#johnny hott

[spilladabalia]

House of Freaks-My Backyard

Dirt-eaters, led-heads and factory rats, soul-hoarders, anchor-crackers and wool hats packing themselves into my backyard. Prime time preachers and the KKK screamin' at me, can't hear a word they say, so many people in my backyard. Debutante Debs of the FFV lookin' for the gospel on MTV, barking up the wrong tree in my backyard. Stonewall Jackson and his glory remain, but he's pushin' up daisies out in the rain, no one lets him die in my backyard. I live here, I'll die here, but it makes me wonder, it makes me wonder, it makes me wonder why I'm here in my backyard. I'm here in my backyard.

[musicwithoutborders]

Steve Wynn · Johnny Hott, Invisible (Unreleased Demo) I My Midnight, 2020

[digitizingalbums]

Album no. 16: House of Freaks, "Tantilla" (1989).

The duo's second album, naturally, feels bigger than the first: a bigger sound, made on a bigger budget (producer John Leckie had handled Magazine and early XTC). All that gloss makes the sound easier to digest but a lot harder to commit to memory. I never listened to this one much. But in light of songwriter Bryan Harvey's murder in 2006, House of Freaks' Faulknerian tone here now seems occasionally to foretell some kind of atrocity. "Family Tree," Tantilla's wistful descendent of "In My Life," sounds especially poignant today. Yet the band was funny, too. My brother (Jeff) once saw them play D.C.'s 9:30 Club with an audience that apparently found the beat too challenging to clap along to with any competence. Harvey interrupted: "Guys, guys! Ones and threes or twos and fours—you gotta decide."

[digitizingalbums]

Album no. 15: House of Freaks, "Monkey on a Chain Gang" (1988).

Fifteen years before Jack and Meg had a ball and a biscuit, a singer-guitarist named Bryan Harvey and a drummer named Johnny Hott had already figured out the formula, building propulsive, stripped-down songs with nothing but a guitar, a drum kit, and twangy, nasal, Southern vocals. (What they hadn't figured out was a decent band name.) When I saw House of Freaks open for Midnight Oil in D.C., I was surprised to witness a simple, straightforward duo from Richmond, Virginia, that fit in comfortably with the pantheon of Athens, Georgia. They wrote serious, angry, Southern gothic music about the underside of American history—railroads and graveyards, slave ships and atomic tests. Monkey on a Chain Gang is a terrific album, much better than I remember, probably because I now have more roots-rock history in my head. But I don't know that I'll listen to it regularly: what sounded to me like darkness in 1988 has become upsetting and horrific, ever since Harvey, his wife and two daughters were murdered during a home invasion in Richmond on the afternoon of New Year's Day, 2006. Hott and his wife, their best friends, found them first.