Naked & Shameless

The CD tells me a lot of things, mostly about drinking, women, drinking some more and women, all designed to bring out my inner Neanderthal. Very rude and oh so crude. Think of "The Man Show" set to music. Damn I Need A beer. - Cool & Strange Music Magazine

If you like drinking music, Naked and Shameless are professionals. With an album full of songs with titles like "Drinking Song #4" and "Are You Drinking With Me Jesus," they're a lot like Irish folk songs, with extremely proficient, fervent acoustic guitar, and serious but jokey storytelling vocals. And even though the songs are about topics like whiskey dick, cocaine, and hookers, they're quite beautiful. I know, hard to believe. One of their most interesting songs is a church choir song that rivals "Silver Bells," but instead just says the word beer in a round. Ironic and wholly entertaining. - Portland Mercury

...Buck and Dave expose the world to a full-frontal assault of jokes, original drinking songs and acoustic covers of popular tunes that the boys have violently twisted and pulled up like an underwear "wedgie"... - The Shepherd Express (Milwaukee)

Naked & Shameless are an acoustic comedy rock duo; one that possesses everything that Tenacious D never amounted to (despite financial backing and the support of a certain Foo Fighter). Throughout their CD they display a daft yet wry sense of humour, the ability to write hook after hook and of course; just how dope they are when it comes to a little journey into rap.

The album opens with a great track that is a hilarious spin on those spoken word descriptions from old private eye films – making for a fantastic introduction. Once the delightful acoustic numbers commence, tracks such as ‘Double Fisting’ work fantastically by recreating Irish folk styles around a rather ruder lyrical concept. Lyrics such as; ‘She’s a slut, a slut, a slut…but…she had a wonderful personality’ demonstrate the general sense of humour that resides upon this CD. As does; ‘We like to drink and drive, moving targets, it doesn’t matter, swerve after children and watch them scatter’: From D.U.I. which also features one of the best and most cheeky verse riffs in the entire record and perhaps…dare I say? - The history of the acoustic guitar.

There are the less interesting interlude tracks such as; ‘Buck’s Little Fugue In Beer Minor’ which is funny a few times but doesn’t offer the variety required to be a mid album song. ‘Whiskey Dick’ is a fantastically sordid and deeply imaginative tale about a large man with an even larger manhood - who is trying to obtain some sexual satisfaction in a town (known as BuggerBe) full of vertically challenged occupants. There is a delightful charm and consistency throughout ’13 Drinking Songs’ with obvious singles like the catchy, bouncy; ‘Cocaine & Hookers’. With lines such as ‘It takes much more than talent to get to number one, it takes cocaine and hookers to get it done’ wittily poking fun at the music industry. ‘Reservation Party Song’ is catchy but a little drawn out – luckily it retains a strong chorus and allows the vocalists to stretch their range.

‘NDM’ is the gentlemen’s fantastic probe into the rap genre with more fantastic lyrics and concepts than I could ever wish to include here – so instead, let it be said that this CD would be worth purchasing for this epic track alone. The record finishes with a couple of more sedate numbers including the enchanting ‘Are You Drinking With Me Jesus?’ Naked & Shameless are really, really sharp writers as they parody, adapt and create legitimately original, deeply catchy and amusing songs. This album contains a wealth of songs with such a varied style and longevity that this would be an essential album for anyone with a sense of humour, a foul mouth and a love of alcohol. - State Of Emergency (UK)

...Their morals may be questionable, but their musical abilities are not. The smooth sounds of their paired guitars and well-harmonized voices bring these drinking tunes to a highly enjoyable, melodic level. The tales they tell can cause some disturbing images, but also some reminiscence. Remember the time you saw that streaker running down Kiefaber Street? Ahhh, the days...

"13 Drinking Songs" will drive you down that road to inebriation, taking pit stops at every bar possible. If you are looking for some heartfelt and wholesome music about love, loss and sorrow, go buy a Belle and Sebastian album, you pansy. Naked & Shameless is not for you.

