Noodle Shooter
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“The Game” by Rex Hobart’s Spaghetti Western:
Scott Hobart is no stranger to schmaltz. For nearly a decade, he has performed in the shoes of his country alter-ego Rex Hobart, a beat-down, repentant crooner who often appears as the polar opposite of the cheery Scott his friends know and love. Hobart’s theatrical streak aims for even campier heights with a three-years-in-the-making Spaghetti Western project. Alternately billed as Rex Hobart’s Spaghetti Western Orchestra and Lead Bloodgold and the Dead Men, the seven-piece band plays classics from such composers as Ennio Morricone as well as original compositions from Hobart’s hyperactive vault (he also fronts rock band Giant’s Chair). The prop-heavy production returns to the stage June 16 at Davey’s Uptown after a year-long hiatus composing new material.
The Pitch: What got you started down this road?
Hobart: I love gimmicks. I would rather be considered an amusement-park showbiz kind of dude than a serious artist. It’s a lot less pressure, and you can have a lot more fun.
Which films or directors got you into Spaghetti Westerns?
Of course the trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that Sergio Leone did. That was the stuff that got me into the style — the way that it looked and the roughness of it. I liked the stories of the guys who are above or below society and not playing by its rules. [Hollywood] had always made the cowboy-and-Indian films about the white expansionists winning the West. Leone wanted flawed characters who were lone riders just killing for money … which to me was a logical progression of the idea of western expansion: greed at all costs.
I started reading up on it and found some other ones that were even more ridiculous, like Django. They’ve made probably 60 Django films, and I think it’s a different guy playing Django every time. You kind of try to find the ones that are the freakiest. There’s one called Django Kill … If You Live, Shoot! It’s about this guy who is shot and left for dead with some Mexicans and he’s a half-breed. He makes his way out of this shallow grave, and these Indians find him and nurse him back to health and give him these golden bullets to exact his revenge. …
What inspired the transition to this new project?
I’ve done country music for 10 years, and I sort of miss trying to break new ground melodically. I wanted to experiment with some other sounds and get back to playing electric guitar.
Did the genre feel foreign to you at first?
It felt kind of natural because I’ve always liked big melodies and spaced-out reverb. It’s not bombastic like Giant’s Chair, but the melodies came. … My formula for the Spaghetti Western stuff has been a progression with a train beat and a minor chord. That’s pretty much all you need, and then you can kind of noodle with reverb over the top.
Do you listen to Spaghetti Western music apart from the films?
Yeah. Ennio Morricone made the music for a lot of them, and that’s a huge influence on us. You can buy crazy three-disc sets of Spaghetti Western soundtracks. It veers into psychedelia a lot, probably just because a lot of things were going that route in the late ’60s. It’s not all dark, reverbed-out guitar craziness. Some of it is pretty playful. There’s these weird, really goofy pieces. It’s all out there and it’s all good.
