Rockabilly's for Squares, Just Ask Anybody

THE KINGS OF NUTHIN'/THE RAGING TEENS
Lilli's/Somerville, MA
August 31, 2001

After catching a fairly entertaining-for-a-sitdown thing Thalia Zedek solo show in Harvard Square, two friends and I booked it over to Lilli's to see if we could hang out in a less pretentious zip code for a while. Overrated whitebread rockabilly poseurs the Raging Teens were just wrapping up when we got there, a nice surprise for me since I'd been told en route that they might be headlining that night. Grrr. While I'll be the first to admit that RT lead guitarist/retro hottie Miss Amy has a cool look and a bit of a charisma vortex thing going, watching and listening to the rest of the band is so goddamn boring I can't imagine how anybody else stays awake at their gigs. Wax museum "traditional rockabilly" for people what can't handle the monstrous distortion and almost complete lack of reverence of the early Cramps./After a brief break paying off their parole officers no doubt, the Kings of Nuthin' went onstage and proceeded to rip shit up with more of that low-rent, duct tape-over-the-hole-in-the shoes-wearing trash r&r that everybody and his bastard brother seems to want to call rockabilly but really's more like one part Little Richard & the Upsetters/Esquerita-style "vintage voola" to one part post-1970s back alley garage punk whammy jammy. I don't know what the deal is with a good half their fans--local rockologists will note that the KON seem to draw the cutest girls and dumbest, most lunkheaded guys in more or less equal proportions--but the latter part of their set in partic. was unruly enough to make putting up with all the fist-waving jocks and Torr's onstage vomming worthwhile. A good time even if the rest of the bill was a little, how shall we say, Pat Boone-esque in nature.