If you want to sit back and drink yourself into a stupor and have something to sing along to on the way, these guys are just what you're looking for. - Flyer News (Dayton, OH)

...Is it any wonder this group's a hit in frat houses throughout the Midwest? - The San Francisco Examiner

...References to beer, whiskey, cocaine and hookers dominate this novelty act. But if hearing the gospel of Pabst Blue Ribbon preached by a duo once called Simon & Pumpernickel is wrong, then our country's priorities are in the wrong place. - Metro Pulse (Knoxville, TN)

Buck and Dave sat down together to answer these questions, bleary eyed,
at 2am 2/28/06, freshly returned from Mardi Gras in St. Louis.

---------------------------------

DK: A "Drunkabilly duo", eh? Is it safe to assume where your inspirations come from?

Dave: Yup. It ain't the whole picture, but the "drunkabilly" tag certainly covers a couple of the major cornerstones.

Buck: It's also Caffeine, Nicotine, Alcohol and Pussy, Sweaty Underthings, Nuns, PBR and the Music of the Cultural Garbarator . . .

---------------------------------

DK: Please help describe "Kitsch rock" to our readers and how you are the "punk kings" of it.

Buck: Eat my balls.

Dave: It's the kind of lounge music you get when the entirety of postwar popular music gets funneled through very tiny ADD-riddled brains. We're punk kings because we've got punk rock pasts and, in spite of all the shenanigans and goofing around, and the infusion of decidedly non-punk music and non-punk instrumentation, the performances are punk-rock urgent.

Buck: No, eat my balls.

Dave: The AMR guys seem to be convinced that we've spearheaded a sub-sub-sub genre they've been referring to as "NoFi". I can't say I entirely see what they're talking about, because I don't really believe in trends or movements or that sort of crap -- I mean the whole "grunge" thing was a SubPop marketing invention to harness the indescribable into
bite-sized media morsels. So there will be less talk of "Kitsch-rock" and more talk of "NoFi" this year. Kitsch, of course, derives from the German kitschen (to smear), and applies to things that are calculated to a have popular appeal but are, in fact, gaudy trash. So if you're attempting to produce kitsch, you're creating a bit of a cultural in-joke. It's a very self-aware act. Which doesn't mean there isn't a reverence for the source material. Far from it. You can embrace something while having fun with it. It means that there are multiple layers of things going on; a wide referential swath. Couldn't tell you what the exact Schopenhauer-to-dick-joke ratio is, but there's more than what you see on the surface. But if that's all you see, it should still work. In the end, we're just performing monkeys. . . Was that too high-falootin'? Didn't think I had that many gray cells left. Excuse me while I get a beer.

---------------------------------

DK: In your biography, it describes your background as "legend has it", how accurate to reality is that bio?

Dave: Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a legal entanglement with Skidd Wong and we can't talk about anything that happened between September of 1995 and August of 2000.

---------------------------------

DK: If it is not 100% accurate, would you care to share your real origins with our enquiring minds?

Dave: It is true that Buck is originally from Southwest Ohio and I did spend a good number of my formative years in the great white north. Also, there was indeed a (very) short-lived Vancouver-based Naked & Shameless that featured Jim Naked and Dave Shameless which was side-side-side project of mine. I will confess that Jim Naked was not actually killed in a drive-by; that got stuck in some versions of the bio to establish some sort of street-cred with urban audiences or something. Jim now goes by the name "Stavros The Wonderchicken" and is a writer/agit-blogger/English professor/vortex living in Korea. Seriously! Look him up!

---------------------------------

DK: What beer does Naked & Shameless consider worthy of drinking?

Buck: Pork Chops, PBR's and Pabst Blue Ribbon. What'll ya have? Or whatever's is. . . ahem. . . complimentary. . . just not that fucking donut beer, right been?

Dave: PBR for everyday drinking. But I'll do foo-foo microbrews on special occasions or foreign beers when in foreign ports of call. Maybe a Guinness if I need the vitamins or it's Paddy's Day. Why, you buyin'?

