HEAVY NECKER
by Sleazegrinder
Heavy Necker is the last gang in town, man. If this were Heavy Metal Parking Lot, they’d be Zebraman and his pals, sending punk back to Mars or wherever that shit is from. If this were Altamont, they’d be cooling out when Mick told ’em to cool out. If this were 1994, they’d be scrawling “Kurt Lives” with Sharpies on the backs of stop signs all over town. They’re pinball wizards and space cowboys, roadrunners and diamond dogs, scruffy street kids with guitars imagining a world where the radio never stops playing, the beer never stops flowing, and all the girls wanna dance. Formed in the very unlikely climes of Peabody, Mass. a handful of years ago, Heavy Necker is a power trio in the clinical sense, a six-legged cyclone of balls-out, soul-powered, holy fucking rock ’n’ roll that belies not only their tender ages, but their whole generational zeitgeist, really.
“I just like to call it rock, what we play,” says Chris Cardone, Heavy Necker’s guitarist/vocalist/songwriter. “People are always like, ‘What are you guys, classic rock? Alternative rock?’ Nobody just says ‘rock’ anymore. That frustrates me, because it’s a sign that people aren’t willing to explore anymore, they’re not willing to dig, they want easy labels. But at the end of the day, that’s what we are, we’re a rock band. I don’t want to be known as anything else.”
That’s been a tough distinction for the band since their inception, really, especially given their neighborhood. Heavy Necker is surrounded on all sides by extreme metal bands, the defacto sound of bored suburban youth.
“That’s kinda the hand we’ve been dealt,” shrugs drummer Mike DeSantis. “We have to play with metal bands because there’s no other rock bands in town.”
“Everything’s a modern metal influence,” adds bass player Keith Kurpiel. “Nobody’s going for a classic sound. Nobody’s going for fuckin’ Hendrix, you know?”
Of course, neither were Heavy Necker, in the beginning. Although no evidence remains, the band’s salad days found them doing what most cool teenagers in the garage do: learning to play “Ace of Spades.”
“I think we realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t our musical identity to be Motorhead,” says Cardone. “When we first got together, it was very communal, it was just this idea, ‘let’s get together and play hard, fast, balls to the wall rock ’n’ roll,’ but then we realized that we could have our own sound.”
“We had two songs already half in the bag, two fuckin’ Motorhead songs,” says DeSantis, “And then we just changed it up.”
“One of them was called ‘Booze for Breakfast,’” laughs Cardone.
“I still want to play that song so fuckin’ bad,” says DeSantis.
Having lashed together a sound that incorporated blues, soul, and thunderous ’70s rock, last year Heavy Necker took their first stab at getting it all down on tape. It was not as glamorous as one would hope.
“The first EP we put out was recorded in my living room,” remembers Cardone. “It was all live takes. We’d just play over and over and pick the best takes. I remember asking my mom to take the dog in the other room because it was barking. You could hear her preparing dinner while we’re trying to record our badass rock ’n’ roll EP.” Cardone laughs. “I was just like, ‘Mom, please, can you take it to the other side of the house?’”
Still, even in these humble beginnings, Heavy Necker did things with style.
“We sort of had a studio audience for that one,” Cardone says. “We had a couple of random chicks and assholes watching us while we recorded.”
“They didn’t have a car to leave,” laughs DeSantis, “So they were basically waiting for us to stop playing so they could go out and get something to eat.”
A year is a lifetime in rock ’n’ roll, and so it was for Heavy Necker, who followed-up their ill-fated first recording this October with the storming Reptile Kings EP, a four track wallop of high-impact slabbage anchored by live favorites like the the headbanging “Master” and the wailing acid-blooze belter “Memento Mori.” The title is an allusion to the band’s original name, Swamplord & the Reptile Kings, a moniker inspired by the many lost weekends the band spent creeping around in the swamplands of Danvers.
“I really like that type of eco-system, man,” says Cardone. “I’ve had some good times in that swamp.” The rest of the band nod enthusiastically. “We’ve gotten drunk as fuck in that swamp,” laughs Kurpiel.
Reptile Kings was the band’s first foray into an actual recording studio. Sorta.
“Yeah, basically,” explains Kurpiel. “I mean it was in this guy’s basement, but he had some legit equipment. He was a hardcore guy, so I think a little of that came through.”
“Really though, I’d say we produced ourselves,” says Cardone. “He basically gave us free rein.”
One of the most striking things about Reptile Kings is that Heavy Necker doesn’t actually sound like anybody else, and the songs don’t hit all the expected marks. They forge their own roads. Verses become choruses, solos pop up in unexpected places, signature riffs wait until you’re lulled into a comfortable haze before caving in your skull.
“When we were working on these songs,” remembers Cardone, “I’d write a new riff and Keith would go, ‘That’s so…” “Avant garde,” chimes Kurpiel. “Yeah. And that’s what we’re trying to do. I mean, we’ve written those verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus songs so many times in the past, but what we’ve done on Reptile Kings is very much an indication of our desire to explore what else is possible. We’re three different people with different musical interests and we’re all dipping our hands into the can of paint and splattering it on the wall.”
While Heavy Necker has no problems with reinventing the wheel in the studio, their live shows are a different story entirely. On stage, the band is exactly what you’d expect from three young dudes riding high on waves of beer, volume, and testosterone. Cardone is one of the most charismatic frontmen in town, a Bacchanalian shaman propelling the crowd to lose all inhibitions—and, on occasion, their clothing, too.
“We played this place called Opus in Salem recently,” says DeSantis. “It was our CD release show but there was also this sideshow going on. There was a guy on a bed of nails, burlesque girls, belly dancers, all kinds of crazy shit. We went on around midnight and the crowd was fuckin’ hammered.”
“I thought it would be awesome if we could get those burlesque dancers onstage,” says Cardone, “so I got on the mic and asked them to come up and dance with us, but they all left. But right after that disappointment, two sprightly young women joined us onstage and slowly, as the set rolled out, they started to bare all.”
“They were dancing and then one would take her top off and the other one would take her bra off, and, you know, it went on from there,” laughs DeSantis.
Heavy Necker has a lot of stories like that. It’s impossible not to get caught up in their enthusiasm for it all—for girls, for beer, for music, for the bonds of friendship, for life. Rock might be dead to the “kids,” but nobody told these dudes.
“We’re usually drunk when we play, says DeSantis. “I mean, depending on the time of day. Not if we play first, but if we play last, I’m usually pretty trashed.”
“It got to a point when we were getting too comfortable being drunk on stage,” says Cardone. “And then we had one show where it was just a complete fuckin’ disaster.”
“We messed up one song so badly we don’t even play it in practice anymore,” laughs DeSantis. “We’re too scared. There was one time when we playing at Sammy’s Patio, and I don’t even know how we got away with this, but we brought a Heineken mini-keg onstage with us and we passed it out to people during the gig.”
“We did that at the RPM Fest this summer too,” remembers Cardone. “I’d be rippin’ a solo and Keith would spray the front row with beer. They were all pretty happy about it.”
Wild times, but wait, what about their career? The EP’s out now, fellas. So what’s next?
“We haven’t gotten that far,” laughs Cardone. “We’re just rolling with whatever comes to us.”
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