“I had to acquire that skill,” Heath says. “But I’ve been lucky. I got to play with some very entertaining people over the years and learned some things.” Indeed, over time the band’s toured with the likes of the Cramps and shared the stage with everyone from Lemmy to Jello Biafra. On its face, Heath and the Dead Kennedy’s lead singer seem like an odd combo. “As long as we don’t get in a political discussion, we’re good to go,” Heath says. “Jello loves music and he’s been a fan of our band for a long time and I’m a big fan of the Dead Kennedy’s, so it all works.”
A Texan gent to the core, Heath is on guitar and lead vocals, backed by affable big guy Jimbo Wallace on bass and Scott Churilla on sticks. Wallace has been with the Rev from the very start back in ‘85 and Churilla’s been part of the gang since the mid ‘90s, on and off. Collectively, they’ve played a back breaking schedule of gigs and released album after cheeky album full of tongue-in-cheek tunes like Just Let Me Hold My Paycheck and Please Don’t Take The Baby To The Liquor Store.
Interestingly, Heath describes the band as a “small business”. His views on what makes for a successful band are equally pragmatic – a combination of hard work, persistence and a reliable set of wheels. “It’s not work – I play guitar, but it’s very time consuming,” Heath says. “Really, Reverend Horton Heat doing the music part and then having to keep everything else going is a full-time job. I don’t really get the time to be as cool a guy as I’d like to be, but I do have friends that I think are some of the coolest guys in the world, so I have my connections.
“The trick is, if you’re good enough to draw people in your own hometown then my theory is that you can do that in any city in the world, but it’s going to be hard. The best advice I can give is get a good-running van. Spend a lot of money on making sure that thing runs good and then you’re set to travel and make it happen in other places. When you do that, it can be a real let down if you’re the hottest thing in Melbourne and you drive up to Sydney and 30 people show up. But you’ve got to keep doing it. You’ve got to keep going. The next time it’ll be 60 and before you know it, it’s a few hundred people and you’re something in Sydney. That’s all we did.”
Well that and being crazy talented. Heath once said that to write sublime rock’n’roll and learn to play the guitar properly you have to be a nerd. It’s hard to imagine, but how exactly was Heath a nerd? “It’s been a dangerous balance,” he says. “A lot of life experience went into my songs and I was probably living a bit too hard, but the other side of that is practicing guitar, writing songs and trying to keep things together. There’s a little bit of a nerdy side to me. When I was a kid I won some spelling bees. I could write good essays, things that teachers appreciated. That leads me into lyric writing a little bit, but I can still write some really bad lyrics though.”
Heath returns to the topic of stage craft. He won’t deny that the Cramps influenced his leering, grinning and grimacing preacher persona.
“We watched their show every night. By that time Lux wasn’t getting naked, because they’d been down that road and he’d get arrested for public indecency. But he’d get close to naked. Pretty much he was naked. There were a couple of times that he’d change clothes right on stage. The funniest thing was this one time, he took his mic stand and started banging on the stage. Banging, banging. And he banged a hole in the stage and he grabbed his microphone and put it by the hole. Then he comes running over, right in front of us and jumps down. No one could see this, because he came off stage right by us, and he climbed into the crawl space under the stage and the next thing you saw just a hand come out of the hole, like Thing from Addams Family and he grabbed the microphone and got it down in the hole and starts going, ‘babababababa’ [Heath mimics Lux singing Surfin’ Bird]. I don’t do stuff like that, but I still learned a lot about entertaining people.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
