DIREWOLF

Music:

Member Since: 30/01/2007
Band Website: www.canisdirus.com
Band Members: DIREWOLF is:
Randy Joe Duke: Vocals, Guitar, Songwriter
Tom Daley: Bass, Vocals
Kevin McBride: Drums, Vocals
Influences: The usual.
Sounds Like: The Pagan Rock Page: Concert Reviews
Direwolf /30 May 1997
Chubby’s Club LaSalle, Indianapolis, IN
I’d never been to Indianapolis, let alone to any rock shows there, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of the venue, the performers, or the crowd. I was pleasantly surprised.
Chubby’s is a small club located in the rear of the bar of the same name on Michigan and La Salle, with an emphasis on small - the place has about as much floor space as my one-bedroom Chicago student apartment. If there had been a big crowd, the club would have been nearly intolerable. With thirty to fifty, however, it became intimate, an up-close and personal encounter with the musicians. It reminded me rather of the Ark in Ann Arbor, except that Chubby’s caters to a working-class rock crowd rather than a college folk crowd.
The place had two major drawbacks. First, the ventilation was almost nonexistent, and a good fraction of the crowd was smoking, which irritated the hell out of my eyes after an hour or two. The other drawback is that the PA is very loud for a space that small, where there’s nowhere to stand outside the broadcast arc of the speakers. My ears were ringing for a good portion of the next day. Tip: unless you’ve already got tinnitus or like your rock at aircraft-engine decibel levels, wear earplugs.
Direwolf, being the local band, opened the show, and was received very well by their crowd (Randy Joe Duke seemed to know just about everybody in the club). I hadn’t really heard their music before this show, except for the scratchy samples on their Web page, and was frankly expecting some kind of mediocre redneck metalhead band. Boy was I wrong.
These guys were impeccable musicians, thundering out ferocious rhythms in perfect time, and bringing more than a couple of the female members of the crowd to their feet to groove in front of the tiny stage. I’m not sure if there’s some tradition or rule in the Indy scene that only the women dance - well, nobody protested or laughed when I got up there; not audibly, anyway.
Since I didn’t know any of the songs, and couldn’t hear the vocals all that well, I can’t really name the tunes that they played. In retrospect (after listening to their CD a couple of times), I know that they played “Embrace the Night”, “Raven” (which was plagued by a PA problem), and “Live and Learn” during their hour-and-odd set. That latter tune was spectacular - during the percussion jam that makes up the middle section, Randy Joe and bassist Tom Daley put down their guitars, grabbed drumsticks, and joined Kevin McBride behind his kit for an awesome three-person tribal drumming jam which lasted a good five minutes or more.
The whole set was peppered with breakneck-speed instrumentals, propelled by Tom’s driving slap bass grooves and ornamented with Randy Joe’s fretwork. This guy can burn! Rock, blues, country, hillbilly - it all came together in a firestorm of sound that ripped from his Strat and tore through the club.
Needless to say, I was impressed. One song in particular stands out in my mind which doesn’t appear on the CD: an emotional ballad to the Goddess, celebrating her roles as mother, teacher, lover.... I hope to hear it soon on a follow-up disc, or at another show.
- Scott Martin
Record Label: unsigned
Type of Label: Indie