alamitous Aggression Undermines Salvation's Enterprise
The prize: mock dissent and suicide. If you can't tell the difference why pay less?”



Neil Michael Hagerty (henceforth "NMH") with his denim-n-drugs (both real and shticked) shit-kicking purveyance of harmolodic guitar anti-hero avant-gutter heroics is saving neither the blues nor rock and roll: he's just getting it out there, guitar hero that he is. But his agenda from his days in the retard-garage revivalist Pussy Galore, through the early Royal Trux albums and his Drag City solo records, has been one of kindergarten-aping Dionysian metrics: giving 'em what they want with one cock, pissing on them with...um...the other. It’s a head firmly on the shoulders that recognize the offense and absurdity of attempting to rescue the blues to the shores of relevance or to protect the historical significance of its canonized techniques. Neither do the blues require high-art-hippy composers or hipster intellectuals to elevate the enterprise, hybridding it all up to acquire profundity relevant to our ex-modern times.

During a solo NMH tour a couple years back, my perpetually baked Texan friend Monkey swore six-ways-to-Sundie that NMH was the second coming of John Lee Hooker and his bleary-eyed reasoning had chillingly tripped its way onto something not wholly untrue. Boogie Chillin minimalicisouly out-ragas, out-timescale-skews every third Terry Riley/Steve Reich/LaMonte Young renegade haute-art construction any eastern-shaman-shammed aging New York mystic musicaller has had to offer, with more grit and ecstasy. NMH may very well ride that same train.

I wasn't buying it at the time. Live, the never-ending art-skank guitar theatrics annoyed me. The blues are history and guitar heroes probably should be. But Monkey had some kinda point (about history). Truth is I can't decide categorically which side NMH falls on. Well, his heart and hands, cock and bull are in the right place, at rolling war with the precious and the canned. Of this much I am sure.

"Porn skanks poolside, moonshine on the moon. No one knew you. Detachment just kindled worship and romance. If you can't tell the difference why pay less?"

Like some Buddhist truism, NMH may have discovered at some point that a guitar solo, like the giant black meat shapes in a Motherwell, is only a wank by virtue of the empty white recursive space around it; Pollock away the white (boy) space and thy wankery loses its sting (and grows another of different mien); time loses its meaning, architecture loses its debt to gravity, and the non-developing results can yield a warm whiskey-bath of Coltrane-meets-Skynyrd even-toned otherness, exaggerating the New petrified-but-present in the Old. It's a truth that (twinned with the power of Ornette's harmolodics) profoundly rocked the eaves of -Roll on Royal Trux's "Twin Infinitives" and NMH's S/T Drag City debut—both astonishingly original, landmark works of deep-fried hydrocephalic hickweed dementia.

NMH records have been consistently informed by a hyper-educated, super-trained, funhouse freak-showiness just riding the sharper edge of irony. But there was always a strung-out love and urgency in his hyper-agency, something structurally and referentially exciting underneath the glamour of even the most pandering late RTX releases. The hex Neil Michael has howled, Pussy Galore to All Night Fox, has always been a lubed-up barking patois of 60's Texas garage, southern-sunburned harmolodic tomfoolery, Motown-and-heroin autism. 'Cause (to quote Hooker's papa) "it's in him, and it got t'come out."

But this record, more so than any previously, pays musical lip service to the specific shrapnel edge of obscure 60's Texas garage-rock like Zakary Thaks, the New Roadrunners, The Liberty Bell, and other less obscure garage greats like Monks and Count Five. In fact, if it weren't for the sassy addition of an equally direct nod to Nancy Sinatra in her most Hazelwooded late 60’s reverby glory, Count Five-land might be the sole musical territory traveled.

But on All Night Fox, the deconstructive tricks and refashionings begin to wear. They appear to be an end rather than a means, forsake the 'post-fucking-everything-but-still-human blues' for a collection of songs (frankly, each the same song) that effectively establish their own joints as the sole objects of inquiry. Elbow-gazing. Digit-gazing. Every song on this record sounds like a DJ remix of low-fi 60's garage: one turntable lock-grooving the drums and razor-thin guitar vamps while DJ Crankmonkey-or-other uses the other to alternate Neil's vocals with those of his satan-o-verbed Sinatra-esque ingénue(s) [the latter of which, I have to admit, are uniformly wicked]. Every song, though circumscribed by hott-lixxx from NMH's demon axxe, is also circumcised within the confines of a radically focused minimalist Briss. I mean repetition ‘till the cows come home…until the guit-fiddle fried chops disappear and detach…all fire and no fuel. And I just don’t' know...

"Porn skanks poolside, moonshine on the moon. No one knew you. Detachment just kindled worship and romance. If you can't tell the difference why pay less?"

Howling Hex ain’t the first to explicitly link the blues to Indian-influenced art music. Henry Flynt tried way back in the way back to somewhat more awkward effect. And don't get me wrong. These tunes rock the light fantastically-repetitive in a very apt, light-handed way. But still, the effect is reductio ad absurdum to the extent that you are left wondering just to what degree the whole thing is a high-concept put-on. This is not helped by the coy McSweeney's-esque mystique of everything—from the ongoing Burroughsy-good-ole-boy Blog that serves as a Howling Hex promotional vehicle, to the lack of any lucid content in the press release or packaging. But then why should the Hex shoulder responsibility to either the public or the press to draw a face or family tree on the tunes? Journalists are just gonna make shit up anyway. If there is a touch of the conceptual gag to All Night Fox, like every NHM release this record still sounds like he's playing and singing for his life with the same rude willed ardor that keeps you on the edge and in his court, waiting to see where it will all fall out.

But trust me—this one is difficult as all GET-OUT to sit through.

While the last full-length Howling Hex record, the under-promoted and underappreciated "Neil Michael Hagerty & the Howling Hex" (a series of live and live-in-studio boogie-brass garage jams) was exhaustively credited, the new Howling Hex "featuring Neil Michael Hagerty" is left mysterious. According to the Hex’s Barnum-n-Breton website, the band includes July McClure (daughter of a Vegas bandleader), Lynn Madison a kickboxing mechanic whose "Iberian roots [grace]…the high country density with microtonal enchantment", and Peter George Denton, "a confirmed, hard-living Aries" and drummer who happens to play guitar here.

"In a court-ordered self-imposed exile backed by 4 out of 5 dogs that prefer the taste of their own balls to the love of another. Mock dissent and suicide threats. If you can't tell the difference why pay less?"

So that's all she wrote. 4 out of 5 of you will prefer the White Stripes and I can't blame you (if I can't follow you). But I admit that I will probably pull out the previous Hex record or the first three Royal Trux records or “Dial ‘M’ for Motherfucker” before I go back to this anytime soon. 'Cause I can tell a difference.

[NOTE: the italicized quotes peppered needlessly throughout this review are entries from the Howling Hex's blog, presumably the prose of one Neil Michael Hagerty, which can be found online at http://hhex.blogspot.com/. No explicit editorial appraisal is intended in their reproduction and they are reprinted without permission for expressly anti-literary, rhythmic purposes. Neil has also written a book.]