"That's your first question?" The disdain is more than evident in Wammo's voice. It's a question most music writers give up on asking sometime during their first year on the job, simply because they realize that by the time a band from another town (in this case, it's Austin, again) gets big enough for said writer to be interested in writing about them, it's been asked of them roughly 700 times. Dude, don't ask them how they got their name – that shit's soooo journo-school. But still, Asylum Street Spankers is a weird-ass moniker; it bears exploration.
"That's the question we hate most," says ASP singer/songwriter/co-founder/goatee-grower/troublemaker Wammo, completely justifying the music writer's trepidation about asking it, and then some. "That shit's explained on our website."
In the music writer's defense, it's tough to discern exactly where to begin digging into the Asylum Street Spankers mythos. The decade-old band is a roots-rock riddle, nestled in a satirical Vaudeville enigma, packaged in an old-timey radio-show puzzle and slathered with hippie-fied mystery sauce.
Seriously, this group is tough to pin down. There are a lot of novel hooks upon which to hang an impression: they play all-acoustic; they usually make albums centered around a specific theme like Christmas, or pot; they've had more members than the Church of Scientology; their co-founder is a guy named Wammo who makes rock and spoken-word concept albums with names like Faster Than the Speed of Suck and Lowriders on the Storm – but none of them serves effectively or appropriately as an encapsulation of what it is the band does.
The Asylum Street Spankers are tough to pin down because they deftly pull off the trick that so few successfully do: They're at once deadly serious and completely and utterly unconcerned about being serious.
"We don't hold anything sacred," says Wammo, who stumbled into the concept for the mercurial roots group with fellow singer Christina Marrs at a particularly pharmacologically assisted party in Texas over 10 years ago. "As a matter of fact, we're ready to poke fun at any style of music."
When paired with true talent (and both an eye for recognizing it in others and a knack for talking them into playing with the Spankers, at least for a little while), that all's-fair-in-love-war-and-music-making mentality completely scuffed away the lines between sincerity, sarcasm, retro and contemporary. You can call them a roots combo because they all play acoustic instruments, or you can call them a revivalist act because there's more than a little Vaudeville and Wild West theater in what it is that they do. But your classifications go all to hell when they pull out a hip-hop cover or start singing about modern politics.
Oddly enough, when asked if the Spankers' irreverence ever irks die-hard roots-music obsessives, Wammo claims that those who pay due attention almost always realize that everything that's done is done with love.
"Usually, the purists like us," he says. "[They see that] when we do a parody, it's more of an homage."
Purists, dive-bar aficionados, community-radio hounds, walk-in tavern traffic – they've all kept the band, and its notoriously fluctuating lineup, alive for more than a decade. In fact, the Asylum Street Spankers threw a 10th anniversary shindig on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin not too long ago, and invited as many former Spankers as could make the scene to take the stage. The soiree was taped for a DVD release.
"I believe the final count was 28 [Spankers]," says Wammo, adding with a snort, "that's about half of the people that have been in the band over the years."
Some musicians might tire of seeing various band members come and go. But Wammo, who started the loose-knit outfit more out of curiosity, boredom and a yen for fun than anything else, is willing to deal with the comings and goings in the name of keeping the Spankers both fresh and functioning.
"We've actually had the same lineup for a year now," he says. "We've always wanted to have a solidified lineup, so we wouldn't have to rehearse as often. This is a hard job, it's not like being on a major label, touring in the bus. This is the nitty-gritty, paying your dues every day for 10 years. It's a different lifestyle, and a lot of people can't handle it.
"It keeps the band from becoming sedentary, but at the same time, people get attached to certain members, who then leave."
The crazy acoustic-instrument-only band has enjoyed rising popularity in recent years, which has fucked with the Spankers' "no amps, no mics" methodology in a pretty big way. Recently, the crowds have been large enough to force the band to resort to amplifying their guitars, banjos and various other tools. Long-time fans fear not, however; the group did its research, and eventually found microphones that would reproduce the natural sound of the instruments as closely as possible.
"We still play pretty quiet, and we still play without monitors," reasons Wammo. "But yeah, it took some getting used to."
What's next, an Asylum Street Spankers set played through Les Pauls hooked up to Marshall stacks?
"It's been talked about," says Wammo, warming to the subject. "That's what I wanted to do for the 10-year anniversary, do a big rock show as the Spankers."
But don't count on it happening anytime soon.
Oh, and the name came from the former title of Austin's Guadalupe Street, and a southern idiom for a particularly visceral style of guitar playing. Now aren't you glad you found that out?
SCOTT.HARRELL@WEEKLYPLANET.COM
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2005.