MULE

Now with one EP, one album, two singles and a second album out in September, Mule have finally reached Europe, recently completing a short tour of the UK as part of their schedule. The Brighton show was undoubtedly one of the highlights of the summer, when they ended up headlining the night instead of supporting Unsane, who violently spilt up the previous evening in London, leaving a trail of wreckage behind them including a broken foot and a smashed up phone box. Punk rock lives on! Mule had a new drummer with them, after Jim Kimball had been expelled for fighting (old Mule reviews seem to overflow with tales of drunken bar brawls and full blown punch ups in the back of the van), and they set the Richmond on fire with their Southern-fried hillbilly blend of blues punk.

P-Bone:"For me and Kevin, particularly, we have deep Southern roots. We feel kind of like first generation Yankees, misplaced Southerners in the North, like urban hillbillies or whatever. It's probably our own fascination with the history of our families and where they were from that got us into trying to work that out, to try and write songs about people we heard about, our uncles or whatever."*

Kevin:" There's religious input in us too. Both Preston and I come from rather fundamentalist background. My Grandmother was a missionary in the Honduras and my grandfather was a preacher. All that stuff is like an influence on my parents and me; all the stories that people tell become sort of like a struggle between what you did on Saturday night versus what you do on Sunday morning, that situation. I think Preston's life is not too much different from that. He came for the best reason: sort of 'Wow! We have a band together, and we love what we play'.

"We're not necessarily Southern but a real American cultural thing and we were fascinated by our family life, that was coming from real people and real relatives of ours that would make up lies, or it would turn out they were telling real stories. You never quite knew so you mix it up. Like you'd listen to a really big mystery and it's like 'Boy, what's going on?' A lot of that I can't trace, because they were just too poor and in the solid.

"My dad was born in the house; he was about to get married to this girl, a local girl in the neighbourhood, not a neighbourhood but a town area really in Louisiana. And they planned the wedding and the girl and the mother had made a dress and then she started getting really sick and ended up dying of typhoid the day the wedding was set. And he went and spent time with the parents of the girl and had dinner and did whatever he was supposed to be doing.

"When he came back he went back home and a storm came up from the Gulf. It started raining real bad and he got to the church where they had the services when it got a little dark. He thought he saw somebody in the chuch and he figured he would stay there for a while until the weather wasn't so bad. And when he got in there, the girl that had died was sitting in the front row, and he was like ( he's young: about sixteen or seventeen), and he thinks he's seeing a ghost and starts to run out of it. It's like, I've seen a picture of this building, it's just like a one room. It didn't even look like a church, it's like a shack. And he starts running out and when he got to the door two guys grabbed him and pulled him back. And what they were doing were (they put a gun against his head), they had taken her body out, robbed the grave, and they stuck her and sat her up at the front when it started to rain, and he just happened to walk by at the exact same time that they were doing this shit, and then they had him swear that he never saw it.

"And he didn't tell for about six months. That happens, that kind of stuff will happen in a community all the fucking time, it's weird. They didn't have any money anyway; I don't know what they got off of her. They did already try to take the dress off her to sell it in the next town..."

Asked about how they perceive themselves, Munro answers: "We're blues. Most people I've played with plays real shit though. I've seen John Lee Hooker and Screaming Jay Hawkins play before. But I'm sure just about any band you can think of in the States (blues bands), I wouldn't talk any shit about those bands, they're sort of folk heroes."

Sacrilegious aren't they.

"Yeah. Al Green's good...Marvin Gaye...Otis Redding... I listen to a lot of soul records. Salsa was a big influence on me. I remember being in the fourth grade. I was at pretty much all black public schools when I was older. I really listened to the Ohio Players, Parliament and Funkadelic. They're a lot bigger now than they were at the time."

These influences and Mule's constant touring schedule has meant that even though they're based in the Northern states, the grunge trademark has completely passed them by, when other bands that have stayed put have been, willingly or otherwise, swept up by the media trawlers, out looking for anybody in a flannel shirt. Mule are stikingly different in that they look mean, stylish and slick as hell. Munro is sporting a pair of torturously creased brown slacks with black shiny shoes and a bright yellow shirt. No doubt about it, Mule are the snappiest dressers around tonight, all the more incredible when you consider they virtually live out the back of a van.

"Well, we're from the North too but I think flannel shirts are not really much of a fashion, and then it's just pretty much like, everybody wears one. They're cool. I have flannel shirts but it's almost like I purposefully don't wear that shit simply because they've got such a stigma now. Now that if you go to K-Mart, they'll say it's grunge approved! That's what they've fucking done! It's a Detroit style thing."

And Detroit is still where home's at?

"Yeah. we still live there. we'll go home for about a week then we'll probably play some shows in the town, take maybe a month off, take our time and then we'll start to tour again in October, maybe back over here."

So it's back into the Dodge Ramcharger and out into the American wilderness, a world of small settlements, bars and roadhouses, to perfect their sound in the most unlikely places imaginable. Seems to me that these guys have connected with the American Dream in a way that is far more fulfilling than a two day coast to coast with mad Cassady at the wheel or a drug addled journey into the lights of Las Vegas. The story goes that last year Mule even baked the Thanksgiving turkey over the engine block of their van using a recipe given them by P-Bone's brother. True or false I don't know, but one thing is certain: if you're ever out in the Arizona desert crawling over the sand, dying of thirst, literally moments from a very painful and dry death, and you see three smart punks playing old thirties' Appalacian hillbilly rebel songs, or something like that, you are NOT hallucinating!