As fans trickled into the venue, Houston’s own ska-punk nine-piece combo, Los Skarnales, took the stage. If you’ve lived in Dallas for some time, you might remember the band for headlining Taco Libre, an annual food, music and wrestling festival that sadly never returned after COVID.
The band’s energy is as infectious as it gets, suited perfectly to the macho, chant-along style of Spanish punk rock. Lead singer Felipe Galvan is a master at crowd interaction, drawing the room closer and closer as it filled. He did so just in time for one of the band’s signatures, “Rude Rude Boy,” in which the saxophone and trombone players sprint into the audience to jump along with whatever dancers or moshers have broken out.
Los Skarnales brought the show to the crowd as they weaved in and out of the audience, playing the entire time.
Andrew Sherman
Whoever made the call to attach Skarnales to a Horton Heat show should be commended. Honing in on the energy that an act creates rather than the similarities in their sound is what breeds the best shows, and these two were perfectly complementary.
The next 60 minutes are hard to put into words, but we'll try: After Skarnales left the stage, 65-year-old Memphian piano prodigy Jason D. Williams entered alongside his son on the drums and grandson on the bass guitar. His performance style was that of a tornado with a penchant for rockabilly, or perhaps what would happen had Jerry Lee Lewis spent a year in a straitjacket and was suddenly let loose again with nothing but a piano and an audience.
Williams’ set had him flipping himself onto the piano and playing it from his stomach, grabbing his crotch and dropping it onto the piano to land a perfect chord and throwing himself to the floor while keeping rhythm on the keys with the heels of his cowboy boots. He was also quasi-incoherent between tunes, speaking a seemingly intentional brand of gibberish that included the lie (later refuted by the Reverend himself) that he and lead singer Jim Heath were adopted brothers.
Jason D. Williams' old-school mix of rockabilly and boogie woogie sent shockwaves through the crowd.
Andrew Sherman
Williams and Skarnales are two of the toughest acts to follow in the music business, but the Reverend was inevitably up to the challenge. A scowling, howling Heath took the stage around 9:30, opening with the instrumental “Big Sky” into “Baddest of the Bad” from 1994’s Liquor In The Front.
For true crossover appeal, look no further than the Reverend, whose crowd was split between high-school punks in Black Flag T-shirts and grandfathers clad in bolo ties and belt buckles.
Those two demographics came right together when Heath let out the first yelp of “Psychobilly Freakout,” inciting a mosh pit with maybe the largest age range of all time. Once both hell and the seal of “I want to slam into a stranger who's either twice or half my age” broke loose, the crowd in front of the stage never slowed down. It was equal parts punk and podunk, in a way that was strangely heartening.
The current iteration of the band plays as a trio, fronted by Heath with 35-year veteran Jimbo Wallace on the upright bass and Jonathan Jeter on drums. After their introductions, they played into “Galaxy 500,” a rowdy 2002 cut that could’ve ended the show.
But after briefly exiting the stage, the band returned for their iconic, almost spoken-word “Bales of Cocaine,” produced by Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers. The last song of the evening was a cover of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” released by the band as a single in May.
Those who made it out to Longhorn on Saturday night were treated to an excellently booked, rambunctious four-hour party. You’d be hard pressed to find another concert with this level of sustained energy and engagement on both sides of the stage.
