About this time a year ago, the Red Elvises were a
band with a huge cult following that I’d never heard of, but when they opened
for our local favorites the Rainmakers at the Knuckeheads dive bar, I was most
impressed by their sheer goofiness and off-beat humor. I liked them so much, I snagged their best-of
double-CD and delved into their oddball repertoire. They played K-heads again back in November, but
it was bad timing because it was a weeknight, and I was already committed to
seeing Bruce Springsteen at Sprint
Center
This show was billed as the Red Elvises “with
special guests” Hayseed Dixie, another under-the-radar band I was also
interested in seeing, so I assumed Hayseed was the opening act. Wrong!
In typical backward-ass Knuckleheads fashion, the headliners played
FIRST on this night, and I was most disappointed. The Elvises, led by singer/guitarist Igor
Yuzov, got off to a hot start, opening with “Drinking With Jesus” and playing
some biggies of theirs like “I Wanna See You Bellydance” and “Strip Joint Is
Closed” and “Love Rocket”, which features the classic double-entendre line,
“We’re gonna rock this joint/We’re gonna roll this joint/We’re gonna smoke this
joint…until we sound like Pink Floyd.”
Then, just six songs or so into the set, Igor announces they were going
to take a short break. WTF? At first, I thought maybe this meant they
were playing the whole night because the Hayseeds didn’t make it or something,
but I was wrong.
The set resumed with some newer stuff and a few
more favorites like “Closet Disco Dancer” and included an interesting drum solo
featuring all five members of the band on the SAME drum kit. The Red Elvises personnel seems to be
ever-changing (the above photo is not current), and it’s a unique line-up they have now—it’s both bi-racial and
co-ed with three white guys (two from Russia
I’ve mentioned my disdain for Knuckleheads before,
but it bears repeating. It’s a dumpy
indoor/outdoor dive bar that looks like a FEMA project that was pieced together
with spare parts, with an outdoor stage that appears to be an old loading dock
from who knows when, and it’s located in a downright dismal part of Kansas
City’s east bottoms area, with “bottom” being the operative word. Oh, and it sits practically on top of a live
railroad line that is constantly in use, with train whistles blaring at any
given moment. In one of the men’s
restrooms, instead of a toilet, they have you pissing into a trough-like sink
full of ice! How they’re able to attract
nationally-known acts like Leon Russell and Kenny Wayne Shepherd to play there
is beyond me. I don’t mean to sound
snobbish, and I’m not expecting the place to be the Taj Mahal or anything, but
come on, we can do better than this! The
lone saving grace of the place is the cheap beer, but I was on the wagon that
night anyway, so I didn’t have a particularly good time.
Once the Elvises packed up their gear, it
should’ve been a quick changeover to Hayseed Dixie, but it wasn’t. There was an awkward period of about 15
minutes with the Hayseeds standing on stage with their instruments trying to
get direct boxes (the sound gizmos) to work.
For the uninitiated, HD is a group of excellent Bluegrass
musicians who do cover versions of mostly hard Rock songs from the likes of
Kiss, AC/DC and Motorhead. Once they did
get going, they still had sound issues for the first couple songs, especially
banjo player Don Wayne Reno, but once that was corrected, they reeled off
several AC/DC cuts, including “Hells Bells”, "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and “You Shook Me All Night Long”
and even the more obscure “Let’s Get It Up”, as well as Motorhead’s “Ace Of
Spades”, which I’m sure would’ve made our friend Lemmy proud. Even The Cars’ “Best Friend’s Girl” and Alice
Cooper’s “Poison” got the Bluegrass treatment, and although this style of music
is hardly my cup of tea, it’s fun to hear popular songs re-worked with
different instrumentation, to the point where you have to play “Name That Tune”
sometimes to figure out which song it is.
The highlight of the set for me was their raucous
rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, which they deemed “the greatest
killin’ song of all-time”. A little
while later as the band played, some Hell’s Angel outside the venue drove by on
his overly-loud fart-machine chopper bike and intentionally drowned out the
band, prompting mandolin player Dale Reno to shout into his mic, “That guy has
a little penis!” Unfortunately, after
about an hour I started getting bored with Hayseed. First off, they aren’t much to look at—they
totally live up to their name, appearance-wise.
I also quickly got burned-out on lead singer John Wheeler’s endless
yammering between songs all about the same subject, drinking, which is pretty
redundant in a bar/nightclub—it’s like someone constantly yapping about being
naked in a nudist colony. And don’t get
me wrong, they’re all great musicians for the genre they play, but the stuff
does all kinda sound the same after a while and I’ve found that Hayseed Dixie
is best taken in smaller doses. They
hadn’t even played any Kiss songs yet, but I’d had enough and left midway
through their set because it was about to storm anyhow. This would’ve been a much better show for me
if the roles had been reversed and the Red Elvi played a full set.
