How old is reverend horton heat

Their sound is self described as "Country-fed punkabilly. Jim Heath played in a cover band called Southern Comfort with friends from Corpus Christi Ray, his high school, before attending the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of At UT, he often entertained friends and dormmates and was often found playing in the stairwells at Moore-Hill Dormitory late into the night to avoid disturbing the sleep of roommate Harold Shockley, now a Corpus Christi banker.

Jim left school in the spring to join up with a touring cover band by the name of Sweetbriar. Three years later, former dormmate David Livingston, now in his senior year of school and at home visiting family, saw a familiar face on stage and reunited with Jim.

David told Jim stories of the punk music scene in Austin and the acts playing at venues like Raul's and Club Foot. After the show, there broke out a punks vs. While Jim and David escaped any involvement in the scuffle, Jim later claimed to have had an epiphany on that evening. Always a fan of blues and honky tonk, Jim returned the favor by taking David and his wife, Ellen, to see The Blasters in Dallas at a venue known as the Hot Klub and Jim's love for roots rock took over from there.

Jim had married a former bandmate from Sweetbriar, and together they had a child. Together they decided that the rock-and-roll lifestyle was over and that it was time to have real jobs. One night during a lull, Russell Hobbs, one of the original Deep Ellum visionaries and proprietors of these venues goaded Jim into getting up to play. He played alone, tearing through a version of "Folsom Prison Blues" that is now so familiar to millions of Reverend Horton Heat fans around the world.

He's a time-travelling space-cowboy on an endless interstellar musical tour, and we are all the richer and "psychobillier" for getting to tag along. Flames come off the guitars. Heat singes your skin. There's nothing like the primal tribal rock 'n roll transfiguration of a Reverend Horton Heat show. Jim becomes a slicked-back ? And then there are the "Heatettes". This time around, Heat had an even more unlikely producer in Ministry 's Al Jourgensen ; he also had major-label bucks, which contributed to a ratcheting up of the hell-raising lifestyle he often sang about, and eventually the temporary worsening of a drinking problem.

In the meantime, drummer Bentley left the band later in to join Tenderloin ; he was replaced by Scott "Chernobyl" Churilla.

Horton Heat returned in with It's Martini Time , which featured several nods to the swing and lounge revival scenes emerging around that time; as a result, the title track became a minor hit, and the album became their first to chart in the Top That year, Heat made his small-screen acting debut thanks to his on-stage preacher shtick, which earned him a guest spot on the acclaimed drama Homicide: Life on the Street. The following year, he appeared on The Drew Carey Show. The band's final major-label album, Space Heater , arrived in ; after its release, the gigantic label mergers of that year resulted in the band being dropped from Interscope.

In the wake of their exit, Sub Pop released a song best-of compilation, Holy Roller , in , covering their entire output up to that point. Undaunted, they continued to tour, and in recorded the more straightforward rockabilly album Spend a Night in the Box for the Time Bomb label.

This time, Butthole Surfers ' Paul Leary manned the production booth. The Reverend next surfaced on Artemis Records with 's Lucky 7 , his hardest-edged album in quite some time. Its single, "Like a Rocket," was selected as the theme song for that year's Daytona race.

Buoyed by the publicity, Heat signed a new deal with Yep Roc in His first album for the label, Revival , appeared the following year, as did a live DVD. In , he gave the world its first psychobilly holiday album, We Three Kings. Three years later, the frontman unveiled his side project Reverend Organdrum , which explored a wider range of retro sounds with Hi-Fi Stereo. In , Scott Churilla left the band, and Paul Simmons became the group's drummer. After the release of 25 to Life , Scott Churilla returned to the lineup, and stayed with the band until , when he was succeeded by drummer Arjuna "RJ" Contreras.

In , the Reverend Horton Heat became a quartet with the addition of full-time piano player Matt Jordan; Contreras and Jordan would make their recording debut with the band on their album Brand New Life.