The Gories- I Know You Fine, But How You Doin?

There's little to be said about a band as legendary as The Gories that hasn't already been said, but here I am anyway. "The Gories" is the only you can say "cooler than you'll ever be" in two words. Two guitars and drums that show the tough-as-nails cool of the motor city can indeed be translated from the birth of Motown via 70's garage sickos like Iggy and The MC5 into a ghostly punk idiom as stripped-down and ghoulish as Detroit's many abandoned facades of former industrial grandeur. And maybe that's just the thing that's so entrancing about The Gories, their ability to effectively haunt the hubristic grandeur of modern rock with a, sometimes barely musical, primitive stomp that brings the ass-shaking rock in ways that studio compression and antiseptic multitracking never could. Who wouldn't look like a fool coming out with a 20-track-layered piece of studio magic that rocks about as hard as a severed squirrel dick when these psychos from one of the Midwest's dirtiest shitholes can set people's minds and hips on fire with two guitars, a microphone, a set of drums, and a sense of utter abandon? Nobody, that's who.

I remember some old garage punk duder was quoted in We Never Learn describing his buddy turning him on to The Gories after discovering the band; "It's like if The Cramps were black" he gushed, pushing the 7'' on him with the pushiness of a street dealer who gets high off their own supply. True enough, and an important reminder to a largely caucasian scene that all this shit was stolen from a bunch of black musicians who, in the very best of cases, were forced to make the decision between total destitution and obscurity or a possible short-lived fetishization at the mercy of the same fuckers who stole their tunes in the first place. But there's more going on than that. The Cramps, revered legends that they rightly are, provide a punked-out take on garage rock whose level of John Waters-esque depraved glam theater could only have come from the psychedelically malfunctioning low-cultural blender that is LA. The Gories, on the other hand, come across with the roots of Motor City Soul in ways which include, but fundamentally exceed, the intonations of their lone black member. Where The Cramps' play music for the post-glam scuzz-obsessive with a pair of glitter-encrusted pumps whose arches have fallen and week-old makeup on, The Gories play a music in which there was never any glamor to let fade and then reconjure in a newly populist, trashy glory. This is a fucked-up brand of rock n' roll for laid off auto workers brooding at barely-lit dive bars over the last can of Old Style they can afford, party rock for darkly debaucherous dance-offs in the skeleton of one of Detroit's many modern ruins, it's the haunting sound groaning out of an old warehouse practice space into the 1.5 feet of asphalt-blackened snow on a frozen Detroit street. And unlike the Midwest's hardcore scene (that was signing its straight-edge thug jock swan song around the late 80's when the Gories started up), the bleakness the Gories expressed wasn't one of suburban ennui, but rather a mystic transferrence of the grit and hopelessness of life in a rustbelt city into an excuse to rock out any dank cavern that could support such unpredictable inhabitants.

so, how you doin?

BONUS QUIZ?
do you recognize the (totally amazing) Suicide cover on this record?
HINT
it's on the Suicide album I posted a few days back