The Pink Socks, the Black Tarantulas and Brimstone Howl burn down a midtown basement

“Everybody Wants To Be My Man” by the Pink Socks

“This song is called ‘One Quick Minute,’ and that’s all you have on this earth, you little wasters!”

As the band launches into a punk-fast blues burner, someone lights off a firecracker. With a smoking hiss, the cigar-sized rocket skitters across the floor and hits the whitewashed basement wall, showering some poor guy’s heels with hot, yellow sparks before it erupts in three rapid pops.

“Hey, did you kick me?” asks the guy who lit the firecracker.

“No, it was him,” I answer, and point to the guy whose pant legs absorbed the rocket sparks.

The ad hoc pyrotechnician sidekicks the guy and sidles away.

I’m in the basement of a house in the vicinity of Linwood and Gillham, at the best rock show Kansas City has had on a Sunday night in probably a long while.

The place is called the Whorehouse. It’s the kind of flop you don’t ask too many questions about, lest the tenants come around and ask why you’re asking. The bands tonight are local acts the Pink Socks and the Black Tarantulas and an out-of-town band called Brimstone Howl.

I’d arrived around 8:30 p.m. to find a living room filled with leather-jacket kids smoking cigarettes and drinking canned beer. Something raucous and trashy was playing on the stereo. The guys of Brimstone Howl, an old-school-rock quartet out of Lincoln, Nebraska, were drinking from two bottles of Thunderbird wine. Lead singer and guitarist John Ziegler told me that last night’s show in Lawrence at the Replay Lounge had been their best ever in that town. He also said that earlier in the day, he and his bandmates had bowled at Ward Parkway Lanes and eaten at Gates Barbecue. Quite the Kansas City experience.

From the basement, a guitar and drums rumble. The Pink Socks are getting ready to play.

It amazes me how many people still don’t know about this band. Formerly called the Litigators, the Socks are a group of true devotees to American rock music of the ’60s — to an era when the black soul music of Stax and Motown melded on the radio with the bands of the British invasion.

Fronted by skinny, redheaded, shit-talkin’, freestylin’ preacher man Jeremiah Kidwell, the Socks are so irresistibly good that — full disclosure — in 2006, I joined them for a month. I filled in on bass guitar for two shows, one at Davey’s and one at Fred P. Ott’s. It was a gig that any self-respecting Kansas City bassist should’ve been hungry to take, even though it ended quickly for me. After all, I’m supposed to be writing about local bands, not playing in them. But I digress.

It’s the second time I’ve seen the Pink Socks in a week and the nth time overall, and, once again, their soulful garage-rock fills me with the kind of pure rock vibes I wish I could bottle up and drink with my morning coffee. Slinky brunette Calandra Bidwell now plays bass and sings backup, and Fender Rhodes man Josh Mobley also plays a tape-echo device that adds a supernatural layer to their songs.

Along with their gut-punch, highway-rambling hymns, the Socks do bouncing covers of forgotten pop songs by the likes of Kaleidoscope (“Jenny Artichoke”) and the Starfires (“Linda”), the latter of which the Socks discovered on the lost-gem compilation Mondo Frat Dance Bash A Go Go.

The Pink Socks are the best band of the evening — of pretty much any evening you’ll come across in this town nowadays — but the second band, the Black Tarantulas, definitely holds the crowd.

Taking their cue from Atlanta garage-blues revivalist band the Black Lips (who, incidentally, are set to play the very next night in Lawrence), the guys in the Black Tarantulas bash out three-chord primitive rock and squeal into the microphone cathartically, as though their balls are being twisted by the Grand Inquisitor. To add to the mayhem, one Tarantula on the side blows into a jug of beer, hoots into the mic and plays a harmonica.

Drunk on the Thunderbird, Brimstone Howl takes the stage next. Ziegler spreads his arms wide and calls for complete silence. There’s a count off, the band starts rocking, and Ziegler starts doing pushups on the floor, his ’70s Gibson Marauder still slung over his shoulder, issuing buzzes of feedback.

Brimstone plays for the better part of an hour. Firecrackers are lit. A mosh pit is started (and quickly stopped). And, eventually, the evening ends with various members of the night’s bands picking up the instruments and playing until they run out of steam. That’s one thing you don’t get at a bar — bands turning their time onstage into an epic jam. At a place like the Whorehouse, though, the musicians rock all night.