MFNW – Friday Part Three: Zeke, Alabama Black Snake
Posted by Nick Hilden
Zeke (Not pictured- Donny Paycheck) Photos by Nick Hilden
Back at the Ash Street Saloon, Rabbits were still tearing down their gear, so I decided to go to the green room upstairs to relax and catch a breather. So far I had raced between three venues and seen six high-volume rock groups, the transcendent hip-hop of Shabazz Palaces, and a ninja band. It had been a busy night indeed.
As I walked up the stairs toward the green room, I saw Zeke’s drummer, Donny Paycheck, on the landing doing some rolls with his sticks on a stool. I tried to duck behind him to get at one of the couches, but as I looked under the overhang that you have to crawl beneath to get into the room, I saw that it was filled with guitars and people. Zeke was tuning up. Not wanting to mess with their pre-show Chi or whatnot, I nodded a hello and retreated to the office to smoke with one of the bartenders.
The drummer went downstairs to check if Rabbits had evacuated the stage, and I noticed that the rest of the guys had finished with their preliminaries, and were just sitting around chatting.
“Hey guys,” I said, “I just wanted to say that you were a huge influence back when I was kid just starting out in music.”
The three of them stared at me from the couch like I was crazy. “Um…but we’re Zeke,” said Blind Marky Felchtone.
Blind Marky Felchtone
I nodded, “Yeah. You’re Zeke.”
“I thought that you might have us confused with Rabbits or something.”
“Nope. You’re Zeke.”
“And you know our songs and everything?”
“I remember my guitar player showing us ‘Telepath Boy’ and ‘Evil Dead’ back when we were in our first band,” I said, “He told us that we had to start playing faster.” That was in 1998.
Zeke
Donny’s voice called up the stairs. The guys started to stand, then sat back down and offered to pose for a picture. I snapped a few and bid them luck.
A few minutes later, the band was onstage making a number of derogatory remarks about each other, the venue, the festival, and the audience. This was to be expected—they’re a bunch of punks.
There were two drum clicks and Zeke was off the blocks like a methamphetamine-powered, runaway speed train. If I counted correctly, they got through four songs in the first three minutes. ‘Fast’ is not an accurate description of Zeke. There a many faster bands out there, but Zeke takes the speed-cake. Their absolute, unflinching, wrist-and-arm flailing punk rock is unmatched in driving, focused madness. They are all sound and fury. It’s like a shotgun blast of punk rock going directly into your face.
Zeke
The set seemed over rather quickly, but that had nothing to do with a lack of songs. They played a health batch; they just did it spectacularly fast.
Their compressed set made me think that I could still make it back to Kelly’s Olympian for the end of Alabama Black Snake’s set. I rushed back down 3rd Avenue, refusing to hand out a cigarette about every ten feet or so.
As I entered the venue, Alabama Black Snake was just going into a fast, high-energy cover of the Who’s “the Seeker”. Those boys know how to hold a stage. As singer Greg Thompson howls and heckles the audience, guitar player Shawn Baravetto and bassist Isaiah Mark strut and pose like they were born on floor of a Rolling Stones concert. There is plenty of Mick in Alabama Black Snake. There is also a lot of Sabbath and Stooges blended in there. Drummer Johnny “Pops” Dryden was apparently playing injured, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he drove and blasted and banged. These guys understand rock and roll. They sound like ACDC with talent.
Alabama Black Snake
A few songs later, and the night was over. I was dosed up on music, high on the inundation of sound that I’d experienced over the previous eight hours. You couldn’t escape live music in Portland that weekend, not if you’d crawled to the deepest depths of the Shanghai Tunnels. The festival had spread shows across the city like a heavy veil of fog. Everywhere you went, you met someone who had also been at this or that show, and it was all that they could talk about. Everyone had a story of ‘who they met’. The singer of Alabama Black Snake ran into Gibby Haynes and King Coffee of the Butthole Surfers hanging out with Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince of the Kills at Mary’s—the oldest, dankest, most infamous stripper joint in town. I myself had the fortune of meeting Zeke and Scott Drake from the Humpers; both bands I grew up listening to.
Music is everywhere. Sure, you can listen to it in your home, on your little laptop speakers or on your massive sound-system. But if you don’t get out and see it once in a while, if you don’t immerse yourself in the audio-visual-tangibility of a live performance, music will remain a digital anomaly, a collection of ones and zeros for you to download and file away. I don’t remember the first time I heard a Tom Petty song, but I’m damn sure that I’ll never forget seeing him at the Gorge.
The summer is almost over, and those of us who live in the northwest know that the weather won’t hold, the jig will be up, and soon we will be finding a number of reasons not to leave the house. Get out while you can. Go find a show, any show, and sweat it up a little.
