ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 27, 1996 TAG: 9606270016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: off the clock
SOURCE: CHRIS HENSON
"It's three first names," he says. "Kelly Wayne Scott. I should be a great blues guitarist like Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Jimmie Dale Gilmore ..."
Kelly is, in fact, the guitarist for what is possibly Roanoke's most fun band, Loud Clangin' and Bangin'. Musically, the name says it all.
Kelly and his colleagues had the honor Sunday night of opening for what is possibly America's funnest band, Webb Wilder and his Nashvillians.
"It was total politics," Kelly explains. He and bandmates William Foster, drums, and Jim Lewis, 12-string bass, work at Kelley's Music on Brambleton Avenue. "Liz Carroll, from WROV, was in the store saying, `We're going to be bringing Webb Wilder in.' I said, `And we're opening, right?' We stuck with it and here we are. It's like 'Seize the Day.'''
Kelly believes the band's out-of-the-ordinary repertoire made it the prime candidate for the gig.
"We take old country," he says. "Hank Sr., Patsy Cline, John Denver, Johnny Cash. ...''
"We take strange old songs and screw 'em up," adds Jim.
"We just rock the fire out of 'em," Kelly says. "It's rockabilly-punk-blues-metal ... it's all in there somewhere."
Kelly, Jim and Billy are all veterans of other Roanoke bands like Catch-22, Desmond Steele, the Fabulous Flys, Juice, and St. Claire. Mostly they played both kinds of music in those days - hard rock and metal.
"With this band we just rejected everything that was in the norm," Kelly says. "Everything we'd ever done, everything that was popular. We kind of went back to our roots, too. We do a lot of old songs and we rewrite everything we do. We take the basic chord progression, toss everything else and rewrite it."
"If you didn't hear the vocals you wouldn't know what song we were playing," Jim says. "Musically it would sound like a regular, you know, rock 'n' roll song. But when you start singing Tammy Wynette over top of it, it gets really strange."
"My friend Todd calls them `oh yeah songs,'" Kelly says. "You listen to a few minutes and then and go 'oh yeah!' Like we do `Paint It Black' by the Stones, only we do it real nasty."
Part of what the band is about is giving up on the idea of "making it big" in the fickle music business. "You couldn't tell me anything but that I would be a rock star ... until about two years ago," Kelly says. "Then I said, `I'm killing myself, I'm not making money.'" That's when he cut his rock 'n' roll hair and settled down to make a living teaching guitar lessons. That's also when playing music became fun.
"Another thing we strive to be is a band you enjoy seeing," he adds. "We try to spice it up."
Consider their T-shirts. "We spent a go-zillion dollars on 'em," Kelly says. "We went down to Nashville last year for a NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show. We bought them at Sparkle Plenty, rhinestone shirt seller to the stars.. ... The shirts were $125 a piece. It's the real deal, though. Porter Waggoner would be proud."
Webb Wilder isn't the first big opening for Loud Clangin' and Bangin'.
Last summer, though they'd only been together a few months, they decided to enter a battle of the bands. Grand prize was opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Civic Center. "We said 'what the hell,'" Kelley recalls. They entered and won. In July, they were on the Civic Center stage.
"Fastest 20 minutes of my life," Jim says. "We tuned and it was over." |n n| Sunday night Loud Clangin' and Bangin' has to set up in front of Webb Wilder's equipment which gives them precious little stage room.
They thrash through a steam-roller juggernaut of `oh yeah' tunes. The clangin' and bangin' is indeed loud and spirited as advertised. But, even more, the band is a tight and solid unit, changing tempos, trading licks and beating the Iroquois into a bit of a frenzy.
They rock through "Burning Ring Of Fire." Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" happens at Metallica speed. And "Eleanor Rigby" sounds like a full-throttle heavy metal anthem.
The shirts do indeed sparkle plenty, with wild embroidery and four pearl buttons on each cuff.
Late in the set Bill Tresky, from Chico and Billy's Pizza Palace on the Market, steps onto the stage in a rented Elvis costume. The band kicks in with "Suspicious Minds" and Tresky cranks his arms like a windmill, gets down on one knee and sings his spangled belt off.
The crowd goes wild.
After their hour-long set, Kelly changes out of his rhinestones and into a T-shirt with a Gretsch guitar drawn on it. He stands behind the P.A. system to listen to Webb Wilder. Kelly bangs his head some and positions himself to watch the lead guitarist at the opposite end of the stage.
He knows the words to every song, waves his arms in time to every drum lick. Webb cranks up "Bringing the News To Mary," a cowboy song with some dirty guitar work.
Kelly turns away from the stage for a moment, shaking his close-cropped hair like there might be a pony-tail Scotch taped to it. "Now THAT'S rock 'n' roll," he says.
Loud Clangin' and Bangin' will play at Scooch's on Williamson Road on July 6. On July 26 they'll be at Confeddy's. Put a note on your refrigerator, and break out the rhinestones.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 linesby CNB