The Surreal McCoys

Straight out of parts unknown, come The Surreal McCoys...a fun and exuberant five-piece country/punk band that goes all out in the name of joyful irreverence, and pure rock and roll. For the first time in five years, the band returned to Los Angeles to perform no less than two different concerts Friday night, at two very different venues...all part of their 2011 Endless Strummer tour.

First up was a thirty minute set at the Foundation Room, a small VIP lounge located on the top floor of the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The intimacy of the room intensified The Surreal McCoys’ exciting set, which included original songs from their 2008 debut album The Bottle & The Gun (such as the surprisingly good-natured “$10 Hooker in a $5 Town”), plus a new song called “God and The Devil” from their forthcoming release “The Howl & The Growl,” as well as super-charged versions of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”, and a Beat Farmers version of Neil Young’s 1979 classic “Powderfinger.”

Standing less than five feet from the musicians, I got to experience the full power of the band. On the drums, keeping the groove strong, hard, and sometimes even funky on his three-piece kit: Billy Saul McCoy (aka Shawn Ryan). On bass guitar, the virtuosic stylings of Clinton McCoy (aka Clint Feddersen). On hard-drivin’ rhythm guitar and blues-inspired harmonica: Goat Boy McCoy (aka Patrick Smith). On lead guitar there’s Elvis McCoy (aka Tim Smith), armed with a Fender Telecaster and just the right licks to rival Scotty Moore and Duane Eddy. On lead vocals is Cletus McCoy (aka Erik Huey)...a punk rock star with a voice like Joe Strummer, and a stage presence and style akin to Mick Jagger, Michael Hutchence, and Jim Morrison. You put them all together, and you have one hell of a band.

Cletus McCoy is not only the band’s frontman, he’s also the audience’s front man too. At every Surreal McCoy show, Cletus leaps off the stage to be amongst the crowd, handing the microphone to whomever is ready and willing to sing along and be a part of the show.

As a special treat for the packed Foundation Room crowd, The Surreal McCoys were joined on stage for their final two songs by Camp Freddy / Billy Idol guitarist Billy Morrison. In the spirit of the night, the band (with Morrison) broke out a rousing version of The Clash’s arrangement of “I Fought The Law,” followed by the 1978 Cheap Trick classic (and Camp Freddy favorite) “Surrender.”

“We call it Johnny Clash” said Cletus when asked to describe his band’s sound. When you listen to their music, you realize Cletus is right on the money. I hear Johnny Cash in their sound, as well as The Clash. I also hear garage rock, rockabilly, and a good sense of humor. Cletus told me “The whole reason the band got together was because of The Beat Farmers, Mojo Nixon, and The Replacements.” When asked about his thoughts on performing in Los Angeles, Cletus said “It’s great to be back in L.A...the epicenter of the music industry. You can’t get up and fake it. You’ve got to deliver the goods.” “Deliver the goods” is right, yet The Surreal McCoys had no problem keeping up their end of the bargain at The Foundation Room, and chose to keep the momentum going with the late show at the second venue of the evening...Dragonfly.

Nestled in a nondescript space in Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard, Dragonfly is more of a traditional rock and roll venue compared to the fancy, exclusive, ultra-chic Foundation Room. It’s atmosphere says “Grab a beer and party.” So to, The Surreal McCoys performed a completely different set than the intimate show they played earlier in the evening in West Hollywood.

At 12:30am, the band hit the Dragonfly stage for a one hour set that began with “Brown Demon”...a four-to-the floor drinking song from their debut album. Keeping the energy high, the band blasted through another track from The Bottle & The Gun called “Words To That Effect.” Next up was the title track from their yet-to-be-released new album, “The Howl & The Growl.”

