Bloodshot Bill

Though Bloodshot Bill hails from Montreal, he summons a great Southern musical tradition—that of the wild-eyed, one-man band. For three decades, the psychobilly savant has drawn deserved comparisons to West Virginia’s Hasil Adkins and Georgia’s Abner Jay, legendarily ragtag multi-instrumentalists whose self-reliance let them be as weird as they wanted to be. “I had access to all these instruments and set them up just to try it out,” as Bloodshot Bill once put it. “I started playing as a [one-man act] just for fun.” He has applied that flexibility to records and his stage show, releasing more than 60 albums, singles, and EPs on great labels like New York’s Norton and Memphis’ Goner and collaborating with the likes of King Khan or Shannon & The Clams.

Still, it is onstage where Bloodshot Bill really shines. He is endlessly adaptable, so that he can recruit local musicians to pile in behind his warped rockabilly about mischief and mayhem, scoundrels and soirees. With his voice pitched between a backroom growl and an Orbison vibrato, he approaches his guitar like he’s got a vendetta, squeezing out sharp solos between ragged chords. And when he goes it alone, making that Silvertone purr as he keeps the rhythms with his feet on a kick drum and hi-hat, he seems to disappear into these songs, a reminder of the basic function of rock ’n’ roll: to howl out problems until they disappear. “Get loose or get lost,” Bill likes to say. His music does both.