Just how great are Black Oak Arkansas? Well rock critic Ubermensch Robert Christgau once posed the question of why they couldn’t fill NYC’s Academy of Music on a Saturday night after two years of relentless touring and then answered it himself with the words, “Because unlike most similar bands they have never achieved competence—they are actively untalented, incapable of even an interesting cop.”
Is that a glowing endorsement or what? But if you ask me Christgau was missing the point. If you have a sense of humor and a taste for the totally inexplicable those are the very qualities that make Black Oak Arkansas so great! I mean, ANYBODY can be competent! And talent’s bullshit! The Police were talented, and they should have been arrested! Eric Clapton is talented! Talent kills!
Black Oak Arkansas were working at a level of total inspiration that made basic proficiency much less mastery irrelevant, starting from the day they stole the PA from their high school and set up in an abandoned grain bin at the outskirts of the tiny burg they’d name themselves after and commenced to produce such an ear-splitting din that it took the cops all of ten minutes or so to swoop down on ‘em and not only pull the plug but arrest them for grand larceny, after which they were sentenced to TWENTY-SIX YEARS at some horrifying penal farm, although the sentence was later suspended. But there’s a lesson in there—playing the sounds they heard in their collective unhinged head could have put them away for decades, and it that ain’t the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, what is?
Black Oak Arkansas was a band of renegade long-haired redneck Krishna Baptists at the bizarro fringe of the southern rock movement who liked to sing about the halls of Karma and called themselves “mutants of the monster” and lived at one with nature in some kind of hairy hippie commune in the sticks where they perfected their totally incompetent but always electrifying and utterly unique brand of radioactive psychedelic southern rock, complete with their own three-guitar army and a drummer who liked to play solos with his bare hands, perhaps because he couldn’t afford drum sticks. But if so, why didn’t he just steal some? Arkansas is Purdue Country and literally crawling with chickens!