Conceived in the back room of a furniture store in central AZ in 1992, Flathead has been a musical staple in the Tempe/Phoenix scene for almost 13 years. Our latest effort "New Old Stock" is a compilation of both our previously released LPs, 1995's self titled album and 1999's "Play The Good One". We hope you enjoy this hard won testament to Arizona roots rockin. For more information, hit our web site at www.flatheadaz.com, read up, and drop us a line. Or keep on reading, here is our story written by Chicago Reader Music Critic Bob Mehr:
Their story sounds like some well-contrived publicity yarn: The left-handed guitarist who plays with his instrument strung upside down; the imposing punk veteran who sings spot-on Appalachian harmonies and drums like a mad dervish; a small army of gifted, outlandish bass players who've come and gone with a Spinal Tappish frequency. Remarkably, though, it's not fiction; it's Flathead.
To music fans outside the Grand Canyon state, Phoenix's Flathead is more a legend than a band. A musical fixture in the desert for more than a decade, Flathead have rarely toured outside their native southwest. Yet their brand of blazing boom-chicka country, fevered roadhouse, and impeccably crafted catalog of trad inspired tunes have made them one of the most significant, if overlooked, roots acts to emerge from Arizona in a generation. The fact that they're still performing, as musically potent and popular as ever, nearly 13 years after first forming is testimony of that.
Although there have been half a dozen lineups in the band's history, the Flathead story begins and ends with singer/guitarist Greg Swanholm. A native of Chandler, Arizona, Swanholm's zeal for music didn't develop until an unusually late age. "My dad had a really great eight-track collection when I was a kid," he recalls. "Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Ray Price, and I always grew up with that stuff in the background and always liked it. But there was quite a long period where I never bought any records. I mean, I can't really remember buying my first record until I was 22 - and that was a result of seeing the Varmits and the Geezers."
The Varmits, Grant and the Geezers and Hellfire (the latter two groups led by Phoenix wildman rocker Kevin Daly) were some of the leading lights of the Valley's fertile '80s roots music scene. Witnessing the passion and energy of those bands firsthand had a profound effect on the would-be guitarist. "Those guys made it real to me," says Swanholm. "I would go to clubs and I'd see guys like Kevin Daly playing. And when you see guys doing it up-close, all of a sudden it becomes real, and that's when I started buying records."
Setting off on what would become a crash course in American roots music, Swanholm began to familiarize himself with the acknowledged masters of the form. "I got my Gene Vincent, I got my Farmer Boys, Eddie Cochran, the Burnette Brothers, Charlie Feathers, Sleepy LaBeef - all of them. But I still had no intention of playing at all. My only intention was to get deeper and deeper into this music and learn as much about it as I could and see the local guys as much as I could."
Swanholm's informal musical education was interrupted by the demands of real life as he left Phoenix, heading south to Tucson to study computer science at the University of Arizona. By the time he returned to the Valley in the late '80s, the thriving cowpunk/retrobilly scene that he'd left behind had all but disappeared. "I came back and Hellfire was gone, and the Varmits had fractured into three different bands, all of which I liked, but still, it just wasn't the same. Nobody was doing anything like what had been going on before," he says.
The quaint, dusty dives that had once made up the Phoenix rock and roots circuit were being replaced by new venues situated around the ASU campus. Tempe was quickly emerging as the new focal point for live music where a new scene, spearheaded by the jangle-pop
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