Night of psychobilly to 'wreck' Mexico City

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 28, 2009

It starts with a peppy upright bass, fast-paced drums and a twangy electric guitar, evoking images of twirling poodle skirts and slicked back pompadours. The guitar soon takes on a harder, punk-like sound as the vocals chime in with hoarse, husky shouts.

This weekend in Mexico City, five bands filed under this part-rockabilly, part-punk category will help play tribute to one of the latest music subcultures to spread across Mexico - a genre known as "psychobilly."

The Tabaltix, based in the San Francisco area, will headline the "Noches de Wrecking" ("Nights of Wrecking") show held tonight at Multiforo Alicia in the city's Colonia Roma. "Wrecking" refers to the thrashing free-for-all dance style popular at psychobilly concerts that takes a step beyond punk dancing and actually involves punching one another - in good spirit, of course.

Also set to perform at the show are Los Mumblers, from Coachella, Calif.; Romeo and the Frankensteins, from QuerActaro; and Wicked and Los Ultratumbatz, both from the Federal District.

"Psychobilly has just barely started in Mexico, but it is growing," said Ignacio Pineda, who runs the Alicia concert club.

"It's not at a massive level, but the scene is still very alive,"

The music subculture got its start in the 1980s when punk and rockabilly (or "rock n' roll" plus "hillbilly") musicians started fusing together the sounds. New York-based The Cramps led the way with lyrics inspired by drive-in horror movies and science fiction films. When the band took its style to England, the psychobilly scene exploded in Western Europe before taking over Southern California.

The psychobilly movement has seen a resurgence in the past decade, with some bands reflecting earlier groups while others have placed a stronger emphasis on blood-and-gore costumes and heavier metal guitar, although the category is hardly easy to define.

"I love playing psychobilly because everything is crazy and everyone is different," said Hiena, who sings in Wicked and helped organize the Friday event.

She said the subculture started to grow in Mexico City around 2003, when she and a group of friends stumbled across older records and discovered the music. They soon realized pockets of psychobilly fanatics had popped up throughout the country, and now around 30 bands with varied sounds and styles have claimed their stake on the Mexican scene.

Pineda said Mexico's first psychobilly pioneers include Los Pardos, a group that nearly a decade ago started playing shows on the local rockabilly scene because its harder cousin didn't really exist at the time.

The Tabaltix vocalist and upright bass player Johnny said his three-member band was looking forward to playing the Mexico psychobilly circuit. The group played a show in Guadalajara earlier this week and will travel to Puebla on Saturday.

"It seems like the whole psychobilly crowd is growing and growing in Mexico City, so we thought we'd try it out," he said.

Johnny said his first introduction to the scene began as a 3-year-old listening to the original rockabilly star Elvis Presley. As a teenager, he and his brother Jeff, who sings and plays guitar in the band, would mail-order records by groups like The Cramps, Holland-based Batmobile and Scottish rockers The Shakin Pyramids.

His band, which includes drummer Miles, favors a style geared more towards their 1980s predecessors rather than the darker, gorier sounds of today's tendency.

The 26-year-old bassist said that while many European psychobilly fans are in their fifties, as followers of the original music movement, most fans in the United States are in their teens. He noted as a complication that the band's prominent fan base falls between 13 and 18 years old - a group too young to enter the 21-and-over clubs where the group mostly plays.

Hiena said that while most of the Mexican psychobilly band members are between ages 25 and 30, the majority of fans are under 22 and have been swayed from the punk music scene. Age, however, is less of an issue in Mexico, where the legal drinking age is 18 and where restrictions aren't as heavily enforced.

Pineda said that Friday's psychobilly show is only the fourth of its kind for the Alicia forum and that there could potentially be more in the distant future.

"This city is changing, the sounds are changing, and this is part of that flight," he said.