These Puppies Won’t Hush: Chickasaw Mudd Puppies Return to Stage and Studio

The stage at a Chickasaw Mudd Puppies show looks more like the setting for a play based on a Faulkner novel than a backdrop for a band melding country blues, rockabilly, and punk.
In their early 1990s prime, Brant Slay, the stringy-haired singer, percussionist, and multi-instrumentalist, perched himself in a ratty ladder-back rocking chair. He teetered with nervous energy throughout songs, dragging a rhythm with spoons on a washboard around his neck, or playing harmonica, dancing like a man possessed. In the chair, he was perched atop a hollow wooden platform – a “stomp board” – that he pounded with his boots to evoke a trap drum. Meanwhile, Ben Reynolds strolled the stage, sometimes singing but always providing the body of the sound with his guitar. Natty quilts, rickety wooden furniture and beads and baubles that look scavenged from voodoo queen Marie Laveau’s parlor formed the backdrop. The sound that flowed from them was a sort of sloppy Delta blues, but with a propulsive beat and scratchy, guttural, faraway vocals (and the occasional banshee wail).
Here and there, Slay’s eyes would roll back into his head. “Shark eyes,” Slay calls them. “They roll in the back of my head, and then somebody else has taken over.”
Even if you didn’t do drugs, seeing the band made you feel like you did.
Playing nearly every city of note throughout the country in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Athens, Georgia, duo was a sonic and visual trip. Many pegged them as the next big thing.
Polygram Records signed the two, and they put out a pair of albums produced by R.E.M. ‘s Michael Stipe, who was a friend from the Athens scene, and famed bluesman Willie Dixon. They put out videos and filmed a segment for MTV’s “120 Minutes,” wherein Tim Sommer declared them “one of the strangest bands ever signed to a major label.” They opened for R.E.M., The Violent Femmes, The Waterboys, The Lemonheads, and Jane’s Addiction.
Fame outside of the South never came, though, and the Mudd Puppies broke up, pursued careers, got married, and started families.
And so it may come as a surprise to learn the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies are performing live again. A showcase for some of the songs from a new album to be released early in 2023 on New West Records.
Most surprising? That this all came about, in a way, thanks to Hollywood action star Jason Statham.

Hollywood hijinks
It was 2010 when the band was contacted by producers of a forthcoming movie – what would become Statham’s “The Mechanic,” a gritty remake of a 1972 Steve McQueen film. They wanted the Mudd Puppies’ song “Ponky Knot” (from their 1990 debut, “White Dirt”) for a training montage. But the band didn’t own the rights to the recording; the label did.
“Instead of giving the record company all the money for the song, Ben and I decided just to go re-record it exactly the way it was,” Slay said. “And they let us do that. We ended up calling the song ‘Chicken Bone.’” Slay and Reynolds both had a ball, and Slay prompted Reynolds to drop back into their bygone roles – at least part-time, as the two still have traditional careers. Reynolds lives in Athens and is a lecturer at the University of Georgia. Slay lives near Omaha, Georgia, and is a conservation manager with The Nature Conservancy. They were still close, in geography and in ethos.
“Hey, send me some songs. Hey, I’ll send you some lyrics,” Slay told Reynolds. “Let’s keep doing this.”
They played a handful of shows in 2011, including a gig at the renowned South by Southwest conference in Austin. They added Alan “Lumpy” Cowart, formerly of The Beggar Weeds, on drums to lighten some of the load.
“We don’t move maybe quite as well as we used to, or whatever,” Reynolds said with a laugh. But the addition of Cowart was as much a concession to camaraderie as age.
“We were totally open to people playing with us that had the same passion and the same connection, and Alan was one of those people,” Slay said. Cowart hails from Jacksonville, Florida, and his former band was a frequent touring partner with the Mudd Puppies. He was thrilled at the opportunity to become a member.
“These guys are a hoot to play with, and I’ve tried to tell ’em so many times in a heartfelt way – the only way that, you know, Lumpy can – that I’m a fan,” he said. “And then I’m in the band, which is pretty cool.”

‘Fall Line’
Work on a new record began almost immediately after that reunion, some 12 years ago, and never really stopped. “We’re just slow moving,” Reynolds said. The record was substantially finished two years ago. The band was about to push the entire album to Bandcamp when a friend convinced them to talk to a label first. Sure enough, Strolling Bones Records was interested, and remixing and mastering began.
The swampy blues, rockabilly, and punk rock notes are still there, if one is to judge by the release of the early mixing of the track “Little Man.” So is the sense of place, in the Southern muck, that was there on “White Dirt” and “8-Track Stomp.”
“Hence the name of the album, ‘Fall Line,’” Slay said. “I mean, that’s where I’ve been working the last 20 years. It just made sense, because the songs that we were writing had characters, and culture, and stories from all of our growing-up regions. In a roundabout way, we triangulated all of our own personalities into this new sonic phase that we’re doing.”
The band has booked a Macon show in addition to the gig at The Loft to support the record. Big Jef Special is the opening act for the Columbus show.
If the Mudd Puppies might have been pokey about getting new music out, but don’t expect a waning of vigor on the stage. Slay still gets those shark eyes.
“When my eyes roll in the back of my head, and I do crazy things, and my face gets all contorted about, that’s when we’re really kicking,” he said.
“You know, it’s different, but I feel like we still do it with the same energy,” Reynolds said. “There’s still something that’s just really magic to me that happens with us. And it makes me feel really spent and really, really gratified after we’ve done it.”

By Brad Barnes