Music Review: Drinkin’ a toast to 25 years of honky-tonk
Hollywood has a long, often underappreciated country music heritage that reaches back to the 1920s, and, while it has accommodated plenty of artistic extremists over the decades, honky-tonk upstarts the Groovy Rednecks are perhaps the wildest of them all. When they convene at Burbank’s Viva Cantina on Saturday to celebrate their 25th anniversary, it will be a display of the unpredictable, ragged-but-right country rock that’s made them a local favorite since 1991.
Led by wild-eyed shouter Tex Troester, the Groovy Rednecks specialize in an offbeat mix of true life-inspired tale telling and lurid, neon lit fantasy. “Country music should be about drinkin’, cheatin’, and fightin’,” Troester said. “I guess our music is best described as old-school country with a healthy dose of raw punk rock mentality, if that makes any sense.”
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Despite several personnel changes, the band’s established core — Troester and guitarists Bob Ricketts and Gary Riley — upholds a consistent foundation that reliably showcases the Groovy Rednecks unusual underdog aesthetic. As captured on their five albums, from 1999’s “Buzzed” to the current “Tawdry Tales,” it’s a boozy, brawling sound characterized by self-explanatory Troester classics like “How Come I Only Love You When I’m Drunk?,” “My Girlfriend’s Got a Boyfriend” and “Happy Mother’s Day From Prison.”
It’s a frequently whimsical approach, and while the band has, pointedly, never taken themselves too seriously, Troester’s ability as a lyricist is often formidable. As revered country singer-songwriter (and occasional Rednecks drummer) Mike Stinson once said, when discussing Troester, “Do you think it’s easy writing all those drinkin’ songs? It’s not.”
“My songwriting usually starts out with just a phrase, or a word I hear,” Troester said. “Then I drink a beer or two, maybe take a shot, sit down and try to write a song. Sometimes I have a certain sound in my head, and then most of the time Bob helps me form the music by trying different ditties he has been working on, until we find one that works.”
Troester, a kinetic performer with a proclivity for show stopping antics like suddenly sailing his 10 gallon hat deep into the audience or stepping off stage, microphone in hand, to sing from atop a ringside table, has a relentless dedication that led him, inevitably, to country music.
“I was born in Jersey, grew up in Minnesota, and have been living in L.A. now for damn near 30 years,” Troester said. “I fell in love with music when I found my dad’s old box of 45’s, Chuck Berry, the Platters, Fats Domino. It wasn’t until about the mid-’70s I started to really get into country music. It began with Charlie Daniels and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but eventually found my music footing with icons like Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty.”
Arriving in Hollywood circa 1989, it wasn’t long before Troester tried to form his own group. “I’d auditioned for a bunch of lame bands and no one would hire me, so I found some guys who actually liked my lyrics and wanted to be in the band,” Troester said. “It was Ricketts, Riley, [drummer] Hermann Senac, and eventually Botehlo. We played our first gig on March 26, 1991 on a rainy Tuesday night at the Gaslight in Hollywood. The lineup is basically still intact except for Ron who moved to Sacramento about six months ago. Our new bass player’s name is Steve Seifert and is working out nicely.”
Saturday’s Silver Jubilee celebration features not only a set from the Rednecks themselves but also appearances by 20 other local bands, ranging from beatnik-folk rock provocateurs Dick & Jane to punk berserkers Bloody Brains to smoldering jazz-country enchanteuse Lisa Finnie to psychedelic country rockers I See Hawks in L.A., all performing their own versions of Rednecks originals. The dizzyingly diverse lineup is a testament to the band’s broad appeal among their colleagues and definitely qualifies as a weird, walloping musical revue.
Troester has obsessively charted every twist along the group’s long career path, which has taken them into almost every rock club and honky-tonk in Southern California and even a European tour. “The fact is that not many bands stay together this long,” Troester said. “Who knows? We may never get rich and famous, but we sure are having a ball trying. We’ve done a total of 840 gigs, and divided by 25 years that’s almost three shows per month.”
“If I didn’t have this band I would feel useless. It’s all I’ve got to look forward to, every day. These guys are my best friends and we love what we do, and what we do happens to make a hell of a lot of folks very happy — which is the greatest reward of all.”
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Who: The Groovy Rednecks 25th Anniversary Party
Where: Viva Cantina, 900 W. Riverside Drive, Burbank
When: Saturday, March 26, 8 p.m.
Cost: Free
More info: (818) 845-2425, www.vivacantina.com
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”
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