Southern Culture on the Skids will play at The Back Room @ Colectivo on Thursday, July 11, 2019 at 8 p.m.
Southern Culture on the Skids’ frontman Rick Miller is sorting through a stack of records as he talks on the phone. His task is familiar to record geeks everywhere: attempting better organization (alphabetical? alphabetical by genre? something more personal?), figuring out what he can live without and deciding that is certainly not Oscar Brand’s Bawdy Sea Shanties.
He lists off albums by the Animals, Alan Vega, Johnny Bond and Brinsley Schwarz and cites the brilliance of Jackie Davis’ Hammond Gone Cha-Cha. As Miller talks excitedly about the artists and albums, you get the feeling slimming down his record collection is a pointless pursuit.
And if you know anything about his band, which includes bassist Mary Huff and drummer Dave Hartman, the magnificent variety reflected in Miller’s record collection is most certainly engrained in the music of SCOTS, a long-running North Carolina outfit that always seems to get genre labels a country mile long in front of their name when anyone describes them: hillbilly, garage, rockabilly, R&B, Southern rock, surf, novelty, psychedelic beach music.
That inability to nail down SCOTS’ sound perplexed music executives in the band’s major label days at Geffen and TVT Records in the mid-’90s and early 2000s.
“Are you rock ’n’ roll? Are you surf? Are you rockabilly?” Miller asks in the voice of a hypothetical record exec with marketing on their mind.
But that dynamic ability to blend those diverse influences into something both wild and familiar has allowed them to thrive as a live band for more than three decades. Bikers, country fans, people waiting to see Biz Markie, weirdoes, folklorists, swing dancers, prisoners (the band has played every medium- and low-security men’s and women’s prison in the Tarheel State, including several shows paired with a gospel band from Pittsburg, N.C., called Landy Void and the Void Brothers), you name it, they had fun when they saw Southern Culture on the Skids perform live.
Recently, when SCOTS played a venue in the Outer Banks for a family that included members from their 70s to their teenage years, they approached Miller after the show. “They said we were the only thing they could all agree on in the car,” he says.
Bringing people together and pushing them to lose their minds with delight for an hour or so while singing along to songs about banana pudding, big hair (and highballs), the irrelevance of penis size, Mexican wrestlers and, of course, fried chicken, as Miller conjures up the spirit of Slim Harpo and Link Wray from his guitar and Huff and Hartman provoke manic dancing fits, has been the band’s righteously magical mission.
SCOTS has played frequently in Wisconsin and Milwaukee, including recently at Turner Hall and Shank Hall, but Miller says one of his favorite places to play was at the late Unicorn Club in the now demolished Sydney Hih Building, where he enjoyed hearing crazy stories about Unicorn owner Gus Hosseini. “He was a character, but he seemed to like us,” Miller says. “He always paid us.”
Miller says he has met many cool people in Milwaukee, and he’s always especially happy to see a fan who travels from Madison each time they play here who brings the band summer sausage and green onions from his garden.
Meeting people in different towns (and going to the fun stores and restaurants they often introduce them to), while also enjoying the energy of the audiences they play for, keeps the band going, Miller says. “It’s a great way to make a living,” he continues. “It’s so much easier doing something you love. It’s something I try to teach my son that being rich is not as important as being happy.”
SCOTS’ most recent album, 2018’s Bootleggers Choice, offers newly recorded versions of songs from the band’s two out-of-print Geffen albums. They are working on new music currently that continues the garage and psychedelic-bend of 2016’s The Electric Pinecones, Miller says. A covers album à la 2007’s Countrypolitan Favorites is also on the horizon; the band has recently recorded versions of songs by Slim Whitman, Wilbert Harrison, Nancy Sinatra, Pretty Things and others.
Southern Culture on the Skids will play at The Back Room @ Colectivo on Thursday, July 11, at 8 p.m.