Reaching into their bag of tricks, The Surreal McCoys pulled out of nowhere the old Frankie Laine song from 1949: “Mule Train.” If that weren’t a surprise enough, Cletus brought out a song that he says “they would not let us play” when the band last performed in L.A. five years ago at the Viper Room: ”Hollywood Hills”...a 1987 underground classic from The Beat Farmers. Further wearing their influences on their sleeve, the band also played “Left of the Dial” by The Replacements as well as “Amsterdam” by Mojo Nixon.

Just when you think you got The Surreal McCoys pinned down, they throw a curveball at you, such as the double-shot of Bob Dylan songs played that night: “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and the classic “My Back Pages.” Of course, the band played these songs in true punk style.

Other highlights of the Dragonfly show included a gangbusters punk version of John Denver’s 1971 classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads”...immediately followed by a great take on The Replacements 80’s track “Can’t Hardly Wait.” For their faithful version of Looking Glass’s 1972 gem “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl), yours truly was brought onstage to play cowbell and sing along with Cletus and the band on the infectious chorus of " Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl).”

After burning through “Gun Sale at the Church” by The Beat Farmers, The Surreal McCoys ended their set as they had done at the Foundation Room... a full blast of Cheap Trick’s ‘Surrender” to close out the night. By the time the last note was played at 1:30am, it was hard to believe that The Surreal McCoys’ Los Angeles run had once again come to an end.

Yet there’s a lot more ahead for The Surreal McCoys. After their brief stop at the Gold Mine Tavern in Las Vegas, they'll take a short break, then go back into the studio to finish up their long-overdue new album The Howl & The Growl. Also, Cletus told me they soon will release a live EP called “Freeways and Threeways.” After that, its back on the road for more shows. If you’re lucky, they’ll pay a visit to your town. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll catch The Surreal McCoys while you can...
- O.C. Reloaded

WHO: Surreal McCoys
WHERE: House of Blues, Dragonfly
WHEN: 6/3/11
Who are the Surreal McCoys? Your new favorite cow punk band.

We followed them on Friday while they played back-to-back shows at House of Blues and the Dragonfly.

To say this band has a good sense of humor would be an understatement. During the average work week, these guys are working professionals, but while on tour, they are better known as the Surreal McCoys: Billy Saul McCoy, Cletus McCoy, Clint McCoy, Elvis McCoy and Goat Boy McCoy.

?This fun lovin' group of five met while attending Notre Dame in the '90s and began playing as the "Surreal McCoys" during fraternity parties. They describe themselves as "a whiskey-soaked psycho-billy musical assault team that specializes in BOTH kinds of music: Cow and Punk.
If Howlin' Wolf and Patsy Cline guzzled moonshine while having snarlin' backwoods fever sex under the full moon at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Surreal McCoys would be their star-crossed demon seed offspring." We're in.

The Surreal McCoys: fun to watch, fun to listen.

?The crowd who gathered at House of Blues was a mix of friends and followers who hooted and howled along with the backwoods sound and participation-inducing antics of lead singer Cletus McCoy.
It's not unusual for Cletus to start roaming the audience, allowing fans to join in on the mic, or to drop a knee like Elvis (Presley, not Elvis McCoy--he's too busy jamming on the geetar).

?Special guest Billy Morrison joined the Surreal McCoys to perform covers of The Clash's "I Fought the Law" and Cheap Trick's "Surrender."

"He even has a guitar named after him!" Cletus said, referring to the Billy Morrison Gibson Les Paul signature model guitar that was released this year at the NAMM Show.

Morrison is a member of Billy Idol's current touring band and performs with L.A.'s cover band Camp Freddy.

In addition to the cover songs, the Surreal McCoys played songs from their debut album The Bottle & The Gun, as well as new songs from their upcoming release titled The Howl & The Growl.
?
Directly after the House of Blues show, the Surreal McCoys headed to the Dragonfly in Hollywood for their second performance. Fans who attended the first show gladly followed.
The no-frills, non-pretentious, bare-bones vibe of the Dragonfly complimented the McCoys rockabilly, bluesy sound. Only one or two songs were repeated on the setlist for the late-night crowd and included an unexpected cover of Looking Glass's "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)."

