Barrence Whitfield & The Savages go three-for-three with an incendiary new album
In film and literature, third acts are where loose ends are resolved for a satisfying conclusion. It’s like that for Barrence Whitfield & The Savages, who originally formed in the early ’80s, recorded a pair of brilliant albums, broke up five years later, and then reunited in 2010, resulting in a trio of exceptional albums, 2011’s Savage Kings (on Cincinnati’s Shake It label), 2013’s acclaimed Dig Thy Savage Soul and the just-released Under The Savage Sky (both on Bloodshot). Given the quintet’s stellar output since its reformation, the question becomes: How does a band match its best work?
“We just come up with great, interesting tunes,” says Whitfield. “We’ve got a song about a guy whose wife is in jail and he loves her cooking so much and he does the best he can, but he can’t survive without her cooking. That’s ‘Incarceration Casserole.’ There’s ‘Willow,’ about a 15-year-old girl who gets mixed up with a cult, and the Jim Jones of the cult goes after her in ways that aren’t part of the plan. We do rare covers like ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Baby’ and ‘The Wolf Call.’ We try to stick to the same formula like guys of the ’50s and ’60s; sometimes it’s all about people’s lives and things going on in everybody’s world. That’s the premise for Under The Savage Sky.”
Given their long history, Whitfield & The Savages are elder statesmen in the garage-rock/R&B/soul scene. Whitfield and Customs/DMZ/Lyres guitarist Peter Greenberg assembled the first Savages band in 1981, but Greenberg left in 1986 to pursue an oil-industry position. Whitfield soldiered on with di fferent bands, but never to the same e ffect.
In 2008, Shake It head Darren Blase helped organize a Customs reunion, and Greenberg, who hadn’t played guitar in 20 years, regained his passion for the instrument. When Ace reissued the long out-of-print ’80s Savages albums, Greenberg and Whitfield reconnected to discuss the project, and the reunion seeds were sown.
This year, after relentless roadwork on Savage Kings and Dig Thy Savage Soul, Whitfield & The Savages embarked on a tour with the Northwest’s legendary Sonics. It was an enlightening experience, to say the least.
“It opened a whole new perspective on rock ‘n’ roll,” says Whitfield. “Here are bands who were born way before 1995, and they’re making records, standing onstage and entertaining people at their age. They’re still putting out great product, whether it’s being listened to or not, but their prime focus is to entertain. You do the best you can and let the music speak for itself.”
The new album—recorded at Afghan Whigs bassist John Curley’s Ultrasuede Studio in Cincinnati, like its predecessors—is a crushing garage/soul masterpiece that steams and screams along on the herculean e fforts of the Savage five; Whitfield, Greenberg, bassist Phil Lenker, saxophonist Tom Quartulli and drummer Andy Jody. It’s the clearest evidence yet that the quintet isn’t merely coasting on old glories, but adding to its mythology in substantial ways.
“Each record moves a step up from the last,” says Whitfield. “It still poses the same excitement, and it’s another chapter in the Savages’ history. When we broke up in ‘86, there was that time gap, but when we said, ‘We’re gonna do it again,’ all that creative juice came back. Our youth is still roaming and crawling in our bodies, and we still have a lot of energy to give and a lot of music in our blood.”
—Brian Baker
