I first heard The Honkeys on The Wayback Machine back in the spring of 2000 and then saw them live the very next day at the Riverfront Times Saint Louis Music Awards (Slammies) showcase in the U. City Loop. They were clearly the freshest, tightest, ass-shakingest outfit I'd seen around Saint Louis for some time—and the only big-beat instrumental outfit (from here) that I can remember worthy of mentioning. At that time The Honkeys were a quartet with Jeff leading with an explosive classic Fender Stratocaster or beautiful vintage Mosrite guitar, driving a tight big-beat rhythm section of bass, drums, and classic Farfisa organ and melding it all into an interesting spy movie/evil hot rod sound.

Even though their sound has changed quite a bit since then (more on this later), their stuff is still dynamic, cleverly written, well put together and thought out, and their unique brand of what most would call "surf music" does not bore or ever fall into a rut. The Honkeys have been packing 'em into the clubs around town like the Hi-Pointe, Side Door, Galaxy and Way Out Club since 1998 due to their great stage charisma and unique, exciting sound.

They've hit the road a few times and, last summer (2000), recorded 16 tracks for their Tequila Mockingbird CD at Jim Marrer's Zero Return Studios (where Man or Astro-Man? Recorded 11+ LPs) in Elmore, Alabama. The songs on that CD are more indicative of the band's more danceable, simple, up-beat, surf-influenced style and not so much that of the band's new direction, which has ironically mirrored that somewhat of Made From Technitium/Eeviac-era MOAM. Tequila Mockingbird is really a great album, and the rumors that they may decide to shelve those tunes for good, in favor of this new sound, are a bit hard to swallow. Some have described this new sound as sort of an instrumental variation on "math rock" (more in common with bands like Don Caballero than that of more traditional, surf-sounding instrumental groups), which is a more technical sound with odd tempo changes that might harken back to folks like Frank Zappa or King Crimson.

The band's somewhat abrupt change in sound coincided with the departure of organist Micah Edge and drummer Jovian Kind, who really helped uphold the Cramps-style "big beat" rhythm to their sound. Dave Devine of The Cripplers has joined them behind the drum kit and The Honkeys have been playing sporadic shows as well as a couple of keg parties at their practice space in Hazelwood.

I didn't make it to either of those keggers, but the Honkeys invited me to one of their beer-fueled basement rehearsals on behalf of Head in a Milk Bottle. They put on a good show for me, complete with smoke machine and miniature blinking lights.

I went there with the intention of asking them a few questions about their humble beginnings, their musical manifesto, and their soon-to-be-released CD. I sat on an old couch placed directly up in front of the band. As I popped open a beer, the trio blazed through a very tight set that plastered me into the couch. About 45 minutes later, they took a break and Dave spoke up, "So, Bob, you wanted to ask us some questions?"

HIAMB (Bob): State your names and your role in The Honkeys.
Cullen: I'm Cullen McGrane and I play the bass.
Jeff: Jeff Thomas, stock guitar.
Dave: Dave Devine, drummer extraodinaire.

HIAMB: When did the Honkeys begin as a band?
Jeff: What year? That would be in '96 when we first started calling ourselves The Honkeys.
Cullen: Yeah, I met Jeff at a coffee shop, and he came up and asked me if I wanted to play bass in his band.
Jeff: But we weren't a surf band back then; we were a progressive noise band.

HIAMB: Ah! So you were calling yourselves a "surf" band for a while. That's the phase with the Saltines (go-go dancers), I take it.
Jeff: Yeah, that was Phase Two of The Honkeys. Phase One was seven of us all not knowing how to play our instruments and we were yelling into the microphones and writing great songs called "Government Cheese" and "Rumplestiltskin" and…
Cullen: [Breaks in] "The Dada Reincarnate!"
Jeff: [Laughs] Yeah! "The Dada Reincarnate" and "Club 367," which was a club where all these metal bands performed all the time, and the roof caved in so we wrote a song about it. We were smartasses.

HIAMB: So, eventually, you began to learn a couple of chords and actually play your instruments?
Jeff: Well, no. I always really knew how to play the guitar. I used to play in a coffee shop and I would play flamenco guitar—kinda pseudo-flamenco guitar, actually—since I never trained as one. My brother was a punk rock drummer. He was in the band back then, too. He left right before Jovian started playing drums for us.
Cullen: Yeah, the original Honkeys was just kinda like a big inside joke and after a while we realized nobody else thought it was funny because it was too far gone for anybody to really understand what was going on.
Jeff: Yeah, we were really ahead of our time, that's for sure. [That was the inside joke.] So we had to come up with a sound that was a little more familiar to the ear, and it was accidentally surf music.

