The Post-Rockist

A Long (belated) Valentine to the Detholz! 

The Detholz! - Mister Electricity
(from Who Are the Detholz!?)

The Detholz! - Behold the Man
(from Cast Out Devils)

Detholz! recordings, Detholz! tour dates, and other assorted Detholz! tidbits available at www.detholz.com. 

The Detholz! have a way of rearranging the realities of the sensory world. At every Detholz! show I have ever been to, there has been a sniff of the weird, or a sense of the infinitely possible. Strangers show up at Detholz! shows and turn out to be long-lost twins. Lovers reunite, and people who do not yet know they are perfect for each other pair off. I have run into ex-boyfriends, ex-peers, ex-coworkers, ex-costars, and ex-floormates at Detholz! shows. And, it seems, I learn another of the endless and eerie commonalities between myself and drummer Andrew Sole, who grew up in metro Detroit, just like me, and went to church a mile away from my house. He babysat for the kid who played Poseidon to my Medusa in a high school play (directed, as an extra note of interest, by the fiancée of one of the editors of this website); his pastor was the father of a former symphony standpartner, who also made a guest apperance as the frontman of an opening band at a show they played in Wheaton, Illinois.

I was an eighteen-year-old with an angry ache nestled in my heart when I saw the Detholz! for the first time. After a crunchy, kitschy set of space rock – songs about following a spurning lover on a train to Mars, a supervillian named Mr. Electricity who is “impossible to touch,” cities overrun by alien armies – the band came back for an encore, wearing bright suits and pale make-up. They set their gear up in silence, played a few tentative chords, and when they all wailed in unison, they spit out cornstarch blood.

They played “Celebrate” and “Hot for Teacher,” rendering every tacky cover with charge. By night’s end I had never been sweatier or more worked up. I had never heard silliness delivered with such urgent earnesty, flushed rock beauty paired so seamlessly with nerdy irony.

My heartbreak was smashed into dust and scattered over the ocean. I was in love.

It was my first year at Beloit College, and during my four years there, the Detholz! became an institution, playing once a semester in the smelly, roady basement of the C-Haus. Their shows were like no other shows. They played to shirtless, screaming crowds for hours, encore after encore, giving us their best songs two or three times. The walls of the bar would sweat brown streaks of beer, tobacco, and grime. Afterward they would come to our parties and dance on our tables. This was rock revivalism at its best, with all of the danger, all of the spirit, all of the flesh.

The Detholz!, of course, have regularly scheduled lives away from this dirty booze pit on the stateline. They live together in Chicago, have other jobs, play music with other bands (notably, Baby Teeth and Bobby Conn), and maybe – no one really likes admitting this, but we’re jealous lovers  – maybe have dedicated fans that aren’t Beloit College students.

Formed in 1996 at Wheaton College – the notoriously fundamentalist alma mater of the Reverend Billy Graham, where dancing was banned until 2003 – the band initially explored their frustrations with stagy irreverence, performing in space suits and smashing television sets with pickaxes. Return engagements at Wheaton resulted in demonstrations, prayer circles, and altercations between fans and detractors.

“We nurtured images of the ‘quintessential Detholz! fan,’” says lead singer Jim Cooper, “who is a socially maladjusted male between the ages of 15 and 30, in a profession related to science or math, probably hopelessly addicted to porn, terrified of women, snorty, constantly apologizing, etcetera.”

In 2002, Detholz! debuted their first full-length, Who are the Detholz!?, a sort of campy musical Metropolis. Though members of the band have expressed reluctance at ever performing or even hearing most of the songs on that album ever again, it is nonetheless meticulously crafted, full of tabernacle harmonies, impeccable electronics, electrifying arches of melody and rhythms so sharp they could snap your neck. This was the album I took home with me after my first life-altering Detholz! experience, and it spent long summers spinning in my car stereo, and lonely winters waiting with me for the thaw of the earth and the blistering homecoming of my heart’s most resilient suitors.

Seasons turned and the band returned, time and time again, to the C-Haus. I kept listening to Who Are the Detholz!?, but it was becoming evident that the album was aging, and that these rock-and-roll missionaries were not themselves getting any younger. Their new songs were full of disco experimentalism, psycho-curious explorations. Jim’s televangelistic monologues were getting darker and closer to the quick. And as the annual Halloween Jukebox of the Dead fete became increasingly elaborate – evolving to include covers of “We Built This City” and the unfortunate Cher-surrection single “Believe” alongside old favorites “Like a Virgin” and “Dancing on the Ceiling” –  their sets of original music became tentative. Requests for “Last Train to Mars” were not always honored, to widespread disappointment. Songs were played that we would never hear again. Whispers persisted that a new album was coming out “soon,” but we could never get a straight answer as to when.

