A blues-based garage rock duo when blues-based garage rock duos weren't cool, House of Freaks were victims of shoddy timing and ill location, arriving in the mid-Eighties in Richmond, Virginia: too late to ride any punk wave, too early for an early Nineties rock revival, and too far from regional hotspots like Athens, Georgia, or Minneapolis to benefit from a scene.

The group's first two albums -- Monkey on a Chain Gang and Tantilla -- had been relegated to cutout bins and secondhand stores years ago, but on March 23rd Rhino Handmade will put both back in print with enough extras -- including the All My Friends EP from 1989 (featuring Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous), some B sides, outtakes and songs from a live set at Los Angeles club Raji's -- to double their respective running times.

Freaks Bryan Harvey (guitar and vocals) and Johnny Hott (drums and percussion) were aptly named. When they formed in 1984, their sound and minimalist lineup looked and sounded nothing like the flavors of the era. "We got shit all the time about not having a bass player," Harvey says. "I mean, it was our fucking band. Did people hassle Flock of Seagulls for not having a guitar player? I was watching Freaky Friday with my daughter recently and a character is talking about the White Stripes. She said, 'Get a bass player.'"

The duo's sound was just as out-of-time, nestling pop hooks amid rough and ragged recordings, and their songs were filled with vividly detailed southern history and lore, from the Civil War ("Big Houses") to its Jim Crow aftermath ("White Folks Blood"). "As odd as it may sound, Monkey wasn't as raw as I wanted," Harvey says. "We had engineers who were stuck in the Eighties, which was all about covering it in reverb and polishing it up. And we'd be like, 'We want to sound like Son House!' It was a struggle; it was a miracle that we didn't end up sounding like the Hooters."

And while the White Stripes have their color-coded cache, the Raveonettes their noir fixation and the Black Keys their raw-boned punk blues, House of Freaks simply consisted of two guys who didn't want to deal with a third wheel. Harvey had spent eight years playing bass, so plucking bass lines while playing guitar wasn't a stretch, and Hott unleashed torrents of sound from his drum kit and any other percussive device within reach. "He was like a volcano," Harvey says. "From the beginning, we just got a real buzz off of playing with each other. I'd listened to a lot of Delta blues, and it made a lot of sense to me. It was the essentials of music: rhythm and melody. A lot of those old guys would play bass with their thumb, use the bottle neck to play a melody, and they'd sing and stomp their feet. What else do you need?"

House of Freaks would release three more albums before calling it quits around 1994. Harvey says he doesn't spend much time listening them off. He's also tuned into (and enjoys) some of the nouveau garage music offered by today's popular duos. "It's amazing what happens with one band getting successful," he says. "It never happened with us, but that's just how it went. We didn't really have a scene to work in, and some of the songs were tough to pull off. Early on I thought, 'Wouldn't be great to be a band that knows its history?' There are great historic songs like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.' But is rock & roll the best form for that expression? I don't know. Many times I think the best rock & roll is about sex and drugs."

ANDREW DANSBY
(February 3, 2004)