The Glenmont Popes @ the Cotton Club, Atlanta. 2/21/98

After his performance, the Popes' bass player, Randy Rawlinson, showed me his right hand. The tips of his first two fingers were bleeding and at the center of this bloody mess was torn skin and exposed tissue. During the show, Rawlinson was plucking the strings of his bass so furiously that his hands looked like tarantulas on a hot plate.

Afterwards, his right hand looked like a left-over hot dish. I doubt he felt the pain from his fingers during the show; Rawlinson's energy, concentration, and raw pleasure made him insensible to pain. You probably could have jolted him with a cattle prod and it wouldn't have compared to the jolt of energy he got from playing. When a band works this good, nothing registers but the music.

A band at the top of their form can bring an audience into their sphere, can share their thrills. The Glenmont Popes provide themselves and their audience one thrill after another. At the peak of their set, my fiance said, "I feel like I'm on a huge roller coaster ride going a hundred miles an hour." The Popes know that a raging rock and roll band is supposed to make people feel like that.

The audience felt it at this show. Although the Glenmont Popes had only middle slot in a triple billing, the audience demanded three encores from them. Their final encore was a version of Doc Pomus' "Little Sister" set to a bad-ass "Peter Gunn Theme" rhythm, which made the whole thing even more lewd than the Elvis recording. Yet "Little Sister" was probably the lowest energy point in their performance. The preceding songs were that hot and fast.

The Glenmont Popes' songs pay tribute to punk and rockabilly sources, but their songs are basically blues tunes at twice the normal speed. Rodney Henry, the Popes' vocalist (and guitarist - I'll get to that later), sings with a smoky gritty voice about the enticements and tortures of love and sex, in the most unadorned terms; in the opening lines of their new album, Henry growls, "Come here baby you're making me a mess / all that stuff wrapped up inside that dress."

The Popes draw on blues as their main aesthetic component, but they also draw upon the speed and spareness of punk and rockabilly. Not content to stand still, they are exanding their range of styles; they included a new song in their set, "Ballad de Mater Dolorosa," that borrows the central riff of "Malaguena," a standard of Latino folk and rock which had been recorded as an instrumental by Ritchie Valens.

The Glenmont Popes' drummer, Kurt Celtnieks, chain smoked throughout the entire show. Although I was concerned for his health, I was never concerned about the beat. When his cigarette burned too low, he pulled out another one as if he were grabbing a new drumstick (which he did several times as well), then lit it with a furnace lighter while pounding furiously with his free limbs.

Celtnieks liked to make eye contact with his bandmates and get them to sync up with his accented beats. He kick starts every song with a reliable rhythm and he often ends songs with a set of "stingers," requiring his mates to watch him for cues. In some ways, Celtnieks leads the band from behind his drum kit.

Yet the lead "voice" of this band is undoubtedly Henry's hollow-body electric guitar. Henry's playing amazes. I've taken lead guitarists to see this band and they shake their heads in wonder at his playing. Henry alternates between stocatto chord riffs and scorching bluesy leads that sound like a cross between Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Reverend Horton Heat. His guitar shouts, pleads, cries, and races through familiar and unfamiliar licks faster than you can catch your breath.

The Glenmont Popes have two CDs available, Cherry Burnin' Love and Love In Flames. Both contain great Popes songs and performances, but the second one, Love In Flames, has punchier production, bringing it closer to the heat I felt from their live show.