---------------------------------

DK: What does a Naked & Shameless show consist of?

Dave: Besides cursing?

Buck: Good times and strange salvation. . . produce. . . drinking. . . Nudity. . . crude jokes. . . NASCAR for Yankees. . . avant garde redneck messy rocking fucking hellbilly fun, yo.

Dave: . . .and occasional appearances from the pantheon of sidekicks.

Buck: You build it and they will cum! (Trust me on this one.)

Dave: But there's always the singin'-of-songs. We usually play drinking games with the audience. Sometimes there's a special sideshow event.

---------------------------------

DK: Would people be afraid to sit in the front row?

Buck: If you're a throbbing fucking pussy, more than likely. If we're rasslin' possibly, especially if you have allergies. If you don't like to be gobbed upon, feel the rain of booze or be groped by questionably sane men in tight pants, then perhaps so . . .

Dave: You can't really hide from us. Not sitting up front isn't going to help. So you might as well sit up front and catch all the nuances you might miss from the back of the room. We're contagious, but it ain't herpes or anything.

---------------------------------

DK: You've played sporadically throughout the states, how do you get yourselves around? Do you have a manager or do you do your own booking?

Dave: Skidd Wong tries to pass himself off as our manager, but he's not.

Buck: Skidd says he does it, but somehow whenever we show up to one of his bookings, there never seems to be a gig waiting.

Dave: Sometimes Skidd helps us out, but more often than not, he creates more problems than he solves. We do some booking ourselves. AMR does some. Sometimes we just get invited to do things -- like the White Trash Christmas show we're doing in Vegas next Christmas. Or the haunted trail we did in Ohio a couple of Halloweens ago. The venues that really get it seem to keep in touch and make it easy for us. Other venues, of course,
ask if we'd like a police escort out of town. We'd love to be in a consistent enough position dollar-wise to have a single-source booking agent. But again, we're in a niche that doesn't really have an infrastructure to support that niche yet.

---------------------------------

DK: What states do you find to be more your favorite places to live/perform?

Dave: Bloomington (Indiana) has been pretty good to us. The folks who frequent Burt's Tiki Lounge in Salt Lake City are always fun. Jugheads in Phoenix. The Empire Amusement Hall in Hollywood is a special place -- not really a music venue, per se, but there's always something interesting going on there. It's been much tougher locally because a lot of music venues have very established ways of working and they simply don't know what to do with us. So we end up doing a lot of off-beat venues, especially for AMR showcases where you're going to see a whole handful of cruel and unusual acts of different flavors on any given night.

Buck: I love Chicago, but they seem to get us more unapologetically out west. They seem to know a good time when they see it. They dig the BBQ and they're not so worried about fucking image, ironically enough.

---------------------------------

DK: Since I don't believe in censorship, is there anything that you'd like to get off your chest that you may not normally get to say in other publications? (be nice though. he he he)

Buck: FUCK!

Dave: [sips beer]

---------------------------------

DK: What musicians have inspired you while growing up?

Dave: I bought my first Elvis Presley record when I was 6 years old. Iggy Pop changed my life when I was 19. So many people. There's so much out there -- I still just keep absorbing it. But basically, it's people who cut to the chase -- I'm not particularly interested in musicianship for musicianship's sake.

Buck: Lux Interior, Shane McGowan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Car Alarms, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Denis Leary, Angry Fathers, Neil Hannon, Burl Ives, Screeching Monkeys, John Linnell and John Flansburgh, Trent Reznor, Elvis Costello, Al Jorgenson, Tom Waits, Stephen Sondheim, Hasil Adkins, Glenn Danzig, Gene Vincent, Small Town Law Enforcement Officials, Jello Biafra, McLean & McLean, John Valby, Tom Lehrer, Eddie Cochran, Kool Keith, Goedel, Escher, Bach, Ewan MacColl. . .

Dave: Sex Pistols, New York Dolls, George Jones. . . what about Flava Flav?