HIAMB: You have a problem with being labeled a surf band, don't you?
Jeff: Yeah, a little bit. If you label yourself a surf band then you have certain standards that you have to live up to. Like the 12-bar blues… most surf bands use a lot of traditional techniques, and there's a certain expectation on the part of the audience who wants to hear a surf band sound a certain way, and if you don't sound that way they'll ask you, "why don't you play more surf-sounding stuff?" They're looking for that traditional '60s go-go or beach sound. And as a musician I don't see the point of mimicking that sound when you can use the reverb guitar styles and other guitar techniques that the older bands used to sculpt something completely new. So I guess we're more of a progressive surf/instro band even though our sound is a lot more powerful than most "prog" surf bands.
Cullen: And not only that, but you get stuck in a genre of surf bands where you can only play certain places. Like the 21 & up clubs, because the club owners think that the appeal of a surf band is just for older audiences, or the only places that wanted to book us were bars, even though they occasionally booked all-ages shows.
Jeff: Yeah and only certain people would come to see a surf band.
Cullen: And you only get to open up for certain similar bands.
Jeff: And that kinda limits booking shows. Because a lot of club owners want to book you with other bands that play the same style. And we probably really transcend a lot of those styles because we don't adhere to the typical surf sound all the time.

HIAMB: But don't you get that anyway? Regardless of the fact that you call yourselves an instrumental band or try to not label yourselves as that? Don't people automatically want to categorize it as "surf" anyway? Seems to me like you're fighting a losing battle!
Jeff: You really can't tell people what to think. There's nothing we can do about it. But if you get into that mode of thinking that you're just a typical surf band then you end up tending to write just typical surf songs, and we don't want to do that, so that's why we like to shy away from that pigeonholing.
Cullen: Yeah, I think things are progressing, even in punk right now. There's another local instrumental band called Ring: Cicada and they're obviously not a "surf" band. They're not stuck with that labeling.

HIAMB: A lot of older fans at your shows?
Jeff: A lot of older surf connoisseurs, and it's like, we don't like those people!! [Laughter] We want more young teenage girls to come and throw their panties at us than older surf heads! We don't want their panties! No, seriously, it's just a small group of people, though, really, who are into that, and to be successful band you would have to broaden your horizons a little bit and we need to attract a broader fanbase. We're trying to attract a younger audience, definitely.
Cullen: Shit man, we weren't even 21 yet and we were playing 21 & up shows all the time, so right off the bat, all of our audience and fans that would have come and seen us, our friends and people we hung out with, weren't allowed to because they were too young. They couldn't get into the clubs!

HIAMB: But a lot of people still came out to see you guys because you were known as a surf band...
Jeff: Even with being the only surf band in St. Louis, we gained notoriety just on that. Randall Roberts wrote a great piece on us for his column in the Riverfront Times. But I don't really believe we are the only surf band in St. Louis. The Civil Tones—whether you wanna label them as surf or not—they're an instrumental band, too. Then there's The Studebakers, who I've heard call themselves a surf band, but I've never seen them…
Dave: Look what happened to The Untamed Youth. They were one of the greatest bands to play music of that kind, in my opinion. But when you are stuck in Missouri, there's only a small fraction of people who care about what is going on around them.

HIAMB: I noticed during your practice here tonight that there seems to be a big difference between the new songs written as a 3-piece and the old songs left over from the previous lineup.
Jeff: A lot of people notice the difference since the keyboard is gone. But the sound is a lot bigger as we're trying to fill out the sound without becoming just loud. I just went stereo on the guitar sound and I'm still experimenting on how to get a big sound and I'm having fun playing through two amps, a Hot Rod Deluxe and a Bandmaster Reverb. Cullen has a big amp with lots of speakers and Dave is as loud as hell.
Dave: I've been given a chance to stretch out a bit. I've always been just a straightforward drummer.
Jeff: Before Dave joined our band he didn't know what a triplet was. When we write a new song and we are describing it to Dave, we can't use music talk. We say things like "bring the thunder, Dave." [Dave proceeds to demonstrate what that means to him.]

HIAMB: How would you respond to accusations from your fans that your new direction isn't as danceable as your old stuff?
Cullen: I'd totally agree. A lot of it isn't danceable. It's not like totally all driving surf stuff. Plus, what fans of ours ever actually danced at any of our shows, anyway? They're all too busy doin' "The Stand." Standing there doin' the "indie nod" or whatever you wanna call it. But you can dance to anything. Most of our newer stuff is more influenced by Fugazi or the Descendents, but it's still danceable.

HIAMB: Has becoming a 3-piece outfit allowed you to stretch out some and help break from the more traditional surf style or were you moving that direction when Jovian and Micah were in the Honkeys?
Jeff: It was a general consensus, even last year, that we were trying to get out of the mindset of being that mundane, typical surf band and were kinda growing out of it.
Cullen: It's just hard for us when we never listened to surf music really. We listen to like, The Boredoms, and we have all these massive influences and pretty much none of them were surf bands.