Our advice: If the Surreal McCoys roll into your town, grab your cowboy hat and run, don't walk, to your nearest watering hole. They might even let you play the cowbell!
? - L.A. Weekly

Inmate says McCoys are better than solitary

By KAREN RIVERS
Tribune Correspondent

When we first talked to The Surreal McCoys three years ago, they were preparing for a single gig, a reunion show and a one-stop world tour dubbed “Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust.”

That cloud of dust never did quite settle.

The Surreal McCoys began in the early ’90s, the brainchild of five University of Notre Dame Law School students. The guys formed themselves a little cowpunk band and took to local stages wearing overalls and handing out jelly donuts. That first foray into the South Bend music scene lasted a few months, and the group disappeared until their 2005 comeback concert.

Despite the declaration that it was a one-stop world tour, the lawyers have been back to South Bend every fall since, always to play a show on a Notre Dame football weekend. In between, the McCoys, who live scattered around the country, have been booking shows in a number of cities and writing songs. They have now released an album “The Bottle & The Gun,” recorded in March at South Bend’s Grand Master Studio.

The McCoys will be playing those new tunes, along with their favorite cowpunk covers, at Simeri’s Old Town Tap on Friday. (And don’t worry, there’s plenty of time to learn the lyrics from their Web site if you’d like to sing along with some of their originals — might we suggest “$10 Hooker in a $5 Town”?)

The album is a slick little debut — a full 14-song LP, nicely packaged and produced. It’s a bit less cowpunk and has more of a mid-’70s record vibe. A little Rolling Stones, a little Thin Lizzy, the songs are a mix of the serious and the playful. The latter are particularly snappy, and standouts include the title track, which pretty well encapsulates the whole McCoys concept; the peppy little ode “Eddie Was a Towel Man” and “Is This a Private Fight?” a raucous, infectious Irish fight song that sounds like a cover the first time you hear it.

The album works as a vehicle that captures the whole McCoys spirit, but with the presence of some serious ballads, it also suggests that the guys may be interested in doing more than the rodeo-clowns-with-guitars routine.

The McCoys, which lead singer Erik Huey once called a nice alternative to having a mid-life crisis, is slowly becoming something of a serious project.

With Huey and drummer Shawn Ryan of South Bend together on a conference call, we learned some more about the evolution.

Back at their inception, the McCoys found and embraced a niche. As Ryan points out, cowpunk was “a totally legitimate genre for about 15 minutes back in the ’80s.”

“In my mind,” Huey adds, “punk and country are thematically and musically very similar — they’re just played at different speeds.”

The McCoys, then, are the logical combination of backwoods flavor and hardcore punk energy, an approach that allows them to cover Johnny Cash while riding a rocking a horse. The guys, in other words, were not afraid to run with their concept — and they are definitely not afraid to take their act to the biggest stage they can find.

The McCoys have played at the famous Viper Room in Los Angeles. They’ve performed on the roof of the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. Last time we talked with them, Huey wistfully mused that his dream gig was a prison.

So they did that, too.

This April, the McCoys played at state correctional institute in Fayette Brownsville just outside of Pittsburgh. The crowd consisted of about 150 jumpsuited inmates, and the McCoys did everything from “Folsom Prison Blues” (of course) to some originals to Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice,” earning themselves a standing ovation.

Ryan recalled one tattooed gentlemen who stood about six-five and weighed in around 300 pounds. When he first saw the McCoys, he said that he’d rather go to “the hole” than listen to them.

Ryan and Huey swear that by the end of their hour-long set, that guy was dancing.

So, with the approval of what, by any estimation, is a seriously tough crowd, what’s next?

“Five solo albums,” Huey says.

“All released on the same day,” Ryan adds, referring to a stunt KISS pulled off in the ’70s.

