The Good Fight: Kentucky Knife Fight Keeps Bringing It
Paul Peters | Dec 09, 2009 | Comments Comments
story by Paul Peters, cover photo by Peter Wochniak
I first heard about Kentucky Knife Fight a few years ago when my brother told me a story about a great band he saw at The Stagger Inn, a crazy combo of 1970s punk and George Thorogood.
At a point during the show where the music had reached a frenzy, he told me, the raucous crowd lifted lead singer Jason Holler into the air, while he continued singing. They lifted him so high that they almost stuck his head into a ceiling fan. He managed to somehow avoid it, and get back onto the stage, without ever missing a beat. (Click for info on Kentucky Knife Fight’s next show).
Holler says this wasn’t exactly the band he and bass player Jason Koenig set out to create in 2005 after seeing a Woodbox Gang show at The Stagger.
“They’re like a dark, dark blue grass band,” he says, describing Woodbox. “We decided we wanted to do something in the same vein, but at the same time we were listening to a lot of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, early punk rock music, and 90s stuff like the Murder City Devils. We kind of wanted to do something like dark blue grass with an early punk lean, and before we knew it, things kind of changed and we became nowhere near the realm of bluegrass music.”
Explaining how the band came across its unusual name, Holler says, “Somebody was giving me grief during a practice and I said ‘You don’t want to invite me to a Kentucky Knife Fight boy ‘cause you’ll lose.’” “That was around the time we were trying to figure out what our name was going to be. And I think it was Jason [Koenig] that said, ‘you know, we should just call ourselves Kentucky Knife Fight.’”
Since then, Holler says, the band has gotten grief from a few Georgians, “Who couldn’t understand why we didn’t call ourselves Georgia Knife Fight.”
Video of Kentucky Knife Fight, Woodbox Gang, Johnny Thunders and Murder City Devils (story continues below)
The band started off playing short sets at the Duck Tape Duo open mic night at The Stagger, and were soon offered to play a full show at The Stagger, which has been the start of many a local band.
In the last couple years, all but one of the band members have moved to St. Louis, where they have had a measure of success, playing bars in the city, and getting their 2008 album Wolf Crept the Children Slept
The band currently has an album’s worth of unrecorded songs that it is playing live. Holler says these songs have now almost completely taken over the band’s live set.
He feels like there has been a progression since the last album.
“The older material we’re doing, we had songs where the lyrics were more catering to aggressive rock and roll. On the slower tempo songs I spent more time on the writing,” he says. “Now I’m trying to make it so that even our adrenline pumping rock-and-roll numbers have more well-written, or well-organized lyrics.”
In January, he says the band will tour, and after that, they plan to record a live EP with Firebrand Recording in St. Louis.
“After that our intentions are to record a full-length album,” he says, but they have no date set for recording the songs yet.
“It’s all monetary,” Holler says of their reason for sitting on 13 new songs. “We had been saving up for a new van, and kind of putting our ducks in a row.”
He says the band has been approached by some small labels, “but it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t exactly what we wanted, and so we held off. We’re not waiting for some major label to sign some unknown band from St. Louis, but the labels we’ve been approached by, it just wasn’t the right marriage.”
It seems the band has it’s feet firmly planted on the ground, when it’s audience isn’t snatching them up into the air. With music like this, we hope they keep ascending, and keep avoiding those wily ceiling fans.
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