HIAMB: Aw, c'mon! I know for a fact that you guys have a ton of great classic surf albums, from The Pyramids, Ventures and New Dimensions to modern stuff like Satan's Pilgrims and The Bomboras!
Cullen: No, I totally agree with that. I'm not bashing on surf or anything. I became more familiar with that great surf stuff from listening to The Wayback Machine on KDHX, and I usually listened to the indie stuff and girlie bands. The surf thing was like a slow progression, and we didn't know about that shit until Pulp Fiction slapped us in the face with it, and then Los Straitjackets, and fuck yeah, The Bomboras… the second show we ever played was opening for them and they were just so cool to us and they completely blew us away. Of course I still listen to it but it's really hard to come by now. They don't stock it at stores anywhere and we really need to focus on other influences because it's obvious that the surf thing has died down.
Jeff: Like I said, we stumbled upon surf accidentally. We were writing songs that just happened to be instrumentals and then all of a sudden we heard Dick Dale and they called that surf so that's how it happened. I can't deny the surf influence; it's there. The reverb is turned all the way up, I've got the tremolo, the picking, and there are the driving drums and bass. If we're a surf band, well, we're a surf band.

HIAMB: So, once you heard Dick Dale and these other surf influences, did it help mold your sound or change your approach to your instrumental songwriting any?
Jeff: Oh yeah, it did. The surf music that we heard at first was completely new to me. And when I heard Dick Dale and all that I discovered there may actually be a market for what we were trying to do. And his stuff had a very Eastern influence, like "Misirlou," and when I first heard him take that song and put it into a rock'n'roll format I was like, "Wow!" And I figured I could do that with different genres like jazz and turn it into instrumental rock'n'roll, too.
Cullen: Yeah, we would sit down and listen to these records and really analyze certain things, like the reverb sound and how he got his guitar to roar like that, and getting the bass to sound so smooth. We were totally infatuated with the whole reverb sound. And then we went and saw Satan's Pilgrims at the Hi-Pointe and they had these huge Fender dual Showman Reverb stacks and the reverb sounded like water. It was just amazing. They were a lot different from Los Straitjackets or The Bomboras. Who knows where they're at now…

HIAMB: So explain why you guys 86ed the Saltines.
Jeff: It just became too much of a novelty, and we started to depend on them being there too much in order to put on a good show. Having them up there on stage forced me to just stand in one spot and play guitar and I didn't have to entertain—I just let the Saltines do it for me. And there were too many dudes coming to our shows. We want more teenage girls throwing their panties!
Cullen: In hindsight I'll agree with Jeff. And this may get me in trouble, but because of the Saltines we didn't move. We just stood there and let them attract the crowd, but having those girls in the band was so much motherfuckin' drama. Just too much drama. That was so fucked up. We wanted go-go girls to help us try to get people to dance but that stung us in the ass so hard… [Laughs.]

HIAMB: Don't you feel that people really miss that aspect of your stage show?
Jeff: Oh, they definitely do. Of course, they're all guys! I haven't had one girl say "Where are the Saltines? We miss the Saltines!" But yeah, we do hear that a lot. Although, I do still get a lot of girls wanting to audition for the Saltines...
Cullen: The girls in the audience would tear the Saltines up, dude. They'd tear them new assholes. Not directly, but I'm sure they got some evil looks. They would seriously just rip on them, because they didn't like the way they danced or thought they could do better, especially to us after a show. It was really weird. And the only people that said that were other girls. That just added to all the drama. It's nice not having to worry about all that anymore so we can concentrate on the actual music!

HIAMB: Where have you been playing lately? I haven't seen you out at the clubs much in the last few months.
Cullen: Playing keg parties right here.
Jeff: Yeah, keg parties. It's helped us perform, I think. We don't have to worry about how we look or sound and we're just stupid drunk. [Much laughter.] And these turned out to be some of our best shows ever! Playing those keg parties has helped us communicate within the band, too.

HIAMB: What about the CD? [More laughter.]
Jeff: It'll be out when we have the money. It's really hard to release a CD by yourself.
Cullen: We keep learning from mistakes. Most involve money management.

HIAMB: Any luck shopping around for a label?
Jeff: The first 500 copies will be sold by us outright. A label would be good, but we need money so we'll just sell these ourselves at shows. We plan to be playing enough shows to pay for it.

HIAMB: Maybe you should charge more at the door at the keg parties!
Cullen: We don't make anything at the keg parties.

