At first glance, the Bottle Rockets look exactly like the kind of band one would expect to find playing at a roadhouse bar in the home base of Festus, Mo. The quartet took the stage at Schubas on Sunday evening in all their scruffy splendor, long frizzy hair spilling out from straw hats and baseball caps, their beards unruly, wearing the obligatory T-shirts and jeans.
It was equally telling, though, that band leader Brian Henneman’s black sleeveless T trumpeted the band Motorhead. During their 90-minute set, the Bottle Rockets delivered a mix of southern-fried boogie and heartland rock with a walloping momentum that would do those mighty head-bangers proud.
The majority of the bands making up the current alternative country movement invest indie rock with a twang they’ve learned secondhand. The Bottle Rockets, on the other hand, inject the gonzo thrills of rock’s most untamed bands into songs that reflect their origins at the crossroads of the South and Midwest.
A Godzilla-size guitar lick launched the lumbering “Slo Toms.” On “Sunday Sports,” Henneman played squalling guitar leads a la Neil Young over Tom Parr’s fiery rhythm guitar, and the band’s riff-shredding “Take Me to the Bank” suggested Chuck Berry fronting Guns n’ Roses.
The band makes its rural roots felt where it matters most, in grooves that suggest Lynyrd Skynyrd on steroids. Between jaegermeister shots, new bass player Robert Kerns and drummer Mark Ortmann powered the loping stride of “Indianapolis,” gave “Perfect Far Away” the terse glide of vintage ZZ Top and made “Kit Kat Clock” shimmy and bounce.
For all the band’s bluster, there’s a tender-hearted poetry in their songs’ portraits of small-town, working-class joys and pains. Singing in a surprisingly effective growl, Henneman mingled country music melancholy with broad plains sweep. He raged against limited options on the glorious “1000 Dollar Car” and, on “Welfare Music,” sympathetically sketched a single mother to a solo guitar introduction that was just a step away from “Sweet Home Alabama.”
“It doesn’t matter how you live, just so you get along,” Henneman sang on Parr’s “Things You Didn’t Know.” Within these confines, though, the Bottle Rockets created a rowdy world of wonders.
Preceding the Bottle Rockets, local quartet Mount Pilot tweaked country ballads and shuffles with flashy displays of technique normally reserved for jazz-fusion bands. The group’s church choir harmonies and chiming guitar leads were a delight, but the sudden tempo and key changes, odd instrumental interludes and frenetic drumming quickly wore out their welcome.
