Pine Hill Haints

Thrasher Magazine, Feb, 2005

OUT ON THE ALABAMA/TENNESSEE state line where the roads are still dirt and a few miles off the Natchez Trace, you can find the current home of the Pine Hill Haints. For many people there's not a lot to be seen out in this area--mostly trees, pastures, rivers, and hills--passing backdrop stuff to most folks. A snapshot of the older days or just backwoods incivility, but for the Pine Hill Haints it is the land and the stories of this south that have given life to their style of homemade music.--Chihwerehuo

From atop the scratched-up hardwood floors of dilapidated 20th century shacks, the Pine Hill Haints whip a lo-fi house party into a wild drunken frenzy of hoots and hollers. The down-low thud of the washtub bass combines with minimal drumming and washboard rhythms to form the backbone of the Haints. There have been too many people that have passed through the Haints to name them all, but Jamie Barrier has maintained from the beginning, writing songs, singing and playing guitar.

Close to two dozen people have played with the Haints, banging on drums, playing the mandolin, fiddle, washtub, accordion, singing saw, banjo, and harmonica. All have played their part and given their time to making the Haints' sound something that is fresh and slightly unpredictable, but always maintaining the roots of country, blues, and pre-genre traditional forms of music. All of it brought together provides crowds with uncontrollable foot-stomping to rattle the devil out of the most sex-confounded love-sick soul. Their songs are more stories than music, but not stories in the sense of structure. They are stories first, songs second. They conjure images of ghost trains and spectral catfish crossing the horizon. There's witches, demons, and getting over on the drink.

"Other than ghost stories being a part of your mashed potatoes every evening, other than Southern life itself, we feel as if we're playing music that's not the new wave, it's not the new thing, it's dead," says Jamie. "Even honky tonk ... rockabilly, blues, soul, Celtic tunes. All these forms are not the new thing in pop culture. They're dead, so hey, we're ghost, we play dead music, we're poltergeists, we're necromancers." The Pine Hill Haints are not contained by any of the current "alt-country" labels or that of punk rock, the ethos of which they exemplify so well.

"I first started singing in the Pine Hill Cemetery in Auburn, Alabama," says Jamie. The gates to the cemetery were east iron relics from the years following the Civil War. Buried in the cemetery were long gone soldiers of a time when America was in its formative stages. The individual lives and those they took were long forgotten. The cemetery was their haunt. Forgotten and lost, until the music of the Haints came alive, taking its breath from a graveyard that had become a home for drunks, southern Gothic vampires, and wayfaring travelers. It was not from there, singularly, that the Haints were complete, but also from the combined influences of each member.

Starting at Pine Hill Cemetery, back before the turn of the century, leading up till now, the Haints have come a long way playing their own brand of country music. They have done so in the face of a culture that is steeped in tradition, and at the same time ready to cripple you with the oppressive pressure set forth by the idea that the world is supposed to operate in one particular fashion.

When the Haints started out they couldn't afford an upright bass, which they thought every real country band needed. That couldn't have been further from the truth, and the washtub bass began its service to the spirit of the Haints. They used a cliched instrument of the south to break away at the rigid notion of what was "supposed to be." Using only his bare hands, the drummer, Johnny Cobra, would sit slapping the busted head of the snare drum. Sad Eye, the harmonica player, sounded like a ghost wandering through space more than any specific sterilized blues styling. Jamie stepped in with the musical arraignments of a guitar player who grew up singing gospel hymns in one-room churches, and the Haints sound began. A little while later, H Kat's washboard was joined in and the Haints honed in on their sound of jangly, about-to-fall-apart-but-making-it-to-grace-at-the-last-possible-moment sound.

"We were considered a joke band at first," said Jamie. "People didn't know what to think, our first couple of shows were with some pretty big bands at the time. Well, bands we thought were big, bands we respected, but they didn't give us two cents worth of nothing for our time." While they were serious about the music and it meant all of their heart and soul, others didn't see it the same way. So what did they do? A year earlier Jamie had started Arkam Records to help with the Wednesdays, a band he started with his brothers when they were all still in elementary school. Through that the Haints released three full-lengths, a 12" vinyl, and a couple of splits. "I don't think I'm some hot businessman, but all Little Richard knew and all that Jerry Lee Lewis knew was rock and roll. They didn't care about that business side of it. It's like if you walk in the room you better be ready to throw down. I feel the same way, but nobody was gonna put out records for us so I better do it." Eventually, Calvin Johnson of K Records took an interest in the Haints, so much so that he recorded them in Olympia for free, and the ensuing CD EP was released on Portland's LELP Records, titled You Bury Your Heart in a Shallow Grave.