Still no time for the blues
Flashing back on Orville Bateman Neeley's bands OBN III and Bad Sports
“I’ve gotten my teeth chipped from people who think it’s okay to slam shit in my face and tackle me. I’ve stepped on a lot of broken glass. I’ve been air punching and caught a nail in my fist from the ceiling. I’ve bruised the fuck out of my knees, and will probably have really bad knees in 20 years.”
Orville Bateman Neeley III made these remarks a decade ago ago now, so his scars have only deepened. His band OBN III popped up on Shuffle the other day. I hadn’t listened or thought about the band in quite a while. I got into their albums a decade or so ago but the Covid pandemic/lockdown really messed up my sense of time: just about anything that occurred before the Spring of 2020 feels much further away in time than it actually was. Certain songs from that era feel as if they’re from another life, or a dreamed life. OBN III now feel far away. That they haven’t been active for several years further embalms them in my imagination, yet when I listen to them they rock right into the present.
Their sound cuts through the muck and the blandness, helps you press re-set, and reminds you of the elemental power of two guitars, a bass, drums, and a howler, playing loud and singing desperately about desperate stuff. (Not just “feelings.” Ideas, too.) The Austin-based band haven’t released a full-length album since 2015, their website’s long gone dark, and their socials haven’t been updated in a while. They do have a presence still on Bandcamp. I really hope they get back at it—because I want to see ‘em live, and because at their best their songs plug in to something timeless: anger and release. Who wouldn’t benefit from that right about now? These days, none our brains can stop from thinking.
Back in 2014 Pitchfork weighed in on the macho “churlishness” that had crept into the OBN III’s lyrics. I tend to tune out most of the knucklehead-ness in any given band’s lyrics, unless the toxicity is genuinely mean-spirited and nasty, delivered without a whiff of humor or irony. Or if it turns out to have been a playbook for a shitty personal life off the stage. I don’t know Neeley or the severals bands he’s wailed in well enough to know either way. I do know this: for a long time I was obsessed with the line “I think I’m in love with the girl who does my Tarot,” in “Self-Hate,” from the band's 2012's self-titled album.
That title’s so evocative that the story’s all there, really—it could’ve been the title of an instrumental. The girl's not described physically, only by what she does, what she conjures, so the attraction comes from what mysterious promises, exotic suggestions, from her divination skills, or her skill at bullshitting, depending—anyway, the power she possesses to make or break his future. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that? But the song goes one better by hanging around long enough for the chorus, where Neeley sings “Don’t want to be in love with my self-hate,” which is an adult and a wise thing to sing. Where does she fit in? As a way out of amplifying that self-hatred maybe, with those cards, that tantalizing future, his good-for-the-soul what ifs colliding with her tantalizing Cartomancy. The song brings to my mind the desperation of Big Dipper’s “Faith Healer.”
If it all sounds a bit obscure for a rock and roll song, well, rest assured that OBN IIIs were listening carefully to whatever playlist was in the van on the way to the studio. It rocks.
“A compelling story grabs our attention and keeps us engaged. At its core, a great story usually has a few key elements: relatable characters, a conflict that challenges them, and a resolution that offers some sort of closure or insight.” So informs Explain It Daily, an email to which I don’t recall subscribing which each morning explains for its readers concepts and subjects ranging from history and nature to entertainment and philosophy, from “like I’m 5 years old”- to “like I’m an expert”-levels. The other morning Explain It tackled “What Makes a Story Compelling?” To the above the helpful explainers added, “Think about it like a roller coaster ride. You start at the station (the setup), climb up (the rising action), experience thrilling drops and turns (the climax), and eventually glide back to the station (the resolution). Each part is essential to the ride’s overall enjoyment.”
This commentary arrived at the the time I was reckoning with the fact that I know so little about bands like OBN III and the stories they’re telling, surviving, or thriving in. Even well into the infinite Internet age it’s easy for a group or an artist to slip through the digital cracks; you might hunt down a press release online, watch a few YouTube interviews, read album reviews and a Bandcamp manifesto, but unless you get out to a gig and chat up the members it’s tough to get a feel for a band’s working life, for the narrative that they’re creating town by town. They may release a handful of singles and albums on upstart, scraping-by labels, “businesses” that may not last the year, pile into a van and drive lonely roads to lonely soundchecks to half-filled joints on Wednesday nights. And those are the highlights. I risk misreading, or worse, sentimentalizing the slog that is touring and the work of maintaining an identity as a band, especially a band playing culturally irrelevant guitar-based rock and roll a quarter into this century. Yet I respect the hell out of it. There are how many stories being written by touring vans?