More seriously, “The Bottle & The Gun” turned into a larger project than the McCoys first imagined it would be. Neither Ryan nor Huey had done much songwriting before this, but being part of the McCoys gave them the perfect outlet. All 14 songs were written in the last year and a half, and the band had great chemistry when they got to the studio.

The McCoys are working on shopping their songs to satellite radio stations, and Huey would love to do some licensing agreements — get their music into the background of a video game such as “Grand Theft Auto.” That, he thinks, would have a kind of poetic resonance.

“A drive-by shooting,” Huey says, “that’s how our fans describe our show!” - The South Bend Tribune/Karen Rivers

Southern gothic magic
Surreal McCoys return to cow-punk you again

By KAREN RIVERS
South Bend Tribune Staff Writer

Erik Huey rocks out sans shirt with the Surreal McCoys at the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles this March.

How did the Surreal McCoys prepare for tonight's big show at Club 22 in Granger? Well, first, they put aside their "festering recriminations" and artistic differences -- not to mention their guns. Of course, they oiled up their chaps. And oh yes, they practiced all three chords they know, and mastered two.

Not many bands would have the guts to call themselves "the top cowpunk band ever to come out of the (University of Notre Dame) Law School" -- but the thing about the Surreal McCoys is, these boys aren't shy.

"We're like some kind of weird psychobilly, under-the-porch, backwoods experiment that's gone awry, but unlike most such experiments, ours is set to music," frontman Erik Huey says.

He adds that the band is like the love child of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, if it was born in the shadow of Tupelo, Miss., while Howlin' Wolf sang in the background.

But of course.

The overall-wearing, Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking quintet formed back in the early '90s, but the musicians went their separate ways after graduation. They reconnected about a year ago, and today, the gainfully employed attorneys return to the local stage.

They're bringing their cowbells and their washboards with them.

The Surreal McCoys are Huey of Washington, D.C., Shawn Ryan of South Bend, Clint Feddersen of Los Angeles, and brothers Patrick Smith of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Tim Smith of Traverse City, Mich. On the phone together to discuss tonight's gig, Huey and Ryan promise a fun-filled evening, guaranteed to exorcise any demons the audience acquired from listening to Michael Bolton and/or Britney Spears.

When asked to describe their performance style, Huey says "loose" and Ryan says "drunken gymnastics."

The guys played a local show last November, when they put on a rollicking one-stop tour at The Sports Page in Granger. They're returning to the venue (now Club 22) for what's been dubbed their "second annual farewell show." They'll cover tunes by Johnny Cash, Drive-By Truckers, Neil Young and others. They'll also present their original tune, "The Bottle and the Gun."

To give a taste, the opening verse goes something like this: "There's a darkness deep in every man/That we struggle to keep hid/I was a sober and a peaceful man/When I got wind of what you did."

Imagine where things go from there.

Someday, the McCoys hope to release an album, but for now, they plan to keep up their schedule of two or three shows a year (Huey's dream gig: a jail). The guys played in Traverse City last night and actually took the stage at the Viper Room in Los Angeles during Oscar weekend this past March.

How did the cowpunks manage that? The short explanation, it seems, is that they're "kind of a big deal." As for how the show went ...

"They weren't booing," Ryan insists. "They were yelling 'Huey!' "

Tonight, they'll offer up that special brand of "Southern gothic" magic, plus, they'll take the money they make at the door and spend it on shot trays for the audience. If that's not enough, Ryan has one more incentive:

"Erik does more costume changes than Cher."

Huey doesn't disagree. Snaps, he says, make for great dramatic stripping -- but it's still good to have an assistant.

