Showman, raconteur, force of nature – The Reverend Horton Heat is truly a one-of-a-kind. However, when a voice somewhere outside of Dallas, Texas answers the phone, it quickly becomes clear that the gentlemanly Jim Heath is on the line, not The Reverend Horton Heat. “The Reverend’s like a superhero,” Heath explains. “I transform about thirty minutes before a show. He’s a pretty fun guy,” Heath says of his alter-ego. “He tries to be sincere and genuine too, but if you try to be a smart-ass, you’ll get your hat handed to ya.”
Heath says that both he and the Reverend are looking forward to their latest trip down under, the latest of many. “The people are cool,” he says. “Australia is a clean, well-functioning place. You’ve got stuff like clean bathrooms.” Is that really something to aspire to as a country, though? “Hey, it’s more important than you think! Edgy is not that great when the internet is super-slow, and when you go to open the door and the doorknob falls off. That’s where edgy gets ya.”
Heath’s affection for Australia is not all about fittings and wi-fi, though. “Australia has some great music,” he says, “And the people are a lot like in Texas – very gregarious and outgoing. In England they’re more… stoic. Australians have more of a sense of adventure. Every place has its beauties, though.”
Thirty-something years after he first hit the stage, Heath is touring the world, living the dream – but he almost gave it away before he really started, drifting in and out of cover bands and odd jobs before The Reverend Horton Heat really got going in 1985. “From my first band at 14, it was my dream, it was what I wanted to do,” he says. “I was lucky to be playing in a band from 16 through 18, a band that actually made money. We got really popular playing the local high school dances, and I was doing road trips and everything. So even back then I knew I could make money playing music,” he recalls.
“Then you get to the point where you gotta play cover songs, just playing the hits of the day, rather than playing original music. That’s when it gets hard, but I was able to somehow pull through. It wasn’t easy, though. Not many of those guys are still playing.”
The Reverend, of course, is still going strong, and he attributes much to his teenage apprenticeship. “Honestly, a lot of it was through watching other people, from being in bands with some pretty good entertainers”, Heath says of his stagecraft. I started out on lead guitar, so I learned all the licks, but other people were always doing the singing and acting as frontperson, and that was a real learning experience. That’s where I got a lot of the showbiz side. When I started singing my own songs, I took all of that with me.”
So things have turned out ok, even if Heath admits that the times aren’t quite as wild as they once were. “We gave up trying to live the life a long time ago. Really, with what we do – rockabilly, the custom culture – we are living the lifestyle. My friends are all musicians, or hot-rod guys, or dealing antique furniture, or antique clothes, or old records. So that’s the lifestyle.” Heath, warming to his theme, offers more home truths. “The whole, ‘I’m a rockstar, I’m getting drunk and crashing cars and trashing hotel rooms’ – it’s highly annoying. Especially if you can’t play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, or if you can’t play guitar worth a damn. If you’re a pretty boy lead singer throwing TVs out of windows, I have no use for you. You’re not an artist at that point, you’re a male model.” Ouch! “I’ve been there myself, but ultimately you’re there to play a show.”
When asked about his heroes, Heath’s enthusiasm is palpable. “I’ve been inspired by all types of music,” he says. “I was a blues player when I started, but I was fascinated by a lot of mid-century stuff as well. Guys with energy, character and humour, like Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Scotty Moore, Gene Vincent, Elvis, that’s what drew me to rockabilly. It’s high-energy music, but with these jazzy turnarounds – it’s not just power chords, or cliché metal guitar riffs. I was so far off into that world that I basically missed the eighties. For me, 1983 was like going back to 1953.” We were playing punk clubs then, and it was a lot of fun. I realised it would be cool to use rockabilly as a platform, rather than trying to trying to fit into that perfect mode. That’s what The Cramps were doing when I first saw them in 1979, or 1980. That’s when I realised that there was a connection the whole fifties thing that I loved, and punk rock. There was actually a big rumble in the parking lot between the punk guys and the rockers, who had mullets and Camaros. I remember being in that parking lot, thinking ‘Am I a rocker or a punker?’ I walked away as a rockabilly.”
BY EDWARD SHARP-PAUL
