When you've already written a piece about one of your favorite bands of all-time, and tried to provide as much context and explanation as possible, it makes the task of writing up the band for a second time a little bit interesting. Whoah is me, right?
So, in addition to being an excellent '90s vintage noise rock stalwart, Hammerhead is very much a current band disinterested with comeback circuits and just playing their "hits" from twenty years ago. That said, as a man just as subject to bouts of occasional nostalgia as the next, I've got to say that I played most of 1994's "Into the Vortex" on my radio show last week, and it's every bit as good as I remembered. There was one LP that followed it (1996's Duh the Big City) but I've always had a special place for the focused desperation, amazing bass and guitar tones and drum sounds, and overall momentum of "Into The Vortex." It's for my money, as good as AmRep ever got. It's a great album that captures most of the amazing live power that Hammerhead commands.
Hammerhead ca. 1994
Since 2010, Hammerhead has released a couple EPs, (Memory Hole, etc.) and is on the verge of releasing its second LP called "New Directionz." I'm just a few listens into the new LP, but it's all Hammerhead, MXR distortion and weird high plains space desolation rock, done impeccably well. Sector 5 is pretty spot-on "classic" Heammerhead, and honestly I like every bit of the new LP.
As an update, Jeff Mooridian and Paul Erickson recently moved themselves, and their other band Vaz, back to the Twin Cities where third member Paul Sanders lives. So it will be interesting to see Hammerhead again with the benefit of regular practice space availability.
So, we'll leave it at that. Total Fest is honored, stoked and happy, all simultaneously, to be offering Hammerhead up this year. See you there. Neck stretches, limbering up, etc. to commence now.
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 goingin 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:
