While most of his classmates were learning songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” John Forbes was getting his first taste of the hard stuff. “My best friend had this whacked-out older brother who would play us Captain Beefheart when we were in kindergarten,” he says. “What did we know? We thought we were listening to party records. He’d play that and some Zappa stuff–when you’re that age and you hear ‘Titties & Beer,’ it’s like, whoa!”
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The group took half its name from the cheap, anonymous pornographic comics called Tijuana Bibles, which were popular from the 1930s through the ’60s and often cast mainstream cartoon characters (Popeye, Little Orphan Annie, Nancy and Sluggo) in an entirely new light. “Hercules” was the name of a seven-foot drag queen that Forbes says he “knew down south.” The tunes are warped, raunchy, and reckless: Forbes delivers his salty lyrics in a raspy, wolfish howl, and beneath his bone-breaking guitar Smith and Piper pound out clattering, manic rhythms on a jury-rigged mix of drums and trash.
After the band broke up in 1998, Forbes moved in with Smith, a Michigan native who’d drummed in the group during its final days. “Man, we lived in this place, it was about the size of a shoebox,” says Forbes. “We could only fit two chairs in the living room, and we had bootleg cable. We’d watch Gunsmoke and The Rifleman every night and eat pork and beans. And then one night we decided, ‘Hell, let’s start a band.’”
Recorded live in the studio, with only some vocals and Piper’s occasional trombone and trumpet parts overdubbed, Tijuana Hercules (like the EPs, released on the band’s own Black Pisces label) is the group’s most confident-sounding effort yet. Forbes and company seem thoroughly at home in their ramshackle mishmash of raunch ‘n’ roll, lascivious rockabilly, and fatback R & B. The slide boogie “Whales on Every Side” dips into funky gospel a la Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the shadow of the Birthday Party looms large on “When the Moon Comes Up Wild.” The band even twists Mel Tillis’s poison-pen number “Mental Revenge” (a hit for Waylon Jennings) to fit its skewed aesthetic.
When: Thu 6/30, 8 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joeff Davis.
