for good with a long, and not entirely necessary cover of Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy.”
It was the one song from their latest album, the 2021 At Home with Southern Culture on the Skids, in a show that was heavy on their one major label album, the 1995 Dirt Track Date and its indie followup, Liquored Up and Lacquered Down from 2000, given emphasis now because it’s ben newly reissued on vinyl. But it also proved something about how enduring its simple songs have become.
Opening the first of the two-night stand Saturday was Virginia’s very fine Jumpin’ Jupiter, a band that’s been around almost as long as the headliner, with an engaging, if sometimes out of breath frontman in Jay Jenc, and a pair of exceptional rockabilly guitarists with styles as different as their locales—Patrick Cavanaugh, described as being from the mountains, and white-bearded Shawn Cody, from the Shenandoah Valley.
It’s a band that’s got a knack for great covers, from Ray Smith’s “Right Behind You Baby” to James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy,” to Tom Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” And they were a great fit for the headliners.
SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS SETLIST
Skullbucket
Voodoo Cadillac
Nitty Gritty
Liquored Up and Lacquered Down
King of the Mountain
Greenback Fly
Funnel of Love
My House Has Wheels
The House of Bamboo
Freak Flag
Run Baby Run
Dirt Track Date
Cheap Motels
Meximelt
Goo Goo Muck
Eight Piece Box
Camel Walk
Daddy Was a Preacher but Mama Was a Go-go Girl
For Lovers Only
Soul City
Banana Puddin’
Drunk and Lonesome (Again)
Zombified
Midnight to Six Man
Haw River Stomp
I Learned to Dance in Mississippi
Dear Mr. Fantasy
