When you're in the little room

Music obsessives like myself, while laying in bed at night, like to make-believe the kinds of bands they wish they were in. Mine typically sound exactly like this.

Get Yo Shit - Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears


Black Joe Lewis and the Honey Bears were brought to my attention Thursday, thanks to, like almost everything I know, the AV Club. Their debut album was produced by Spoon's drummer, whose last album "Ga ga ga ga ga" featured their first foray into a some neo-Motown sounds.

Let's see the check list, which has existed in my head every time it's too hot to sleep, and I'm imagining the "musicians wanted" flier.

1.) Singer in vein of Otis Redding (soul shouter)
2.) All-tube, vintage garage rock guitarist with more distortion than traditional R'n'B
3.) Bassist fully versed in the Stax catalog, but also the Nuggets box set
4.) Any drummer
5.) Keyboardist owning a Hammond B3 organ
6.) This isn't on my list, but it's in Joe Lewis's band - horn section

Black Joe Lewis and the Honey Bears are a fairly straightforward R'n'B band (in the southern, Stax mode), but as with all indiesnobs, old sounds made new are best when slanted grimy, and Black Joe Lewis knows how to keep things in the garage.

The Greenhorns fulfilled my need for this sound (minus the horns) the last couple years, and before that it was the Dirtbombs, and their garage punk attack on "Ultraglide in Black," a collection of loud covers of '60s soul tunes. Going back to high school (and to this day), the Black Keys and White Stripes kept the garage-blues side of my brain happy, the Keys on the more traditional side of things and the Stripes splattering indierock bone marrow onto candy-striped memories.

I'm happy that Mr. Lewis and Co. will now fill that void until I finally get my make-believe band put together.

"Well you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room" - The White Stripes