Last train to Boozeville

Railroad Jerk revive a lost art

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

We've all heard about designer drugs permeating rave culture. If the state of music in general is on a substance frenzy, then rock 'n' roll has definitely turned into a dry county. What of the un-hip booze hound who has worn out his bean dip-encrusted copy of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street? Where can he turn for inebriated good times in the '90s?

Within the first chords of Railroad Jerk's fourth album The Third Rail you can picture Robert Johnson pulling up a barstool with George Jones. You can almost see them as they clink dirty glasses with Hank Williams and Jim Thurwell like they've been drinking together their whole lives.

"When Marcellus [Hall, guitarist and singer] and I started the band," says hung-over bassist Tony Lee, "we always said that one of our favourite sounds is a drunk guy falling up the stairs. Y'know, when you can hear them use the walls to guide themselves--that's what we modelled the sound of the band after." And the band have more than a superficial fascination with the devil's water. "We're not drunk all the time," says Lee, "but I think there is an aesthetic to what we do that definitely comes out when we've been drinking. It shapes our sound."

Listen to the songs on The Third Rail. Flesh out the surprisingly titled "Another Night In the Bar" or Hall's yodelling to an out-of-tune guitar with pots and pans struggling to keep beat on "Sweet Librarian." Their saucy "aesthetic" seems well worth the morning-after headaches.

The roots of Railroad Jerk's sound can be found in the grooves of dusty '78s and old country and blues albums that emanated far from their hometown of New York's Lower East Side. But this is redone classicism: Hank Williams could never get away with lines like "We had sex in Tower records." "When I listen to something like George Jones," says Lee, "I hear songs about divorce and getting drunk, but with an air of optimism that's rare nowadays. I think people don't realize that we're living at a time when we have 80 years of recorded music at our fingertips. They should take note: Robert Johnson is a hell of a lot more punk than Sid Vicious ever was."

Lee sums up the Railroad Jerk philosophy in one breath: "It's like, come to the show and let's get drunk together 'coz that's what real rock 'n' roll is to me." Clear as a bottle of cheap grain liquor. *

Tie one on with Railroad Jerk and Pond at The Jailhouse Rock Café on Friday, May 2. $8, tax included