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" '68 Comeback merges blues, punk into unique sound. "
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By Ross Gohlke
Chances are you won’t see Jeffrey Evans’ '68 Comeback performing on Beale Street, or even at a blues festival. Your best bet to hear the band’s style of dirty, twisted, retro blues - dubbed trash rock or damaged blues - would be at a punk rock house party or a small club that caters to the new generation of beatniks. If you’re surprised by the crowd,wait until you hear the music. From Buddy Holly and Charlie Feathers to Bo Diddley and The Jelly Roll Kings (the 1960s band of Frank Frost and Sam Carr that can still be seen at blues festivals), Jeffrey Evans likes to do the old stuff. It shows in the original songs he writes for his band as much as in his choice of cover songs. Evans has managed to avoid the inherent pitfalls of revivalism - kitsch and redundancy - because he both respects the music he pillages and wants to leave his own mark on it. “We are out doing the music of dead people. In that sense it is still valid. We’re doing our version of it, but it’s something that has a history to it,” he says. '68 Comeback’s version reaches back to the blues through the window of rock ’n’ roll. More to the point, the band's music recognizes a clear lineage from the gutbucket Delta blues to rockabilly to punk rock. “I don’t know how [our music] exactly fits in with the blues, except that the blues has always been comfortable in the underground, too. I always thought blues was a free-form rebel thing. It’s more related to people like Frank Frost or R. L. Burnside. A more loose kind of blues. They hang on the same chord for eight minutes and tell a story and it doesn’t really go anywhere and there’s no hook. It’s a lot different from what you hear on Beale Street where you have a three-chord, 12-bar blues and you can hear the change a mile away,” Evans explains. At a time when even punk rock has become assimilated, appropriated and ground up by the gears of a music industry desperate for greater market share, trash rock keeps the anti-establishment spirit alive by identifying with the past. It’s not about making punk music or blues music: it’s about the impulse behind the music. “It’s an aggressive type of expression. Music is one of those things where you can bark it out. You have something worth crying about and that’s what people relate to - some shouting out against the system," Evans says. "That’s what it’s always been about except that people forgot it when the music got polished.” Whether it’s the 12-bar blues you hear on Beale or the infectious melodies of Green Day's contemporary “punk” sound, palatable music loses the barbaric yawp. “And that’s good, too,” Evans is careful to add, “but it’s not what we’re doing.” Today a handful of punk-aesthetes - including Memphis’ trashiest trio the Oblivians - find the blues well-suited to their projects. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is the most prolific and commercially successful of the genre. Ironically, Spencer earned his trash rock stripes playing with Evans in his previous band, the Gibson Brothers. Back in 1989 Spencer joined the band for an East Coast tour, and stayed long enough to record two albums before forming the Blues Explosion. With albums like Orange and Now I Got Worry, the Blues Explosion has brought the blues to a younger audience who, long ago cut off from Top-40 fluff by modern rock, is already anxious to abandon MTV’s Alternative Nation in favor of a more sincere (albeit dirtier) musical expression. But it’s not really fair to call it a blues revival, Evans warns. “Unfortunately I don’t think it will ever be a matter of 'going to a blues concert.’ If Jon Spencer is doing it, it’s a rock concert. Blues never would have hit if not for rock ’n’ roll bringing it to a wider audience. It will always be considered rock ’n’ roll now,” he says. Trash rock is not revivalism because it’s not academic. Evans is quick to point out that he’s not an historian of the blues. It’s not about education as much as it is identification. “I don’t think young kids are going back and buying Robert Johnson. I think the most you can hope for is that they think the music came from some place period.” For Evans, the blues is not a subject to be studied. It’s a way of life, an example. “If Charlie Feathers were still 25 and touring, there would be no need for '68 Comeback because he would blow us and every other band away. No one today is that wild. No one’s done anything that good since. That wildness, that loud, aggressive blues is such a slap in the face of authority. That’s what rock ’n’ roll did, but blues was the nasty undercurrent of rock ’n’ roll you couldn’t even tell your parents about.”
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