Honey Don't

As previously stated, the devil speaks to me. He's talking to me right now. He's waiting. He's a friend of rock & roll. Think about it...have you ever listened to Nick Cave or Tom Waits or Foetus (aka Jim G. Thirlwell) or Easy Action or Bantam Rooster and heard the demon himself? He's there.

I've always thought that Satan was just a myth. A beast created to further the belief in good and evil. But then, when I was a teenager, I first heard Nick Cave. His slower stuff is one thing, its usually kind of poppy, but then you hear songs like The Mercy Seat, and you know what you're really hearing. Cave is just a mouthpiece. A puppet of the Dark Lord.

Later, I heard Tom Waits and I just thought he was a storyteller, like a film noir Bob Dylan. But he got darker, too. When the songs slow down, the voice becomes more familiar. I could feel the power. That sick feeling in your stomach every time that gruff voice growls.

When I was in college, I got into industrial music and all the fringe weirdness that came with it. An accoutrement of the devil's musical accompaniment is drums. Big drums. Stark, warm yet dry, tribal drums. Industrial is by nature percussive music. Cave and Waits happen to have significant percussion in their music. Its usually fairly simple, but its there, and it carries the demonic vocals. I found the devil in much of the industrial music that I was into at this point, but the man himself was manifested in the voice of Jim G. Thirlwell, an Australian storyteller who ranks right up there with Waits and Cave. After emigrating to NYC's lower east side, Thirlwell growled his way around the streets of the underground. I can picture his music being used in a film like Sin City. His rasp would also fit in well in a film adaptation of any William Burroughs book.

In more recent times, the devil has manifested himself in more obvious ways outside of music. Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney, for an example. But if you look hard enough and beyond public poiltical figures (the obvious Luciferian mouthpieces), you'll still find that snake slithering around Detroit. There was a time when Satan spoke to Detroiters through two men: Tom Potter and John Brannon.

Tom Potter was the singer/guitarist in the devil-rock two-piece Bantam Rooster. When he started playing that guitar, and his mouth opened, it was like staring Satan in the face. Pure, concentrated evil. He became transformed. A completely different person. The devil had hold of him. But Potter found soul, and the devil retreated back to Tom's psyche.

Brannon was the singer for Detroit's original hardcore band Negative Approach. We're talking about the mid-80s here. Same time period as Minor Threat, but much, much different. Even then as a teenager, Brannon had the voice. HE was there. The beast. I never got to see a show, I was too young, but I've seen pictures, and I've heard the live music. Later, years after NA broke up, Brannon came back with the Laughing Hyenas. It was like some sort of twisted soul hard rock hybrid with that demonic growl at the center of it all. The devil was all over that band. Personal problems, white drug problems...it couldn't last forever. After two albums and a couple of EPs and singles, the band imploded. Brannon came back a few years later (early 2000s) with Easy Action. He found the true voice. Perhaps more than Cave, Waits, and Thirlwell, Brannon's elastic growl is THE voice of Satan. I've seen it.

Odd sidenote: All of these men have soul, whether its under the surface in their music, or in their record players at home, or on the stage, they have it. In the beginning, the Christian faithful said that soul was the devil's music. Coincidence? Nope, not at all.