In early August at the Crocodile, the Whore Moans gave their fans a
little taste of what to expect musically at Bumbershoot, playing new
songs along with a few from their first two albums—Watch Out
for This Thing and Hello from the Radio Wasteland!—and
throwing in a sweet version of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” to boot. The
song was appropriate, its big beat adding a bittersweet mnemonic to
what was a synchronistic show, as Willy (Mink) DeVille, the king of
soul punk, had died the day before. You could hear DeVille’s masculine
mojo shuffling between the Whore Moans’ screechy speed changes and
spontaneous jigs.
That night, the Whore Moans revealed three new tunes written for
their upcoming Bumbershoot extravaganza, “The Whore Moans Present: The
Black Atom!” The new material is more melodic and less frenzied than
the earlier, more hardcore-influenced rock of their first two albums.
But the Whore Moans’ plans for the festival go way beyond some new
songs.
At last year’s Bumbershoot, the band staged a spaz-patriotic set
that was already pretty conceptual, featuring girlfriends on roller
skates, a pal dressed as Abe Lincoln, and a flag-twirling celebration
on the theme “The Bush era is fucking over!”
Singer/guitarists Nikki O and Jonny Henningson, bassist/singer Ryan
Devlin, and drummer Jason Kilgore have been playing together as the
Whore Moans for about four years. They originally hail from Tacoma and
Olympia, but they now live together in a house in their beloved new
hometown, Seattle. Nikki O, Henningson, and Devlin all work as
bartenders; Kilgore works for a needle-exchange program and runs sound
at the Funhouse.
Backstage at the Croc that night, the band members offered a variety
of mystifying, sometimes inchoate descriptions of what the Black Atom!
might look like—hell, they might still not be entirely sure
themselves.
“The Black Atom! is sort of a theatrical soul revue, garage-rock
extravaganza,” Nikki O says. “With girls, and dances, and we also have
little spiels we throw out. We’re trying to do something like an old
Depression-era event where you would have like six artists performing
and Booker T. would be the backing band for all of them.”
“We’ve got a couple of pretty girls from the Cute Lepers, Prisilla
Ray and Duffy [Meredith McGuire], doing backup vocals to help us out,”
says Kilgore. “And we have our friends Jordan [Lock, keyboards] and
Mike [Tyler, sax] from the Hands coming in, too,” adds Henningson.
“We really don’t know how to describe this, because we’ve never done
it before,” says Nikki O. “It’s going to be big, and we’re only going
to be able to do it once. Honestly, I don’t know if we’re going to be
able to pull it off.”
“It’s probably the kind of thing you’d only like to do in your
hometown,” adds Henningson. Devlin adds that the band wanted to bring
something special for Bumbershoot, because otherwise “people are paying
$35, $40 to see local bands do what they normally do.”
Soul-punk with expanded lineups has been the thing off and on since
at least the mid-’90s, probably creatively sparked by the aesthetics of
Make-Up but also recently intriguing more wacko/macho forms of
garage-punk, such as King Khan’s various garage-rock groups. But it
sounds like the Whore Moans are shooting for the Stones’ Rock and Roll
Circus maybe, or even a punk-metal the Last Waltz.
The punk-blues songs they’ve been writing for the show, some of
which should appear on a third album they’ve just started working on,
are about lives fucked up by both the past year’s economic depression
and personal failures. “It’s like dealing with the effect that politics
has on everyday life, the way we’re forced to do things,” says Nikki O.
“Like, how do you deal with the fact that so many people are out of
work?”
For all their preparation (Devlin says his pile of notes and
sketches for the production have “become the kitchen table” of their
house), the Black Atom! will actually be the Whore Moans “mostly just
flying by the seat of our pants,” according to Henningson. It might end
up a mess—but even if it does, odds are it will be a blazing-hot
one.