White trash extravaganza
Welcome to a Southern-fried rock ’n’ roll revival meeting
Kari D.

“I gotta be honest with you: I’m currently incarcerated. But the guys say they’re gonna get me out, because we’ve gotta leave and hit the road and make it to Western Canada pretty goddamn soon."

“Usually I’d be in the van, snorting lines of crushed up Ephedrine tablets just to keep awake and drive in a straight line,” says Clem, the lead vocalist/guitarist with Toronto-based road warriors White Cowbell Oklahoma.

“We got a souped-up megavan with a machine-gun turret on top so we can fight off the authorities as we’re fleeing from the mobs of angry parents of all the teenaged and college-aged and also the parents of all the soiled ladies and their moms.

“But anyway today I am just cooling my heels in a cell but I came in with a cell phone up my ass and now I can use it to get to you.”

Clem has had a rough night. The Southern-fried rockers staged a release party in Toronto for their new album, Cencerro Blanco, last Thursday night. He’s speaking to Uptown the morning after a party that — he claims — had the group fleeing for the exits at the wee hours of the morning, a trail of illegal substances and female undergarments

behind them.
“It was filled with sin and salvation and rock ’n’ roll pornification,” he says. “We brought the people back to the rock, they went home saved. It was an unbelievable combination of stellar movements and alignments.”

As legend would have it (and the band wouldn’t have it any other way), the ’Bell has been ‘saving’ its followers since guitarist Hollis had an unfortunate vehicular run-in with the window of a music store some years ago.

“He was having hallucinations, he thought he was driving into the fourth

dimension,” Clem says. “He drove (the van) right goddamn through the window. We got all mangled and we’s was like ‘Fuck, let’s just steal all this shit while we’re here.’ So we stole everything and couldn’t sell it ’cos we live in a small town of only 23 people, so who’re we going to sell it to?

“So we started playing like crazy. We got a vision in the sky one day, we was trying to learn Smoke on the Water or somethin’ and this vision came out of the sky, it was Ronnie Van Zant (late singer with Lynyrd Skynyrd) sayin’ ‘Don’t fuck around with Smoke on the Water, learn Freebird instead.’ And we’ve had Southern-fried superpowers ever since.”

The ’Bell returns to Winnipeg Halloween night, and while it’s hard to believe the band could possibly surprise its audience with anything more outrageous than its live show already is, Clem isn’t letting go of any secrets.

“You just have to remember that there are 10 rock ’n’ roll warriors up on

that stage sweatin’,” he says. “There is unprecedented nudity and rampant sexual abandon going on at the show. I could go on about the costumes, but more than likely there’ll be a lack of costumes because there’ll be a whole lot of naked bodies goin’ on. It’s just Roman-esque entertainment, if someone were to use the classical terminology. It is going to be an orgy of rock ’n’

roll entertainment going on, and I can’t give too much else away.”

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