House Of Freaks – Monkey On A Chain Gang / Tantilla

With its two-man membership, the Virginia-to-L.A.-and-back-again duo House Of Freaks might have been better named Foyer Of Freaks. That said, the pair — guitarist-vocalist Bryan Harvey and percussionist supreme Johnny Hott — were able to generate a genuine musical ruckus, with Hott’s personality-filled pounding a perfect match for Harvey’s inventive guitar work. The latter’s expressive voice was capable of conveying a range of emotions in the duo’s often deceptively weighty songs.

On their 1987 debut Monkey On A Chain Gang, that lyrical depth comes courtesy of such songs as the westward expansion study “Cactusland”, the surprise minor MTV hit “40 Years”, “Bottom Of The Ocean” (about the despicable acts of seafaring slavers), and the Los Alamos A-bomb-test recollection “Dark And Light In New Mexico” (well-researched enough to drop the names of Dean Acheson and Lewis Strauss).

At its leanest, the music that drives these and other tales has almost a hybrid rockabilly feel; it’s sometimes hard to tell where the sweaty energy leaves off and the notes begin. When Harvey and Hott offer their version of propulsive pop on the record, with the swerving and soaring “My Backyard” the most successful example, it comes with a different flavor of exhilaration.

Thanks to “My Backyard” and others, Monkey On A Chain Gang isn’t all sinew and bone (after all, the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies were still waiting in the wings). However, its 1989 follow-up Tantilla is even more fully realized and meatier, sonically speaking, with the presence of XTC producer John Leckie contributing at least a little to that shift.

Tantilla is a concept album of sorts about the American south, tackling along the way topics such as religion and racism with the scrutinizing eye of returning expatriates. You could call it Harper Lee rock; the album’s centerpiece tune proclaims in its chorus, “It’s a sin to sing/It’s a sin to fly/So kill the mockingbird.” At its sepia-toned best — that being the lovely “Family Tree”, led by Marty McCavitt’s guest piano, and “Big Houses” — the music on Tantilla sounds the way Mathew Brady’s photographs look.

Both reissues double the original payload with the inclusion of bonus material. Monkey On A Chain Gang includes a live six-pack recorded at Hollywood hotbed Raji’s, capturing the pair at full throttle. Tantilla tacks on the All My Friends EP, a nice bonus that ultimately is more interesting for the appearance of horns and Mark “Sparklehorse To Be” Linkous than for the songs. Better are a live take on “Big Houses” and the Tantilla outtakes “I Confess” and “Remember Me Well”. Those last two ended up on House of Freaks’ one big-label effort, 1991’s Cakewalk, an album once memorably described as “the White Album as produced by Howard Finster.” It’s interesting to ponder why that impressive pair of songs didn’t make the Tantilla cut.

During their roughly ten-year run (their 1994 swan song Invisible Jewel is a spotty affair), House Of Freaks found a niche somewhere between the rootsy rock of the Long Ryders and the psychedelic resurrections of the Dream Syndicate — a point underscored when Harvey and Hott joined ex-Long Ryder Stephen McCarthy and Syndicate leader Steve Wynn in the liner-note-junkie supergroup Gutterball. But for a couple of months in 1989, in the glow of Tantilla, House Of Freaks was my favorite band on the planet.