They walk the line

The authentic story of the Amazing Crowns

by Carly Carioli

A decade ago, in my pre-rock-crit days, a metal band with plaid gear, ska licks, an explosive live presence, and a debut album called Devil's Night Out was a damn good time. Somehow, eight years later, a punk band with pompadours, a stand-up bass, hollow-body twang, and a local hit called "Do the Devil" was an affront to my cultured sensibilities. Which probably says a lot more about the pompous ol' fart I've turned into than it does about Providence's Amazing Crowns, whom I've been panning for the past several years, and whose crimes have amounted to little more than making fun and free-spirited punkabilly records with not too much regard for the constraints or specifics of punk or rockabilly.

Well, that and being modestly successful at it. After a roller-coaster ride through the industry that saw them sell 85,000 copies of their homonymous debut album -- 1000 on their own, another 15,000 or so in the disc's second incarnation on the local indie Monolyth, the rest after being picked up by major label Velvel, which promptly went belly-up and left the band close to $100,000 in debt -- the Crowns are now ensconced on the BMG-distributed label Time Bomb, which puts them in very good company. Their labelmates include Social Distortion's Mike Ness and the Reverend Horton Heat, who know a thing or three about applying modern methods to the making of American roots music. And the Crowns' new Royal -- a defiant reference to their original name, the Amazing Royal Crowns, which they abandoned after being sued by a swing band called the Royal Crown Revue -- fits in nicely with its neighbors.

Produced by Bosstone bassist Joe Gittleman, Royal finds the Crowns firming up their foundations while attempting to build on the somewhat one-dimensional confines of their debut. The most obvious single, "Mr. Fix It," springs the clock forward from '56 to '66 with a power-chord-and-Farfisa-charged anthem in the garage-punk mode; the closing "Chop Shop" makes concessions to heavy metal that would cause even the Reverend Heat to break a sweat. They take a stab at straight-up country on "Flipping Coin"; the remaining tunes, most in a rockabilly style, reflect a much-improved instrumental proficiency (partly the result of a line-up change that brought two former Speed Devils -- drummer Judd Williams, also an ex-Country Bumpkin, and guitarist J.D. Burgess, also an ex-Fathom -- into the fold). Through it all, singer Jason Kendall finds a few new twists on his patented Big-Bopper-does-Danzig gargle. Royal is a more mature album than its predecessor, sprinkling conventional roots systems with sprouts of melodic invention, on the whole well-paced and competently played.

In other words, it's an album that begins to correct many of the problems I had with their first disc. Except that recently I've grown fond of The Amazing Royal Crowns, falling prey to its dimwitted charm and cartoonish kitschabilly malapropisms, and now I almost miss the Crowns of old. The point being that the Amazing Crowns find themselves in a predicament similar to the one the Mighty Mighty Bosstones confronted early on: how to walk the line between crossover-novelty shtick and serious genre devotion without getting all wishy-washy.

IN 1998 I hated the Amazing Crowns. They had been touring in the company of such grand champions as the Cramps and the Reverend Horton Heat; in the context of the latter's meticulously articulated hillbilly speedmetal and the former's psychotronic hellfire, they seemed to me merely muddled and middling -- court jesters, royal clowns. And in the context of New England's burgeoning roots-rockabilly scene -- which included original Crowns drummer Dana Stewart's Racketeers and New Hampshire co-eds the Raging Teens, who were in turn drawing on the experience of such old hands as Sleepy LaBeef and former Big Mama Thornton sideman Frankie Blandino's Cranktones -- the Crowns were, to my way of thinking, unschooled poseurs, hardcore kids who'd swiped a couple of Stray Cats albums.

Which in some respects wasn't so far from the truth. "You called it, I was in hardcore bands and punk bands," says Jason Kendall over chicken soup at the Middle East in Cambridge, where we've convened for a détente of sorts. "I'm 34, so I've done a bunch of shit. I grew up in Connecticut -- do you know the Anthrax in Norwalk? I saw everything there, from Minor Threat to SS Decontrol to the Circle Jerks to Angry Samoans, you name it.

"I was raised, and this is no bullshit, on a truck stop. This," he says, pointing to his shirt, which is emblazoned with the logo of Republic Auto Truck Plaza, "is my dad's truck stop. It's down I-95, near the Connecticut-Rhode Island line. That's where I was raised. And believe it or not, my old man was in prison until I was five. I was surrounded by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Slim Whitman, a lot of old-school stuff, and I hated it. I mean, when you're a kid, you're not gonna do what they want you to do. So I rebelled against it completely, and I threw myself into punk rock.

"I wasn't into it [country] at all, and I sunk further and further into the punk scene, and then I started getting into a lot of delinquency. I stole a bunch of cars, did the requisite drug dealing, a lot of speed and shit, and then when I finally graduated high school -- after quitting a few times -- I immediately joined the Army, and I went over to Europe. I lived in Germany for two years. And that opened my eyes to so much. I started getting into psychobilly over there -- Demented Are Go, the Guana Bats, the Meteors, and Batmobile and all that shit -- and it made me think, `Oh, this is good,' because I had always liked the Stray Cats. I thought, `This is great, I need to get into this, and where are they getting these sounds? Because I don't think they're doing it right.' So when I got back to America, when I was out of the Army, I started delving into it. I ransacked my old man's record collection and just kept going."

