MUSIC :: NOVEMBER 17, 2004

DVD rolls in sludge rock dirt

By WHITNEY SPOTTS

Death Valley Dragline
With PB Army, Abdullah and Red Giant, Sat., Nov.20 at Mac’s Bar, 2700 E. Michigan Ave. in Lansing. Doors open at 9 p.m. with a $5 cover. 21+. For more information visit www.macsbar.com.Take a couple of guys jamming in a radio-ready blues-rock band, a bassist who has just recently picked up the instrument, and a bluegrass guitarist, and the last thing you’d expect to come out of their union would be Death Valley Dragline, the dark, dirty sludge-rock band out of Rives Junction, a small town just north of Jackson.

The band’s music, inspired by groups like Corrosion of Conformity, Kyuss and Black Sabbath, grew out of the boredom guitarist/vocalist Donny Thunders and drummer/vocalist The Prodigy, aka Tom Trujillo, felt playing a couple of times a week in a band that wasn’t nearly heavy enough, nor nearly as dedicated as they felt it should be. The two began working on 10 or so songs that Thunders had already written, and started to look for a second guitarist and a bass player to round out their sound.

Death Valley Dragline models the rocker uniform: (l to r) Tom Trujillo, Donny Thunders, Dave Barnett and Mean Joel Green.

They stumbled on “Mean” Joel Green while he was playing in a bluegrass band at a party, and the three started jamming on an Alice in Chains song during one of the band’s breaks. “Me and Tom, we were writing songs already,” Thunders says, “and I just had this in my head for some reason that we were going to get Joel. I finally got the number from his uncle and I was ready to call him up, and the next day or something I went to the party store on Leslie and I almost ran right into him. He was going out as I was coming in, with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and we almost ran into each other. I thought, ‘There’s the omen right there.’”

A frustrating search for a bass player ensued. “We’d get bass players that would come in and be good and everything, but we’d start talking our shit about how serious about it we were and everything and they’d just scurry.” Thunders says.

Keeping with an age-old tradition, the boys decided it might be better to find a virgin and teach her how to touch them, so to speak, so they recruited Johnny Reb, aka Dave Barnett, a longtime friend of Thunders who had just recently picked up the bass, and the lineup was complete.

The music could be umbrella’d under sludge rock — gravelly, riff-driven rock with vocals alternating between Thunders and Trujillo. “It’s tough to put it into straight stoner rock,” Green says, “because some of the songs are metal, some are straight-up stoner rock, some are a mix. We don’t have just one type of song.”

Trujillo says much of the lyrical bent centers on power struggles or tirades against modern radio music. “A lot of the stuff, how we approach it as singers,” Thunders adds, “is probably more on a hardcore level. We listen to a lot of hardcore — Skinlab, Hatebreed, stuff like that.”

The band has been pleased to notice the rising popularity of other local bands that fall into the stoner rock category like The Fallopian Dudes (who recently snagged a spot opening for Clutch at the Orbit Room Nov. 27), but stress that the pressure is on themselves to succeed, rather than on listening trends. “I’ve kind of found that it’s not a very good practice, across the board as an artist, you don’t want to go around comparing yourself with other people,” Thunders explains. “You just want to keep on the vision you’ve got. If a hundred million people think it’s the shit, then that’s great, and if a thousand people think it’s good, then that’s good, as long as they like it for the same reasons you like it for.”

Saturday the band will play with PB Army (named after Pabst Blue Ribbon – stoner rockers unite!), the “high energy death rock” of Abdullah and Red Giant.

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