Among the bands Heeley’s made noise in is Denton, Texas’ Bad Sports, another outfit that’s seemingly gone on hiatus. (They hit the road sporadically still and released a digi single a few years back. An official comment on their Facebook page from 2020: “I know we’ve been quiet over here for a while. We all live in different cities again and the world feels like it’s collapsing anyway.”) I dug Bad Sports’ albums Kings Of The Weekend and Bras quite a bit, and caught them a decade or so back at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. A trio that plays riffy, super-charged songs, earnest but wound-up, Bad Sports were all about the tunes that evening: Neeley (guitarist and vocalist), bass player and vocalist Daniel Fried, and drummer Gregory Rutherford said literally nothing between songs. My buddy Dave, with whom I met up at the show, told me that at an earlier gig at Gonerfest down in Memphis, the guys had been mouthy and boastful. Not at the Bottle: the only thing Neeley uttered was a terse but genuine “Thank you” after the final song. Then he grabbed the mic and stuck it in his back pocket.
But they sure were welcome, and didn’t need stage patter to galvanize the crowd. Mod-ish and sharp, Bad Sports sprinted through a set of tight, urgently-played rock and roll muscled up by Neeley’s thick-sounding Gibson and snarling, Phil Lynott-styled vocals and Fried’s eighth-note riffing, spiky with hooks; Rutherford seemed impatient between songs, tapping at his hi-hat, raring to get things going again as soon as a song finished. The band played a lot of tunes from their then-new self-titled mini-LP—“Living With Secrets” and “Anymore” were stirringly good, as I recall—and a handful of older songs, all of which gave the impression of well-crafted bombs lined up in a row, vibrating with dark but thrilling intent. Like all great rock and roll, the best songs threatened to fall apart bar by bar, but Neeley, in his black fitted-tee and Ramones sneakers, and Fried, in polo shirt and sharp shoes, were stylishly in command. The floor felt as if it shifted beneath me during the best songs. It’s the reason I go out to shows.
During the headlining set by Radioactivity, Rutherford stayed behind his kit while Neeley and Friend swapped instruments to back guitarist and vocalist Jeff Burke, whose tightly-wound songs were propulsive and intense, if same-y. I refrained myself from yelling “More changes!” But that’s me. The crowd was euphoric, with dozens singing along. (My favorite moment of the night might’ve been during Dumpster Babies’ set, when bass player John Gorman seemed startled and then pleased to see a few fans singing along to the chorus of his song, always a warming victory for the opening band playing before a scant crowd.)
What I love about OBN IIIs’ best songs is their refusal to wallow, to sink deeper into the morass of nihilism or negativity. It’s there for sure—these guys are pissed off and it shows—but they also know that noisy, anthemic rock and roll, theoretically anyway, is a way out, that eighth notes might haul you up rather than down. A timeless and noble charge. “A lot of parts of my life are really slow, boring, and lonely, actually,” Neeley said in 2014, roughly one hundred years before the pandemic. “‘No Time for the Blues’ is basically me saying that I have nothing to complain about. Anytime I catch myself getting down about things, I remind myself I don’t have time to be upset. I just need to keep doing stuff.”
In a 2015 Austin Chronicle profile of Neeley, Tim Segall reported that “Classic rock radio and [Neeley’s] parents’ Columbia House cassette collection stayed in heavy rotation in the family car [when Neeley was young]. “‘My favorite tape was that first Boston album. Then, by the time I was 6, I was really getting into the Beatles and Queen. I liked the Rolling Stones, too’.”
Segall added, “Eventually, Kiss, AC/DC, and the Cars joined Green Day in Neeley’s budding tape collection, followed by Metallica, Motörhead, and Black Sabbath in eighth grade. That year, he wrote his first song on guitar, while two years’ worth of savings from washing cars and mowing lawns bought his first teenage drum kit. (“It had the worst cymbals I had in my life! They broke within the first month I had them!”) A ticket to the Warped Tour in 2000 finally tipped him over into punk, even if most of its bands hardly appear in his recent musical diet.” I approve of those influences.
Rumors online is that these days Neeley’s out West kicking up some noise—I hope that his story there gives him all of the resolutions and insights that he can handle. Just as likely he’ll depart the stage, or alight from a van, or crash in bed or on a floor somewhere lousy with conflicts, challenges, and uncertainties, and more questions than answers. There are always some songs to help.
See also:
They wrote a song, they played a show
Top: album cover, OBNIII’s Live in San Fransisco (2014), photo by Brian Prichard
Photo of stage setup: “The stage is set for a triumphant OBN IIIs rock show!!!” by Artie Haywire via Flickr
Photo of Bad Sports, Empty Bottle, Chicago, 2016 ©Joe Bonomo
They definitely got the motorhead dirty rock and roll vibe going.
Third Time To Harm and Worth A Lot of Money are ferocious - I love those albums, like an updated Sonic’s Rendezvous Band-MC5 vibe, so good