HIAMB: Hmmm… and you wonder why you have money problems! You don't even charge a cover at your keggers?
Jeff: [Laughs.] That's hard to enforce… door covers. People always find a way to sneak in. We've made money from selling T-shirts and stickers, but that's it. We've only played two of them. Just helped us out, as performers, being drunk and in a basement. I think we play better live now because of them. They're more for practice than anything. Just something fun to do, something outside of what we're used to, and we'll play three sets, which we never do at clubs, either.
Cullen: Yeah, and it's at our friend's house and he lets us practice there. It's just a bunch of old friends and friends' friends who haven't had a chance to see us yet. So we're like, "networking." And yeah, man, it's great practice. You don't have some stupid venue getting pissed at you for standing on the amps and playing drunk and stuff.

HIAMB: Are you planning on recording anything as a 3-piece?
Jeff: I like the 3-piece playing live, but in the studio I like to add other instruments. Playing as a 3-piece allows us to be tighter. Before, the organ was like off in its own little world.
Cullen: In the first place, we've had a problem with organ players not knowing how to operate the organ. They knew how to play keyboards but didn't know how to plug it in. And this happened constantly. But we definitely have plans to record again. When we get the money for it we will. We made so many mistakes on the first recording and we need to do a better job of planning for it next time.
Jeff: The 3-piece just feels nice. And for us to add another instrument, well, we would really have to be able to connect first. Right now we are busy putting our plan into action. We have our press kits, and a list of labels. We just need to get the CD out. We've been talking to a lot of bands from other towns about swapping shows, but with the lineup change it's like starting all over.

HIAMB: When was it that Jovian and Micah left the band and why did they leave?
Jeff: They left last Halloween. Micah left because he was having problems with school and needed to focus on that, and Jovian left because, I don't know… I think he was just tired of it. And now he's living in L.A., is engaged to Exene Cervenka, and is playing in her new band, The Original Sinners!

HIAMB: Now, Dave is also in The Cripplers, who just recently got signed to Dionysus Records. Does this pose any problems for either band? Do you (Dave) plan on sticking with The Honkeys while you can?
Dave: Yeah, I plan on sticking with these guys. I liked them long before I joined up. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity so I jumped on it. So far touring or anything hasn't posed a problem, so I don't see why I can't do both.

HIAMB: I guess the next question is what are your individual influences? What are you listening to now?
Jeff: The Boredoms. And I've been listening to a lot of Sonic Youth, which has nothing to do with the music that I'm playing. I like The Boredoms. It's just a great band.
Cullen: Stereolab, the new Bjork, (International) Noise Conspiracy, Yo La Tengo, The Four Corners, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. A lot of awesome bands are coming out of Japan like Guitar Wolf...
Dave: The Revelators, Metallica's Ride the Lightning, D.R.I., Devo's Greatest Hits Live. My influences for drumming would be like The Rolling Stones or CCR.

HIAMB: What about current fave instrumental bands that you've heard?
Jeff: Obviously Man or Astro-Man. I bought a really interesting CD the other day that was by a great band called Laika & The Cosmonauts which I really like, and I've been listening a lot to Fugazi's Instrument soundtrack lately.
Cullen: A band called Air, and that fuckin' Tomorrow's Caveman CD is awesome! Tim Lohmann's instrumentals are the fucking best. They're so goddamned addictive… "Velvet Underwear." Man, those are awesome. Surf-wise I haven't heard anything new in a long time.

HIAMB: What do you think have been some of your biggest stumbling blocks that you've encountered as a surf/instrumental band?
Jeff: The absence of lyrics. For some reason people love to see someone up on stage singing. I don't think it really matters what it is they're singing, either. I think instrumental music is an abstract idea to most people and it's hard for them to relate to it, without someone telling them what the song is about (i.e., the singer). The song "Portrait of a Lady" is an experimentation into that, with our friend Morgan just singing syllables. They aren't real words, and I don't think anyone even knows that when we play it. It was still an instrumental song, but just using her voice as another instrument, because there weren't any actual lyrics.

HIAMB: Your new logo and the look of your promo packs is really interesting. Tell us about that.
Jeff: That's all the work of Mark Wightman at Phoenix Creative. The guy was awesome. He was always on the same page with us, got all of our inside jokes, was very patient with us—even when we were being really impatient—and he really helped us out a bunch. And the design he came up with was perfect for the look we were after. He's just a great guy and a fantastic designer, even though he looks like Rowdy Roddy Piper! [laughs.]

HIAMB: Anything else you'd like to share with our readers? Any special messages?
Jeff: Our new web site should be up soon (www.thehonkeys.net -- never happened) and our CD will be out as soon as we're done with replication. We have something special planned for our Halloween show but it's a secret. We've done a Halloween show every year and we try to make those our best shows. We're going to have to do a lot of promoting for this show, though, because Halloween falls on a Wednesday night this year and it's at the Way Out Club.

That's it!

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