Metro Pulse/Music/Helldorados

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But hell, listen at 'em cover the Hag 'n all

by Mike Gibson

On a warm summer Saturday night, Shane Parkey sits on the recently-revamped patio of Cumberland Avenue's Long Branch Saloon, dissecting old Merle Haggard nuggets with Cowboy, the establishment's fearsomely bald and grey-mustachioed beertender. His favorite, says Parkey—whose own vertiginously spiraling handlebar imparts a striking resemblance to former baseball great Rollie Fingers—is "Swingin' Doors," a choice that draws earnest nods of approval from both Cowboy and the man at Parkey's left, blond, raw-boned, and multiply-pierced Josh Noble.

"What a great song; a woman throwin' you out, so you go and live in a bar," Parkey enthuses. "That's one that, ideally, I'd love to do a cover of one night."

Such an endeavor would see Parkey ably assisted by drummer Noble, guitarist David Hamilton, and bassist Anthony "Horse" Campbell—AKA the Helldorados, a scruffy band of black T-shirt rockers who have become a house favorite at the bar. And the hypothetical cover version of Haggard's cry-in-your-beer classic would be sandwiched between brooding strains from the diverse likes of Black Sabbath, the Misfits, and Johnny Cash, not to mention a clutch of hard-bitten originals inflected equally with throwback country and the coercive simplicity of hell-bent three-chord rock.

"The stuff we like is the stuff that comes across live," says Noble. "Even if we don't necessarily like where a band is starting from, we dig it if they have the energy and the attitude."

"The key word there is 'attitude,'" adds Parkey. "Some of this stuff you hear on (modern rock) radio, with the guitars hanging around their ankles and tuned down to 'Q,' all of it sounds the same."

Members of the Helldorados first stumbled into the same Morristown practice den some two years ago, united by their tri-cities roots and time served at Walters State Community College. After what Parkey calls a "Spinal Tap rotation of bass players," Campbell was the final permanent member to join when, at his audition, he took the four-stringers' slot captive with a showing that effectively frightened the other three members into acquiescence.

"He walked in, plugged in, and started screaming," Parkey remembers with a dubious nod of the head. "He was louder than God. We all looked at him and said 'You're hired.' That boy just ain't quite right."

Since their cacophonous coalescence, the Helldorados have played any number of low-paying, low-profile local gigs, and issued one CD-EP, an eponymous four-song effort released to local stores in April.

Though it lacks the sheer netherworldly intensity of their live set, Helldorados offers a darkly representative sampling of the band's moody, sottish rock. "Gone," the first track, sounds like a Ramones session gone awry, as if some belligerent roadhouse drunk had wandered in and usurped Joey's mike. And "Nightmares," with Parkey's frayed and booze-pickled tenor wandering all over time signature and key, has the lurching, haunted quality of a Misfits song at half-speed.

"People who haven't even heard us have called us 'three-chord, derivative junk,'" Parkey fairly spits. "Well, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we are trying to do something that has its own personality. And if you're gonna steal, you've gotta steal from the right people."

Despite the intemperate, sometimes even depraved legacy of the band's immediate forebears, all four members have respectable day jobs: Parkey as a grocery manager, Noble as a wholesaler, Campbell as an audio specialist at Guitar Center, and Hamilton as an electronics teacher at Tennessee Technological Institute. And according to Noble, there's no shame in normalcy, even for a band of black-leather rock 'n' rollers.

"We may be blowing our street cred, but we all gotta pay rent, and we all hate baloney," says Noble. "We're just not in a blues/classic rock cover band like a lot of the other day-job oldies. We don't have any pretensions about it."

"I've been there, done the Paul Westerberg diet—a beer and a bag of BBQ chips for breakfast," adds Parkey. "It's not much fun. At the same time, I wouldn't want to be making a living off classic rock cover tunes, $500 a week at the Dew Drop Inn and hating every stinkin' minute of it. The biggest compliment I can get is when someone hears our music and says 'That sounds like a Helldorados song.'"