In the late 1980’s, a band emerged on the LA club scene dedicated to the proposition that two guys on a stage could generate enough energy to put a traditional four person combo to shame. That band was House of Freaks. The name, which was taken from a circus poster, was most significant for what it did not mean. It was intended to be amorphous — something that would not tie the performers to any particular genre. They resisted categorizing their music. But some have called it “twisted blues swamp rock.”
Johnny Hott played the drums and collaborated in composing. But the enterprise was most clearly identified with Bryan Harvey, the lead singer and lyricist. Both men, who later discovered that they were distant cousins, were natives of Richmond, Virginia. They wrote songs weighted with regional history, including one that asserts:
What mysteries flow through these white folk’s blood?
What secrets do they hide within?
…
Dusting off their fathers’ guns,
Words like worms crawl through their brains.
Sermons fly from the preacher’s mouth
But the auction block still remains.
What turned me on the House of Freaks, however, is the following:
Given the title and the Southern gothic themes of some of their other material, “Kill the Mockingbird” could be viewed as a grenade lobbed at that mainstay of the middle school reading list by Harper Lee. But the contemptuous reference to the “cooing of amorous people” is a giveaway. In fact, Harvey admired “To Kill a Mockingbird”; instead, as he noted in remarks that have been preserved on the site bluecricket.com, he intended to write an “anti-romance song” trashing his relationship with his then girlfriend. I prize it because it is so spirited and clever as to balance the sense of menace. Harvey sings that the mockingbird should be killed for the sin of singing. That softens the blow — just as the fact the Harvey was Caucasian lightened his performance of “White Folk’s Blood.”
Years later, after he fell in love with the woman he married, Harvey wrote a song entitled, “I Got Happy.” It tellingly includes the line: “Now its okay. Let the mockingbird sing.”
House of Freaks released four full-length CDs between 1987 and 1994. Then the band, which never achieved mainstream success, disbanded. Harvey and Hott went on to pursue other musical partnerships. But the aftermath of the story is difficult to tell. The word nightmare feels inadequate.
Suffice it to say that, in the early afternoon of January 1, 2006, while waiting to host a New Year’s Day gathering in their Richmond home, Harvey, his wife, and their two young daughters were the random targets of a burglary during which they were brutally murdered. Over the next decade, the drama played out in state and federal court proceedings in which the details of the crime — along with those of four additional murders and a vicious assault that the killer and his accomplice had committed within the same few months — were counterposed with the tragic circumstances of the killer’s childhood. A little over a year ago, he was executed.
In retrospect, it is difficult to avoid viewing Harvey’s work through the prism of his fate. But in this context as others — to borrow a phrase from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — one should be alert to the danger of a single story. Harvey was a vibrant source of creativity and humor. His memory should evoke pleasure as well as sorrow; anything less would deny him his due.
Let’s close with this track, which Harvey vaguely described as “about letting go and letting life happen.” The one great phrase — “strong as death, sweet as love” — was lifted from the title of a 1975 Al Green song. But the music and mood are irresistible.