Buck: Word.

Dave: and Unknown Hinson!

Buck: Fuck ya!

---------------------------------

DK: You have an ample supply of albums for people to purchase on your site. Has there been a particular favorite among your fans that has sold well?

Buck: 13 Drinking Songs is our SEMEN-all release to date. *cough*

Dave: 13 Drinking Songs and Hot Dawg! are the most widely available beyond the Atomic Mouse Recordings website. 13 Drinking Songs is definitely the most well known. Atomic Mouse has done two pressings, and even though it's a few years old, there's talk about licensing it out for a special "truckstop edition" that'd give it some unusual but pretty wide distribution. And I'm not making that up. Hot Dawg! is just starting to get noticed -- the people who like Hot Dawg! seem to be pretty rabid about it. Vinyl junkies (and perverts) tend to go for the 7".

---------------------------------

DK: Rumor has it that you'll be performing our St Paddy's day show at Sizzle on Broadway on March 17th. Do you have anything special planned for this show?

Dave: Paddy's Day and you have to ask? It'll be a schmorgasboard of drinking games.

Buck: What fucking rumor? We's a gonna tear that bitch up with Your Little Ponies at the Third Annual Liver Olympics dudes! Fucking drinking for prizes! I say "fuck," you "drink." VIRGINS! DRINK YA BASTARDS! It's on mothahfuckah . . . it's ONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dave: I don't know if this will erupt on the 17th, but a feud has been brewing between a couple of our sidekicks. The day Dirty Sanchez and The One And Only Big Bologna show up to the same show, something will be going down. It's just a matter of time.

---------------------------------

DK: What do you have lined up after this show and for the rest of the year?

Dave: There's a song coming out on the next Atomic Mouse compilation (Sound In A Vacuum, Vol. 2). Then we're going to co-headline the Legends of NoFi tour for part of the summer with Scotty Iseri & The Big Rock Show. We're currently working on working on two new CDs, Veni Veni Veni, and Upstage The World. Veni should be out in May on AMR. We're going to try and shop Upstage The World, so that may sit in the can for a little bit. Since we've already committed to Christmas in Vegas, we'll undoubtedly be on the west coast in December.

Buck: And some drinkin', cussin', rasslin', fightin' and fuckin'. Yee hoo.

---------------------------------

DK: What final words would you like to leave our readers with?

Buck: Grease up your poopchute honey, cause daddy's comin' home?

Dave: Seem like we missed a couple of points, didn't we?

Buck: yessir.

Dave: So, Mr. Naked, what's the story with all the brassieres and other acourtrement that adorn your mic stand?

Buck: I will trade you merchandise for your sweaty underthings. Yum yum yum.

Dave: Fascinating. And, Mr. Naked, how does one become one of "Buck's
Fucking Girlfriends"?

Buck: Cum to a show and show Buck some love? Get a pic in his hat? Encores in the hotel room later?

Dave: Are those the only ways?

Buck: or you can email a pic of yourself doing something SEXXXY and holding a sign that says "I FUCKED BUCK!"

Dave: Is that the last beer?

Buck: Yup. Time to go. - Chicago Music Guide

If these guys aren’t fraternity house favorites, there’s more wrong with this country than $2-per-gallon gas. Buck Naked and Dave Shameless deliver a unabashedly crude audio experience interspersing their testosterone-and-beer-fueled songs with a series of sketches about the “grilling season” (where we find, among other things, that it’s uncool to put tofu on the grill around PBR drinkers). The hard-rockin’ “Four Food Groups” serves as a mission statement for the duo, stating that a “growin’ boy” needs caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and an anatomical part with a feline nickname. The misadventures of Buck and Dave in the grilling season bits (which includes an alien being mistaken for a sea monkey and put in the marinade for grilling) go along well with suggestive tracks like “Mowin' Your Lawn” (hint: it’s not a bush in the back yard). No Grammys or Pulitzers here, just some lewd and bawdy fun. - The Amplifier