GO KAT GO! & CAfe 9 Present
The Legendary Shack Shakers’ hell-for-leather roadshow has earned quite a name for itself with its unique brand of Southern Gothic that is all-at-once irreverent, revisionist, dangerous, and fun. Led by their charismatic, rail-thin frontman and blues-harpist JD Wilkes, the Shack Shakers are a four-man wrecking crew from the South whose explosive interpretations of the blues, punk, rock and country have made fans, critics and legions of potential converts into true believers.
After taking more than a year off to work on other projects (including JD Wilkes’s book “Barn Dances & Jamborees Across Kentucky”), the band remobilized in the fall of 2014, with tours across the USA and Europe, much to the excitement of many a Shack Shaker fanatic. Despite the group’s time off, their reputation for intensity has stuck with them. On stage, JD has been compared to the likes of Iggy Pop, David Byrne, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Nashville Scene named Wilkes “the best frontman in Nashville” in 2002, while former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra has called JD “the last great Rock and Roll frontman.” Having joined the band in early 2012, garage blues guitar player Rod Hamdallah–who also lends his prowess to Wilkes’s side project ‘JD Wilkes and the Dirt Daubers’–is back in the Shack Shakers’ lineup. The rhythm section is rounded out with Brett Whitacre on drums and Mark Robertson thumping out the upright bass.
Although not legendary upon being named, the band has grown into its reputation the last several years due to their heavy tour schedule, six critically acclaimed studio albums, and songs that have been featured on television shows such as HBO’s True Blood. Past tour mates and fans include Reverend Horton Heat, Rancid, The Black Keys, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and Hank Williams III. Robert Plant is also a noted Legendary Shack Shakers fan, and picked the band to open for him on his 2005 tour of Europe. Plant named the band’s third album Believe as one of his favorite records of 2005. The list of esteemed admirers goes on to include horror novelist Stephen King, who listed “CB Song” as among his iPod’s Top Five in a 2008 Entertainment Weekly article. Such a wealth of devoted fans over the years has only added to the mystique that the Legendary Shack Shakers possess, carrying them down the road toward new creative pursuits and barn-shaking tunes.
For a quarter century, Dex Romweber has trolled the dark corners and back shelves of the haunted thrift store of Americana ephemera and honed an extraordinarily idiomatic sound, a particular and readily identifiable DEXness for those in the know. It’s a creepy doll collection of surf, proto-rockabilly, garage, dark and vengeful blues, and nobody, but nobody, plays it like Dex.
If Tim Burton were to throw a surprise birthday party for The Devil at Fats Domino's house,
Viva Le Vox would be the band in the living room'
Viva Le Vox bubbled up out of the South Florida muck in 2008. Often found playing open mics and their local laundromat spreading their peculiar blend of punk rock, ragtime, and blues, their live performances soon gained enough attention to land them in the clubs. It wasn't long before they took their show state-wide. With their first full length release, Desperation Alley in 2009, they ventured out into the southeastern United States. In 2010 they released Wayward Ones and took on the rest of America, touring almost nonstop for the next two years with a short break to record Dirt For Sale with Joe Buck (Joe Buck Yourself, Hank III, Legendary Shack Shakers).
The band's lineup has embodied many forms since its inception, and at this point Tony teamed up with Joe on upright bass to continue spreading VLV's weirdness here in the states and make the jump across the pond to Europe. In 2014 the duo recorded Luv Hungry and made their second run to Europe and the UK in 2015. Upon their return, Tony reunited with original bassist Scarecrow Jenkins and convinced long time friend Johnny Tugboat to take up the drums, soon relocating the base of operations to North Carolina. The trio released The Fall Of Skivvy Starzo in 2016 and continue to blow asses off throughout the galaxy....