"Last year," he says, "I had my own cowboy shirt roadie." - South Bend Tribune

The Surreal McCoys bill themselves as the top cowpunk band to ever come out of Notre Dame Law School. If you want to argue about that, take ’em to court.
The five attorneys — Erik Huey ’92J.D., lead singer; Shawn Ryan ’88, ’91J.D., drums; Clint Feddersen ’94J.D., bass; and brothers Patrick Smith ’90, ’95J.D./MBA, guitar/harmonica and Tim Smith ’89, ’92J.D., guitar — are scattered across the country and doing just fine in their various law practices.
A few times a year, however, the lawyers shift into travelin’ man mode and head for a good-times performance at a city near where one of their members lives. That’s where the fun really begins. That’s when they become the Surreal McCoys (aka Cletus, Billy Saul, Clint, Goat Boy and Elvis McCoy).
The McCoys bring cowbells. They bring funny things to wear. And they bring people up on stage to share in their musical havoc of alternative country, which ranges from re-imagined covers of Johnny Cash or The Clash or Hank Williams to their original songs, such as “Is This A Private Fight (Or Can We All Join In)?” Their motto: Play it Loud, Play it Plowed.
Despite the hijinks, these attorneys are quite serious about the band and about songwriting. “All of us, right down to our drummer, seem to have a certain creative push to develop and create new music,” Tim Smith says in an email.
That push was evident during their undergraduate and law school days, when the various group members played in different bands. They got together as the Surreal McCoys in 1992, then split when Huey and Tim Smith headed for their respective law careers. In 2005, the two attorneys — Huey working in Washington, D.C., and Smith in Traverse City, Michigan — contacted the other three band members and suggested a reprise of the group. From Feddersen in Los Angeles, Ryan in South Bend and Patrick Smith in St. Paul, Minnesota, they got a yes, and the group was reborn.
To make the cross-country band work, writes Smith, the members agree on a set list for an upcoming show, practice on their own, then meet the day before the show and run through the performance several times. Beer might be part of that.
Live shows at various spots in the country (they were in St. Petersburg, Florida, in May) aren’t the Surreal McCoys’ only claim to musical fame. Last year the group released a 14-track CD, The Bottle & The Gun, available on iTunes, and this year signed a licensing and distribution deal with Song Stew records.
The band also makes a splash on its website, thesurrealmccoys.com, with photos, lyrics to its original songs, audio from a 2006 appearance at the Viper Room in L.A., tour dates and various strange factoids members happily share with fans.
One thing they definitely want fans to know is where in the country they will pop up next. For the remainder of 2009, the Surreal McCoys’ not so aptly named Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust: One Stop World Tour includes an August appearance in Minneapolis/St. Paul, a show October 14 at Traverse City and an October 15 gig in Chicago.
The big date is a return to their roots, an appearance at Simeri’s Old Town Tap in South Bend on October 16, 2009, the night before the ND-USC game. “We want to make sure any ND fans coming in for the biggest game of the year know about this show,” says Tim Smith. Now you do. - Notre Dame Magazine

Top Lobbyist Makes Like Jagger
Rock Review, National Examiner


Meet Erik Huey. Entertainment industry lobbyist for Venable LLP by day, rock god by night.

Or so it was this weekend, as Huey and his band, the Surreal McCoys, held the latest of several reunion “tours” since their heyday at Notre Dame Law School. The two-stop tour began in Georgetown on Friday night in the vacant, graffiti-covered space at 33rd and M streets that formerly housed Staples. Before about 200 friends and associates, the band breezed through about 90 minutes of “cowpunk” covers — “Think Johnny Cash crossed with The Clash. … And we’re still alive,” they say — and a few originals.

Another local, Washington Life editor Michael Clements, sat in with the band on harmonica.

Then, Saturday, it was into the tour bus — OK, so it was a van — for more of the same at Fontana’s Bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

After not playing for several years, this kind of quick tour has become de rigeur for the band’s six members, who went their own ways after law school.

Last year, they played a smattering of bars in the Midwest, including in South Bend, and capped things off with a gig at the legendary Viper Room on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip.

“Being a rock star is not a dissimilar skill set to being a lobbyist,” Huey said. “It comes down to connecting with people.”

-- Staff writer Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin - Washington Examiner