Their shows remained transcendent. We kept taking our shirts off.

But we started to ask ourselves:

What is going on? Were these guys Christians or what? Were there kernels of sincerity in their preacherly tirades? Was a song like “I.M.A. Believer” presented to us only in parody? Wheaton College was no big secret, and of course we would have accepted the Detholz! regardless of agenda or persuasion. Still, it nagged, and it nagged more as the band seemed to be scampering off in ambiguous directions.

And then, like a strike of lightning from the sky, the good people at RightRightRight Films produced and released Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a feature-length documentary about Christian rock and including extensive interviews with members of Detholz!, addressing at once the question that many of us had formulated on our own over the course of a long courtship with this band, and forging a valley of clarity. This was a band that was Going Through a Transition. They were Figuring It All Out.

“I will say that it’s a little disconcerting to be referred to as a ‘Christian’ or even as an ‘anti-Christian’ group,” Jim tells me, “and we’ve been labeled as both by listeners and in the media.  Detholz! is neither Christian nor anti-Christian.  We are neither pro-life nor pro-choice.  We are not members of Rotary International or of the Kiwanis.  We are not Freemasons.  We are not politically motivated.  We do not wish to touch you or your children in inappropriate ways.

“We are musicians.  Period.”

And THEN, like lightning striking the same place TWICE, Detholz! finally released Cast Out Devils. And the light hit the stained glass window and fell onto the rough-hewn floor of the chapel.

Here’s what I want you to understand.

I want you to understand that I am not a widely-listened listener. I am not particularly deft at detecting the myriad contextual subtleties of most individual releases. I am not especially literate in the language of contemporary music. I am sure there are many who would argue that I flat-out have bad taste, given my fondness for kitsch, schlock rock, accessibility, satisfying chord progressions, and my fundamental laziness.

I like to think my greatest asset, as an appreciator of music, is an open mind. That is why I am here at The Post-Rockist.

But. I also want you to understand that I love this band like I have never loved any other band, ever. I like music a lot. I have been to a lot of shows. I have rubbed elbows with a lot of hustle-bustle sorts of musical folk, like D12, and the guy from the Verve Pipe, a black-eyed Jason Stollstmeier of the Von Bondies post-tussle-with-Jack-White, and speaking of Jack White, did I ever tell you about the time I saw the White Stripes for free in the Diego Rivera plaza of the Detroit Institute of Arts for FREE before they were FAMOUS?

Cast Out Devils will inevitably invite comparisons to Devo, Talking Heads, and other such post-punky new-wave outfits. This is fair and to be expected. “We approach music in much the same way that a lot of New Wave bands did in the early ’80s,” Jim wrote to me. He also wrote:

“Schtick and ironic posturing served us well in our formative years– and garnered us a solid cult following– but since we decided to ‘unzip our fly,’ so to speak, & forego some of the silliness, the response has been overwhelming and the band has really taken off.  This has been disconcerting to our old-school contingent– understandably so. What I’ve discovered, though, is that most people want to be communicated to, not just toyed or joked with.”

What do I want you to understand? I want you to understand that nothing I have ever experienced really compares to a Detholz! show. The gentlemen themselves may blush (or cringe) at my saying this, but it is imperative that you get it:

Though my feelings about God and the universe are squarely, certifiably ambivalent, I always go home from a Detholz! show feeling a little transformed. A little baptized.

I went to see them play at the University of Wisconsin-Madison not long ago, in the Busch-Gardensy Biergarten of Der Rathskeller, a polyester-Old World sort of cafeteria. Everyone sat at looming wooden tables. It was not unlike the show I saw at Wheaton College, where everyone sat on the floor.

During the opening act, a small man in a wheelchair scooted up to the stage, climbed out of his wheelchair, and started to dance. He wore an Alonzo Mourning jersey, baggy Dockers, and reef runners on his feet. He hopped on one foot, flexed his muscles, and repeatedly hit himself on the head. After twenty minutes of math-rock, he sat back down in his wheelchair and wheeled himself away.

Not long after Detholz! took the stage, an elderly black man in a red plastic hat and a leather jacket stood up and began distributing enormous five-dollar bills with stickers that read “SOUVENIR: Cincinnati Museum Center!” He gave one to keyboard player Jon Steinmeier, who grinned and held it bravely aloft. And then, like the rest of us, he danced. Without removing his leather jacket or his red plastic hat, that man got down.

It could not have happened anywhere else. At a Detholz! show, it seemed downright banal. So it is that the universe is organized – long stretches of emptiness, dimpled with pockets of weird, effervescent, revelatory glee.

-Posted by Amy E.