Everyone carries within their personalities a balance of influences and a dichotomy that makes them exactly who they are. For Jim Heath, leader of the Reverend Horton Heat, his equilibrium is created by his rough, hard rocking on stage and his sweet off stage personality and impeccable style.
“My family knows I’m that way. They know that when I’m out there on stage I’m this wild rock and roll guy and then at home I’m a dad asking, ‘Did you clean your room?,” he laughs.
Reverend Horton Heat will perform in Houston on Saturday, April 1 at The Continental Club with opener Piñata Protest from San Antonio creating a perfect night of music that intends to take influences from the past and push them into a new and more aggressive direction.
Surprisingly, it will be the band’s first time performing at Houston’s Continental Club, an ideal fit for their rockabilly sound and mid century modern aesthetic. Just recently during SXSW in Austin, Heath took the stage at the Austin Continental Club with piano wildman Jason Dee Williams and Dale Watson.
“That was a really fun gig for me and I think it was the first time I got to play that stage since the pandemic. It’s been a while and that’s kind of my home.” Heath is looking forward to finally playing the Houston club, one of the city’s few venues where audiences can get inches away from the heat radiating from his Gretsch guitar.
In 1985 Jim Heath was baptized as the Reverend Horton Heat by a club owner in Deep Ellum creating the root of his band’s path to being considered the godfathers of modern psychobilly music.
Growing up in Corpus Christi, Heath was influenced by his parents’ love of big band music and classic country. After being busted smoking cigarettes by his dad who confronted the young Heath’s perceived lack of direction in life, his father offered him some guitar lessons as an option but continued to have his reservations about his son’s future.
“I took my ratty little Stella guitar and started taking lessons. I didn’t take lessons for very long because I started hanging around guys that were much better than me and I started learning ninth chords and blues licks,” says Heath describing his teacher’s dismay at his jump in learning.
Heath got his education not only by learning from his peers but through his local record store where he devoured old blues records and learned to play other styles of music by listening to albums, setting the needle back and playing along.
Influenced by visiting art galleries in Dallas, he realized that visual artists were often intent on making their individual style immediately identifiable. He applied this concept to his playing and decided to focus on the rockabilly sound.
Around the same time, after reading an ad in a magazine describing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s switch from Triple Threat to Double Trouble as a more “turned up and aggressive, Hendrix style of blues” Heath turned the mirror on himself.
“So what he did with blues, I figured I’ll do that same thing with rockabilly. I’ll just make it a little bit more turned up, aggressive and put aside the idea of trying to be the perfect, authentic rockabilly group. Instead, I’ll write my own songs and I’ll use that authentic rockabilly thing but amplify it and get a little bit more aggressive, a little faster with it and that’s how I developed the Reverend Horton Heat style.”
“I’ll use that authentic rockabilly thing but amplify it and get a little bit more aggressive, a little faster with it and that’s how I developed the Reverend Horton Heat style.”
37 years, 12 albums and countless tours later, The Reverend Horton Heat style continues to draw in audiences and influence newer bands. Much like his musical influences, Heath manages to make naughty, rocking songs with a touch of the catchy and seemingly innocent vibes of the era that inspires him.
When asked if he’s surprised at the continued draw of the band Heath says, “Let me tell you, it started blowing my mind that it was still going after we went past the first year.” Heath describes thinking initially he could do this “guy named Reverend Horton Heat” for maybe a few months or weeks even but never imagined initially that it would go this far.
“My dad was really correct to tell me that I could be wasting my life doing this music thing because it’s so hard but what has ended up happening is that I’ve worked for Reverend Horton Heat longer than he worked for his company. Somehow Reverend Horton Heat proved him wrong and I’m grateful for his advice and grateful that he was wrong too.”
In 1999 Heath started his own label Fun-Guy Records, a self described “vanity project” where he initially released singles on vinyl for his own project and later expanded to recording other artists putting to use his extensive collection of vintage gear.
Last month he released The Roots of the Rev, Vol. 1, a toned down homage to the songs that made him and his longtime bassist Jimbo Wallace who they are today with Heath selecting songs that carry a personal connection to him and his band.
“It was a chance to get to use the vintage gear and record in a way that was more old style so we had a blast doing it. I call it lo-fi but high energy. It was a little bit of a gamble for a band like us. We’ve done a lot of records in some of the best studios in the world with some of the best engineers and producers in the world and I kind of got tired of that because I wanted something more raw, something like this new record.”
The Roots of the Rev, Vol. 1 is a warm and intimate examination of Heath’s musical heroes and shows him and Wallace in a rare slower speed but without losing their edge and chemistry between the two. They take on the very song that perked Heath’s interest in Wallace many years ago after hearing him play around backstage with their take on Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” and Wallace on vocals.
The longevity of his career and focus on a classic style has allowed them to work with some of their long gone idols. “Getting to have a connection to some of these older people has been one of the greatest things about all of this. I got to meet Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins told me stories for an hour and a half, I got to meet Johnny Cash and I played guitar with Screamin Jay Hawkins.”
With Fun-Guy Records and his future projects Heath hopes to go beyond the preservation of rock and roll. “I wanna bring back real rock and roll,” says Heath describing his view that the genre could not be stopped and the big labels didn’t want it in it’s original form per say but always strived for a more watered down version of what rock and roll really was in its inception.
“They wanted it to be manufactured formulas and there’s no way to manufacture formi for what Jerry Lee and Jason Dee Williams do. It truly is like the original punk rock and so my theory is that it never had its day in the sun. It’s such high energy music that it needs to come back.”
Reverend Horton Heat will perform with Piñata Protest on Saturday, April 1 at The Continental Club,3700 Main. 9 p.m, $27-42.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
