John Howie has a voice you’ve never heard before, but would swear you have. Just the other night, in fact, one barstool over. Older guy, looked a little run-down and weary, knocking back one straight Scotch after another like he was trying to forget something. Except that every sip only made the memories more acute, a feeling he insisted on sharing with everyone within earshot. But no one much minded. He was a good drunk, took his moods out on himself rather than anyone else. A good storyteller, too. Funny. And that voice! Man oh man, smoother than the smoothest whiskey…
Yeah, John Howie has a voice like that, an old man’s sound trapped in a young man’s body. But few people realized it when he was known only as one of the best drummers in North Carolina, holding down the beat in bands as varied as Chris Stamey’s pop group Alaska and Stones-ish crunch-rockers Finger. Then a couple of years ago, Howie stepped out from behind his drumkit and started playing straight-no-chaser country as the Two Dollar Pistols. Locals were awestruck. When he would solemnly intone, “This song was written by a man named Harlan Howard, for another man named Lefty Frizzell,” it was as if Roger Miller had come back from the dead and was walking among the mortals in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle.
The secret is about to get out far and wide. The Pistols became more than a part-time concern after the sadly premature 1996 demise of Howie’s previous band, June, whose atmospheric art-rock Howie anchored with his steady backbeats. June guitarist John Price joins Howie on the Pistols’ debut On Down The Track, along with Squirrel Nut Zippers drummer Chris Phillips and members of a slew of local bands including Soccer, the Tremblers and the Nancy Middleton Band.
Despite the clashing backgrounds, you’d never guess anybody in the Pistols ever played anything but cry-in-your-beer honky-tonk anthems, because On Down The Track is totally convincing. This is hard-core stuff, heartache as viewed from the bottom of a shot glass. Hide the kids and put this record on next to Hank Williams or Merle Haggard, and it more than holds its own.
The key is Howie’s voice, a richly emotional croon that imbues every syllable he sings with intense feeling. He writes as well as he sings, too. Three of these 12 songs are covers — Tom T. Hall’s “I Flew Over Our House”, Harlan Howard’s “Gone” and Roger Miller’s “World So Full Of Love” — and it’s a tribute to Howie’s songwriting that his originals stand up to his covers in quality as well as mood. Howie demonstrates a flair for clever wordsmithing throughout the record, but it’s his singing that brings everything to life and allows him to get away with over-the-top declarations (“You don’t need someone to understand, so let me be your fool”) that might sound overwrought or even cheesy in lesser hands.
Howie makes it all sound as inevitable as the hangover that follows the binge. But now is not the time to think of consequences. Just drink it all in, friend, drink it all in.
