Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

“Getting To Know…Bad Blood” by Bad Blood

DATELINE LOUISVILLE, KY, FIRST WEEK OF MARCH 2007: I was bicycling down Bardstown Road with local artist Noah Church, whose outstanding paintings are currently on display at that street’s hookah bar known as Café 360 (we stopped there to see them, along with the mural he painted on the building’s wall and the mural-on-wheels on the café’s truck), en route to two record stores I always visit when in Louisville, Ear-X-Tacy and Underground Sounds.

Ear-X-Tacy features a section with local artists’ CDs and a listening area. I intended to purchase something of interest from that part of the store. I had bought a CD titled “Come, We Go” by a killer local band called The Pennies during my first visit to that store ten years ago and almost always found something new to feed my insatiable CD player during subsequent trips to Louisville. Not this time, though.

Noah and I pressed on to Underground Sounds, joined by a friend of his who was also out for a morning bike ride and had seen us after we had left Ear-X-Tacy. If the film “High Fidelity” had been set in Louisville instead of Chicago, Underground Sounds would have been used as the store and its two employees would have given Jack Black a few lessons in how to be a know-it-all and hysterically funny record store employee. During the hour spent there, we were treated to an impression and critique of Aaron Neville’s vocal style, one of the final Tim Buckley recordings and its relationship to “key parties” and white guy Afros of the 1970s, and the merits of Captain Beefheart’s “Safe As Milk” CD, which was deemed “the greatest garage band recording ever.” All this at no charge to shoppers. It’s a public service.

Two more of Noah’s friends were at Underground Sounds by the time we were ready to leave. I suggested he hang out with them for awhile, rather than worry about entertaining me. I knew the way back to his parents’ house, more or less, so I reversed direction on Bardstown Road and began the return trip. About halfway back to the house, a pickup truck slowed next to me while I pedaled on the sidewalk. A man seated in the front passenger seat leaned his head out of the car, yelled “Hippie!” at me, and the truck drove away. I should point out here that I am fifty-one, have short gray hair (no white guy Afro), and was wearing a baseball cap backward so the wind would not blow it off of my head. Hippie? Huh?

So there I was in Louisville, being called a hippie and without any local music. The next day I met up with my friend Ray, who had made the drive from Indiana to join me for a tour of the Louisville Slugger museum, required reading for all baseball fans. While we were there, my wife, her sister, and her sister’s boyfriend visited some of the local shops.

One of the shops was Dot Fox. The shop owner is married to a member of the band Bad Blood, whose CD “Getting To Know…Bad Blood” was available at the store, along with the CD from another of his musical projects, which included a song parodying (trashing?) Louisville’s best-known band My Morning Jacket, its title probably best kept out of the cyberpages of this publication (and you, O reader, should be able to figure it out without much effort).

My wife bought Bad Blood’s CD and gave it to me when I returned home from the museum. I have listened to it a number of times and am convinced this band locked itself in a room with a copy of “Safe As Milk” and played it non-stop for a year. Their music does not mimic the Beefheart sound: it contains less beef but every bit as much heart. The chorus of the CD’s first song, “Like It Should,” describes the band’s music in a nutshell: “It feels good, don’t it/uh-huh, just like it should.” Bad Blood is the kind of rock and roll that never goes out of style: loud punchy guitars, fuzztone guitar solos, bass, drums, and a vocalist who sounds like he eats sugar-frosted barbed wire three times a day. Great stuff. Ask any hippie.

For ordering and additional information, contact the band at Thebadblood@gmail.com.
picked up again.