ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JULY 15, 2004
By Steve Newton
When I call Adam Renshaw up on his cell, the drummer for the Forty-Fives is cruising through Sacramento in his band’s van, enjoying a game of Scrabble. The nerd-friendly word game might not seem like a staple of the fabled rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but Renshaw couldn’t care less–he’s just happy to be rolling steadily along to his next gig.
“We had a really bad week last week,” he explains. “Our last van broke down four times in five days on its way from Atlanta to Tucson, and by the time something broke for the fourth time, we just realized that it wasn’t worth putting any more money in it. So Yep Roc helped us get a new one.”
Good ol’ Yep Roc, the North Carolina-based record company that’s home to such road-tested acts as Southern Culture on the Skids, Los Straitjackets, and the Reverend Horton Heat (whom the Forty-Fives open for at the Commodore on Saturday [July 17]). The label wasn’t about to spring for a factory-installed CD player, though, so there are no cool tunes accompanying Renshaw’s quest for a triple-word score.
“Right now,” he says, “we’re in the very unfortunate position of being stuck with only having commercial radio to listen to on all these long drives. And it’s even more terrible than I remember, I can tell ya that.”
If Renshaw had been better prepared for the setbacks of the road, he could have brought along the portable Panasonic 8-track player that is so prominently displayed on the cover of the Forty-Fives’ new CD, High Life High Volume. He scored the funky blue ’70s castoff for a buck at a thrift store a few years ago.
“A friend of mine managed to fix it, and I was able to immediately rock out to some Creedence,” notes the affable skin-basher. “You’d be surprised how good it sounds.”
The Forty-Fives’ latest disc sounds pretty fine, too. It was produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by the Dirtbombs’ Jim Diamond–or, as Renshaw calls him, “the unofficial mayor of Detroit”. So what particular talents did the wily Diamond bring to his crucial role in the studio?
“Well, first and foremost, I have to say that he makes a helluva cuppa coffee, which is probably as important as anything else. He makes a fantastic cuppa coffee, and has a good ear.”
High Life High Volume sees Renshaw, guitarist-vocalist Bryan G. Malone, bassist Mark McMurtry, and keyboardist Trey Tidwell going hog-wild on a hearty batch of garage-roots tracks. One standout is the superfunky version of Otis Blackwell’s oft-covered “Daddy Rolling Stone”, which was recently billed as “the coolest song in the world” on Steven Van Zandt’s influential Underground Garage radio show.
High Life is the quartet’s second release on Yep Roc, and Renshaw couldn’t be happier with the partnership.
“They really gave us the shot in the arm that we needed when we got hooked up with them a while back,” he points out. “And if it weren’t for them, we’d still be stuck in the desert right now.”