Cactus Brothers
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For a time, through sheer numbers, the dancers dominate the floor. Dressed primarily in cowboy hats and Kix Brooks’s flamethrower western shirts, the dancers scoot and turn as one. But eventually it’s the Cactus Brothers who prevail in this hopelessly uneven range war. Through sheer volume and freaky eclecticism, the Nashville sextet quickly clear out most of the dancers. The punks remain rooted to their positions. A few dancers continue to brave the Cactus Brothers’ unpredictable set list but seem challenged by the oddball selections. “This is a song by one of our favorite country songwriters–Bob Dylan,” lead singer Paul Kirby says into the mike. The band falls into a rendition of “Quinn the Eskimo.” A few dancers dissolve into disco-ish gyrating. Several couples earnestly two-step around them. The punks don’t move.
The Cactus Brothers are a weird gang, a bunch of guys who could easily walk off the stage and onto the set of Fox’s era-bending comedy-western The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. The painting used on the cover of the band’s 1993 debut album, Billy the Kid with a third eye staring from the center of his forehead, looms as a stage backdrop. The hallucinatory image succinctly captures the band’s slightly trippy take on country. Electric fiddler Tramp, dressed in overalls, with a set of Botticelli locks hanging in his face, lapses into a hillbilly-on-acid story between songs, but the tale does little to break the ice. The band plunges on, playing bluegrass-tinged country tunes turbocharged with loud 70s rock riffs. They reference Flatt and Scruggs in “Crazy Heart,” but surrender virtuosity in favor of simple bass-and-drum propulsion. The opening “Love Her Madly” Doors riff on “Devil Wind” swoops into Will Goleman’s doing what the Eagles should have kept Bernie Leadon doing: namely, moving a rock song along with a hard-plucked banjo. It’s the stuff these guys listened to in high school, stuff, no doubt, the crowd heard as well. But band and crowd are separated by a gulf, a gulf expressed nicely by differences in attire. Both the cowboy hat and the leather jacket have evolved from functional roles to purely cultural ones. Kirby offers one resolution by sometimes donning both.
