Wayward Son

When the band finishes its last song, a woman at the end of the bar speaks up. “It’s like a sustained orgasm,” she says.

A Wednesday night at Davey’s doesn’t seem like the typical time or place for women to be comparing blues to great sex. In fact, how often does that happen anywhere?

Kansas City should rejoice because, for now, we’ve got a new organ in town, and the man behind it sure knows how to use it.

John Wesley Myers plays keys in two of the best blues bands anywhere: the Black Diamond Heavies and the Immortal Lee County Killers. These out-of-town trios play the blues hard, fast and dirty — none of that stale “Mustang Sally” shit. They play as if punk came before the blues.

A Southerner and devotee of the Delta, Myers moved to KC over the holidays to be with his girlfriend, Sarah Vaughn, who, in addition to having issued the above comparison, insists, “This is about the sexiest music you can find.”

Myers is quite possibly the most enthralling musician I’ve seen here in years. The guy’s mom must have held him by the ankle and dipped him in the Mississippi River when he was a baby, because he’s drenched in soul. If you don’t get off on his music, you’ll at least step back and admit he can play like a maniac.

And if — like me — you can’t stand the middle-aged-white-dude harmonica blues that rule the withered KC scene, then you’ll agree with one of the night’s attendants, local rocker Cody Wyoming. “They remind me that I don’t hate the blues,” he said of Myers and the Heavies.

Skinny and long-haired, with a thin handlebar mustache and garish silver rings on half his fingers, Myers looks like a misplaced backing musician from some ’70s Allman Brothers tour.

Myers himself had only one backing musician, drummer Glen Hockmeier of KC’s the Gaslights. They’d gotten together for the first time earlier that day, and that night was their debut. Myers had been through town twice in recent months with the Heavies, playing to blown-away crowds and winning the heart of at least one Kansas City girl.

Between sets at Davey’s, the onstage sex machine was meek and affable. He kept apologizing for being unrehearsed, claiming he was self-conscious about his performance. But if he was holding anything back when playing without much practice, then he must burst into flames when fully prepared. When he sat behind the wobbly Fender Rhodes electric piano — positioned, appropriately, outside the door to the women’s restroom — everything changed.

What happened was somewhere between divine intervention and voodoo possession.

He ran his Rhodes through a Fender and a fuzz pedal, which warped the mellow, bell-tone keyboard into a dirty, distorted, bellowing beast. Sometimes Myers would sit in close and calm, knees apart and elbows at his sides as he made love to the mike with a deep, fiendish rasp that rang of pain, cigarettes, love and gin.

Then he’d slide back and stretch his arms out straight, thrashing his brown locks and pounding the keys with hands like claws, playing like he’d fall over dead if he didn’t keep accelerating.

And then he’d rise partway out of his chair, roaring into the mike as though Satan had cut out his soul with a rusty carving knife.

Even his ballads had spiritual power. In fact, it was during his version of Bob Dylan‘s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” that the University of Texas won the Rose Bowl — the two events clearly being connected. Myers also does soul, gospel, funk, and rock and roll, and he even got some spontaneous help from the Gaslights’ Abigail Henderson on a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed.”

Twice during the night, four or five women came down to dance. The first time was to “Down, Down, Down,” Tom Waits‘ organ-shattering ode to self-destruction, which Myers dedicated to a birthday girl in the house. By the end, the women on the floor were in full-swing self-abandonment, yelling for more after each song, until Myers and Hockmeier ran out of tunes. That was around midnight. Myers had kicked off the night at 8 and taken frequent breaks because he and Hockmeier had worked up only about an hour and a half of material.

But Myers had also spread things out with anecdotal song introductions steeped in Southern mystique and depravity. For example, there was the one about the night his car broke down on the interstate outside of Wildwood, Georgia, and his shoes fell apart and he had to walk down the highway barefoot while coming off cocaine.

“It’s gotta be sexy, it’s gotta be raw and it’s gotta be real, you know what I’m sayin’?” he’d said before the show in casual conversation — not like some drunken geek but like a man on a mission.

Judging by the reception Myers got that Wednesday at Davey’s — playing a loose, unpromoted show with a $3 cover — it’s obvious this town is starved for some real, sex-soaked blues and soul.

He’ll keep playing Wednesday nights at Davey’s until the end of the month; then the Heavies join him for a show at Fred P. Ott’s on the Plaza on Sunday, January 29. Tours overseas and around the country, including a stop at South by Southwest, will keep Myers away from town in the coming months.

But if people around here support him — and if things go well with his lady — maybe he’ll pitch his tent awhile longer.