Onomatopoeia at it's finest - Wammo is nothing if not a big slap upside your head. An ex- radio jock (ironically fired from a radio station for playing Ice T's "Freedom Of Speech"), a chunky guy in a bad Batman costume, a "real gone guy with a six pack and a frozen pizza just lookin' for love", Austin, Texas' Wammo wants your attention. I don't think that will be a problem.
Produced and recorded by Barbara K (Timbuk3), Wammo is all over the spoken word map. Stream-of-consciousness rants like "Do I Look Fat In This" bunk with eavesdropped conversations like "Open Letter '92". "Too Much Light In This Bar", complete with lurid Billy Idol impressions and poseur slams, is possibly the most intense four and a half minutes you're likely to spend all year. God knows what kind of Waring blender is in Wammo's head - most good poets are tuned to a different frequency than the rest of us - but the results aren't likely to be heard on any radio station you know. But you knew that when you grabbed a record with song titles like "Cat Head Biscuits" and "Unprotected Menage A Trois".
"Homage To The Ramones" aptly uses just three chords, stops on a dime for a rant, and continues on only after bassist Katie Morrison's Dee Dee like "2! 3! 4!!". Along with "Batman" and "There Is Too Much Light In This Bar", "Ramones was co-written by labelmate and ex-Austinite Ed Hamell, whose jackhammer guitar riffs propel all three at about 150MPH. (If Hamell got paid by the strum he could buy and sell Bill Gates with a day's pay). Instrumentation on this record is unbelievable - everything from trash can drums to gospel scat to bar fights.
Not that he isn't funny. Throughout the record Wammo slams "hip alternative" music, even taking a nice swipe at an alternative goddess ("So Kim/What's the Deal....we don't have to Breed"). Ditto the nine second long closing piece, whose entire lyric is "Charles Bukowski's Dead...finally, there's enough beer...for the rest of us!".
"I was flannel/when flannel wasn't cool", says Wammo in "Children Of The Corn Nuts", which despite its "Take This Job And Shove It" melody is undoubtedly a live standard of his. I've seen Hamell On Trial live, the true medium for artists like these whose humor and riveting presence can't be fully realized on a recording. I can only imagine that Wammo must have a similar electric connection to his audience.
You want truly "alternative" music? Fat Headed Stranger is forty-five minutes of poetry, self-analysis, rants, primal screams, confessions and songs that will command your attention. Hell, if Wammo ever writes a screenplay I'll bet it's amazing, but for now an uninterrupted hour in a dark room will have to do. Art-house movie fans, poets and open minds will devour this oral soundtrack - Hootie fans need not apply.