Short in stature, with a fastidious pompadour, two equally fastidious tattoo-sleeved arms, and steely unblinking blue-gray eyes, Kendall has a mythic American rock-and-roll pedigree that only Mike Ness could sneer at. The truck stop, the imprisoned father, the exodus via the Army to Germany are details that echo the trail of Elvis Presley; the drugs and cars and hard-luck lot offer a bitter taste of Ness's own fabled redemption. It is a beautiful and vivid story, and if Kendall ever finds a way to set it to music, it would almost surely make a transcendent album. There is a hint of this on Royal, in the country tune "Flippin' Coin," which Kendall reveals was written in response to the recent operating-table death of a 22-year-old cousin. "The song's a little broad, but that's what it's about." I'd taken "Flippin' Coin" for a song of profound ambivalence bordering on nihilism. Despite the song's classic country-weeper formula and morose pedal-steel glissandos (courtesy of Providence legend Dennis Kelly, also the author of Royal's "The Ride," which was originally done by his band Boss Fuel), the lyric's win-some-lose-some indifference to the outcome of the toss seemed to adumbrate a Brando-ish whaddya-got outlawism.

But in the end Kendall's "authentic" history is as irrelevant as my own preoccupation with the Crowns' inauthenticity. Truck-stop-born ex-juvie-delinquents can make lousy records just as easily as blue-blood trust-funders; and an unschooled, primitive ensemble like the early Crowns can make superb rock and roll -- perhaps in spite of themselves -- without claim to mastery of the details. Which is what I have come to believe they accomplished on The Amazing Royal Crowns. Anyway, if my problems with the Crowns had to do with their lack of authenticity, the question should not have been why their ham-handed rendering of punk and rockabilly succeeded where more accurate or savage renditions had failed but why no one had thought of the idea sooner. After all, the market generally rewards façades like the one the Crowns put forth -- a veil whose cosmetic cues encompassed an archetypal American exoticism even as they masked a familiar, eminently enjoyable melange of palatable musical touchstones (the Crowns' local hit "Scene of the Crime" being, when you got right down to it, Katrina & the Waves' "Walking On Sunshine" dressed up in pomade and blue suede shoes).

"I think back then we were perceived as a bunch of spazzes that got lucky," says Kendall. "But my answer to that is that we have worked harder than any of those fucking bands. We went out and ate shit for years, lived in the van, the whole thing. Seriously, anybody can do this -- you just gotta be able to give up everything. I didn't have an apartment for two years, I lost my job, lost my girlfriend, lost everything -- I lost my fuckin' dog, a dog I'd had for nine years -- all because I can't do anything but the band because it takes so much of my life. So I think we were perceived as getting lucky. But now, because of the people we have in the band, because of J.D. and Judd and the way [bassist] Jack [Hanlon] plays -- me, you can think whatever -- but I actually think we're respected a lot more."

So, yeah -- there were some sour grapes. And Kendall admits that the Crowns weren't always the best live band. "What fed your argument back in those days -- it was a different kind of band back then. I could definitely see you going to a show and going, `Why? What the fuck?' There were train wrecks all over the place. I mean, I enjoyed a lot of those shows. It was very chaotic. But when we did the [WBCN] Rumble -- to this day I don't know why we won. I really don't. There were better bands. We got lucky."

Maybe it was just dumb luck, but even so, the worst thing you could say about the Crowns is that they fit into a long line of garage bands who misheard their influences and got by on sleaze and attitude alone. It took hearing "Do the Devil" on the radio -- sandwiched between Everclear and the Foo Fighters, and sounding like one of those vintage rock-and-roll flyin' saucers Billy Lee Riley was always harping about -- for me to come around. Stripped of all the bogus context I'd heaped on 'em, the song was just plain outta sight: a first-rate novelty tune about a fictitious Dionysian dance craze, with an unbeatably nasty sax blurt (actually the work of three horn players from Spring Heel Jack, one of whom is now in the Bosstones). There's another great sax attack on Royal's "Greasy," and it's pure raunch, a flatulent, brawling raspberry of the kind that was ubiquitous on even the most casually inspired R&B records of the '50s -- a sound that was the inspiration for guitar distortion itself but has pretty much vanished from the face of the earth.

Traditionalists -- who needs 'em? "I love Big Sandy as much as the next guy," says Kendall. "But I think people who just repeat something exactly are no better than those Civil War historians who go out and re-enact the battles -- y'know, you gotta have the right uniform. It's cool, it's fun, but eventually it just becomes cover-band stuff. I don't see why you'd wanna do that stuff. I think if Gene Vincent were here right now, he'd be doing what we're doing."

Seriously?

"Seriously."

The Amazing Crowns' CD release party, with guests Murphy's Law and the Money Shots, is this Friday, June 9, at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel.