MOSTLY-GIRL PUNK PARIAHS: SASSHOLE

Guest Blogger: Becky Hensley

Moving to Missoula was a transformative part of who I have become.

I was coming down off some seriously bad vibes from living in a small town in Wyoming and the only answer seemed to be moving to Montana and shacking up with my boyfriend who had moved there months earlier to live with his brother.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was moving to the Volumen house. The first one, actually.And from the moment I pulled my car into the city, packed with everything I could fit in a beat up ’86 Buick Century, life was different.

My gut told me that the boyfriend wasn’t going to pan out, but I stuck it out hoping I’d find a friend or two to help make sense of staying in Missoula.

The Volumen dudes suggested I meet up with Sasshole.

A phone call came in, ”Meet us at Squire’s Pub” - I could hear laughing in the background and for a moment I felt like it might be a prank.

I had heard about these Sasshole ladies and what I had heard scared the living shit out of me.

Stories had filtered through emails from my boyfriend about these women. Kia, Jen & Milli would go harder and faster than anyone else out there. They’d put cigarettes out on your face, drink you under the table…literally, and if you couldn’t keep up…GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.

Sitting across from them, I was nervous - trying so hard to be cool. They wore chokers, smoked cigarettes, wore ringer tees paired with sparkling vintage jewelry, and swallowed back bottles of beer in such an elegant and effortless way.

They were rebel girls. They encapsulated every part of how I had idealized Riot Grrrl culture and they were immediately the queens of my world.

After our first encounter, I found a home with these weird and wonderful and sometimes fucking terrifying women. They made me laugh, got me into parties, shared their beer with me, and became my very best friends. They supported me to pursue boys and be confident, they didn’t get mad when I puked on their butts or slept on their couches, and whether they knew or not, they enabled me to grow into an empowered woman.

They were passionate about their lives and they lived every moment like it was about to explode.

This passion and insanity plays into every part of what Sasshole is as a band.

Sasshole is silly, horrifying, offensive, dark as fuck, and always irreverent. They never take themselves too seriously, but you can always tell when they’re proud of the arrangements they’ve put together or a song is particularly well crafted. Because that part is important too…but they don’t really care if you know or not.

Kia’s voice is urgent and mewling and it’s sexy as hell. Her stage presence feels a little off beat, but always ends up connecting with the rest of the pieces of the band.

Milli is a force to be reckoned with. Her rock stance on lock, she plays her bass hard and she stares down the audience. Her voice punctuates the places where Kia’s falls away. She’s a powerhouse.

Girl drummers rule and Jen is no exception. She kills it and manages a flourish or two while rocking a serious brown lip and throwing her curls around. She is cute and dangerous and doesn’t have anything to prove.

And although I’ve fan-girl’d the heck out of the ladies of the band, Dave is one of my favorite guitar players in Missoula. He’s serious and deliberate and he shreds. He’s the straight man, literally, to this wiley crew and it’s always a treat to hear Dave shout along with Kia and Milli.

To say Sasshole changed my life would be an intense understatement. 

People talk about the soundtrack of their lives and I can say without a doubt that the music scene of Missoula in the early 2000s was mine.

I tried to use the present tense to talk about Sasshole as a band because in my heart they never broke up. They never took a break for kids or jobs. They’ve always been a band to me. And even after this last show, they still will be.

I’d recommend you not miss their set at Total Fest this year. And don’t be surprised if you end up covered in corn or peanuts or kitty litter.

It’s happened before.

sassholereunion
Ladieeees and gentlemen! Preeeesenting: JENNIFER LEAH TACHOVSKY and her band!
Posted by Lee Conway on Saturday, April 30, 2011

HUMPY.

Humpy.

Back when I was a wee lad of eighteen or nineteen years, in about 1992, newly arrived in Missoula, wet behind the proverbial ears and taking my first set of classes at UM, there were a handful of interesting punk and underground bands going in a time that otherwise you couldn't really toss an Oly stubby without hitting a dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, Phish-logo'd New Jersey license-plated Four Runner-drivin' bro 'round here. Luckily, these culturally resistant types were charting their own courses, going against the prevailing grain of the time doing their own thing, irrespective of audience size, whether many folks really cared, money, or whatever else sort of extrinsic gains there might have been.

Bands like the Phantom Imperials, Judy Rosen Parker, VTO, Hughes, Sasshole, The Banned, Honky Sausage, the Jolly Ranchers, the Oblio Joes, and Humpy (etc.) defined my first handful of years in Missoula, and had it not been for them, god knows if I'd have fallen in love with the place like I have. There also was a classically jerry-rigged and decrepit place called Jay's Upstairs that was centrally located, and which regularly hosted all kinds of weird stuff on its stage, including the first two Total Fests.

And as I broadly dismiss these '90s "hippies" I don't want you to think I'm a stunod who doesn't get that the original hippie movement was a countercultural, antiwar outfit with some great music associated with it. I'm just saying there was a particularly annoying set of entitled youths in Dead and Phish wear, primarily, roaming places like Missoula in the 1990s, and their contributions were of a somewhat limited scope. That's all I'm saying. Thankfully, Missoula's always had that kind of counter cultural vibe around, in the early days from the hippies, artists and weirdos, and more recently from artists, musicians, punks and weirdos. But anyways, in those days, there were a lot of folks in love with jam/cover bands and with a kind of Dead breakup hangover, crowding bar stages from Boulder to err... Ballard. And Missoula had its fair share of whatever that deal was.

In the middle of it all, there were some dudes from unlikely zipcodes like Havre and Billings who had located each other at UM and decided that their shared interests in SST bands, Australia's Sheaf Stout beer and noisemaking made them well-positioned to band up. And lo, Humpy was born. Their lore has it that for a while, they had two or three members simultaneously playing guitars and bass through the same cruddy Sunn amp, and used a soup ladle taped to somebody's foot to provide rhythm before they figured out a drummer... who knows how much of that is true, but it makes for good copy, eh? Humpy's music had a least three pretty distinct periods, the first of which was punctuated by the extremely woody bass-tone of Denis O'Brien. That period featured some pretty wild and diverse rock and roll. Occasionally they'd hunker down and knock out a ripper, but the band was very comfortable making its own distinct and varied racket.

Over time, longtime Jay's Upstairs sound reinforcement officer (and former Texas deathmetaler, and Kiss memorabilist) Justin Lawrence became bassist, and Humpy grew into a pretty straightforward, excellent hardcore band, and always played fast. But it didn't start that way. Humpy's done a handful of post-break up shows over the years, but when they brought Denis O'Brien out of the dugout for the Jay's reunion show (organized by Lawrence) a few years back, health problems kept the line up from getting to play live. We at Total Fest sure hope we can reconcile that this year, and are stoked to get to see that very first lineup one more time.

Here's a nice piece about Humpy, and some lyrics from Dave who runs One Base on an Overthrow.

This below may be all you need to know about Humpy: