The Big Chair

Kansas City’s Scott Hobart is making his return to rock. For one night, at least, the city will feel like 1995, when heavy, guitar-driven songs, à la Hum, took center stage in the underground scene. From 1993 to 1997, Hobart’s three-piece monster rock machine Giant’s Chair spread the gospel of the Kansas City scene across the nation, along with cohorts like Boy’s Life, Shiner and Germbox.

Since then, Hobart has formed country outfit Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys, a honky-tonk antithesis to the overdriven rock sound of Giant’s Chair. He also has moved around the country, from Buffalo, New York, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Yet KC remains his nesting place, and loud rock is an old friend rather than a distant memory.

“I’ve always been inspired by the KC music scene — I’ve definitely fed off it,” Hobart says. “I haven’t quite been around enough yet back in KC to really hear what’s going on, but I saw the Stella Link the other night, and I’ve seen the String and Return. I think these bands are making big guitar music.

“I like expansive, epic-sounding things, and it’s still happening in KC,” Hobart continues. “We [Giant’s Chair] all live in KC [again]. Paul [Ackerman, the drummer] was in the Farewell Bend and [lived in] D.C., but that finished up, and he’s been back for a while.” (The lineup is rounded out by bassist Byron Collum of Doris Henson.)

Giant’s Chair hasn’t played a reunion show since it hit the Brick in October 2003. Could the one Saturday at the Record Bar mark a permanent return for the band?

“I like to think it’s just been a long time since we played last,” Hobart says. “If I start to think about things in terms of reunion or reformation, I start thinking too hard about stuff, and then it’s harder to rock.”

For now, the band’s status is up in the air. But it’s safe to say that its searing, fuzzed-out sound will continue to be part of KC’s underground rock community, if only at sporadic reunion shows. Hobart’s other projects, from country-western music to building sets for the Coterie Theatre, are likely to keep him around.

“If the fact that I still get goosebumps from Giant’s Chair songs is to be trusted, then this has been a formula for timelessness for me,” Hobart says. “I trust goosebumps. Rex Hobart is as much about heart work as Giant’s Chair was and is.”