Asylum Street Spankers

The Asylum Street Spankers ride the line between genuine love for roots music and parody of it. The Austin, Texas, troupe uses banjo, fiddle, saw, acoustic guitar and haunting female vocal, but the presentation isn’t exactly typical. In fact, the Spankers are about as subversive as folk gets. Especially when lead eccentric Wammo has the microphone, uttering all manner of irreverence: I’ll read Bukowski in the gutter/With a hooker on each arm/And a wine bottle up my ass/I’ll make you smoke the majesty/Of my impending mullet. Whoa. You won’t find that on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Wammo also claims that Dave Grohl stole the concept for Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf from Wammo’s Faster Than the Speed of Suck. If you catch Wammo at the bar, which is likely, that’s a good icebreaker.