Artist Spotlight: Lenny And the Piss Poor Boys

Genres are bullshit

It was 2010 or so, and we had just pulled into one of the many deeply unremarkable towns in southern Germany to play a gig on a Tuesday night. Every touring band knows what this can feel like. You are thousands of miles from home and from the people you love, you’ve just poured your hungover self out of a preposterously long van ride, and you’re slated to play a set of some weirdo music on an evening when no one in their right mind should even be going out to a concert.

And you know, people sometimes describe venues derisively as a "hole in the wall”.  But on this one particular evening, the venue was literally a hole in the wall, a sort of alcove carved out of a basement wall. I remember shambling into this actual hole in the wall after a 9 hour drive and collapsing with an ill-advised pilsner on a stone bench. And then I heard the music.

After sitting in stunned, soothed silence for about a minute, listening to the vocalist, I remember turning to someone and saying: "hey, isn't this Lenny from Darkbuster?" Nah, it couldn’t be, this was country music, right?

But it was indeed Lenny Lashley on the mic. Darkbuster was a band we'd been listening to in the van for a while, a semi-legendary Boston area punk band with a very distinctive lead singer and some insanely catchy hooks. See: Skinhead, If Grandma was a Nazi(featuring the greatest ending to a song ever) and the gloriously contrarian Lilith Fair, a song guaranteed to make 18.3% of you tsk-tsk, shake your heads and mutter something about privilege. Whatever. I can sing the entire Surfacing album all the way through, I get to enjoy “Lilith Fair”.

Anyway, since that day I have never lost this powerful sense that Lashley is a goddamned genius, because this world-beating semi-legend punk singer just hauled off and decided to make this incredible S/T country music album, called "Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys." How this album has languished in obscurity I will never know.

Fig 1: The Masterpiece

Lashley was able to see something that a lot of songwriters aren't: the superficiality of genres. For my part, you don't get very far in a genre called "folk-punk" without realizing that genres are often bullshit, that often two genres may have far more in common than the superficial packaging reveals. Lenny's genius lies in seeing that the half drunk loser out in the pit isn't really that different from the half drunk loser at a real honest country folk show.  They both want to revel in emotion and community and sing along to some sweet lyrics about booze and heartbreak and life in general.

The songs on Lashley’s country album are magnificent.  And again, the amazing thing is that he made an album that both a Ramones fan and a Robert Earl Keen fan can enjoy.

Anyway, country-folkies should start here:

And punks can start here:

When I was living in Providence, my buddy Jen invited me to Boston to see Lenny play an acoustic show. She knew I was a megafan and introduced me to him. It didn’t go well. I stumbled and fumbled my way through a bizarre set of statements that were almost as embarrassingly fanboy-ish as what I said when I met Brody Dalle. Ugh. I suck.

Sorry Lenny. As penance, we, the Dreadnoughts, were actually going to put one of these songs on our most recent album. It may still happen on a future album. But for our paid $ub$criber$, here’s the not-very-good pre-studio demo of Lenny’s "Shot of Bourbon”. The idea was to take the Piss Poor Boys song and move it back in the direction of the Darkbuster sound: