Pete “Panza” Bondurant, the guitarist and vocalist of up-and-coming noise rock trio Horse With Knife, did not have a good 2012. Horse With Knife was playing an outdoor show in Reno, Nevada in support of their critically acclaimed debut LP, A Useful Man Is a Hideous Thing, when Panza’s guitar shorted out, catapulting him 35 feet onto the roof of a porta-john occupied by concertgoer Cyndi King, who told reporters, “I heard a LOUD whistling noise. It sounded like a buzz bomb. I was for goddamn sure I was defunct.” Bondurant was lucky to escape with two broken legs.
But worse was yet to come. Bondurant, a real trooper, took to playing in a wheelchair, which at a show in Boise malfunctioned (faulty brakes), causing Bondurant to roll off the stage and topple nine feet onto the concrete below. On his head. Bondurant suffered a severe concussion. Then, back in Horse With Knife’s hometown of Riddle, Texas, he got into a drunken barroom brawl (in his wheelchair) and broke his left hand. He won the fight.
A lesser man would have spent the rest of his life cloistered in a monastery. I know I would have. But no sooner was Bondurant back on his feet than he went into the studio to record Horse With Knife’s stellar sophomore LP, Let’s Go Hurt Myself.
A concept album of sorts about Panza’s travails, Let’s Go Hurt Myself features such highlights as “Flying on Electricity” (“I could clearly smell burning hair/Way up there in the Nevada air/I cried, ‘Holy motherfucking Jesus/Look at all the people who came to see us!’”) and “Lucky to Still Be Retarded” (“Thunderbird and cheap cocaine/It’s good I have a real small brain/I was hardly a genius when this all got started/And I count myself lucky to still be retarded”).
Horse With Knife will be playing an afternoon all-ages show on April 5 at St. Fiacre (patron saint of veneral disease!) Catholic Church to benefit rickets research, and you’d be a fool not to go see what disaster will befall Bondurant next. And to top it all off, Bondurant has promised the first twenty attendees a swatch of the trousers he was wearing when he made his historic Reno flight. The Brittle Liver Band opens.
