When the Shivering Denizenstake the stage at Lake City’s Shanty Tavern Friday night, Ronnie E. Rebel (Ron Banner on his birth certificate) will be celebrating one of the momentous occasions of his life. And he’d appreciate it if you didn’t buy him a shot. The band’s singer, guitarist, and songwriter is marking 10 years of sobriety.
The battle against the bottle, Rebel says, is “a huge part of my life.” Big enough, indeed, that he started the Denizens in 2007 as a self-described “straight-edge honky-tonk band”— appropriate, considering country music’s canon of songs of booze-soaked regret, of which Rebel has plenty. Served alongside well-chosen covers like Ernest Tubb’s “Driving Nails in My Coffin,” Rebel originals like “Dry Drunk Blues” and “Homeless, Drunk, and Lonely” are witty anti-sermons about getting messed up in more ways than one.
When he sings “She left me there at the needle exchange with a dagger through my heart,” it rings with grimy truth. When he sings “I’m a candidate for change, come on and get me high,” on the panhandlers’ anthem “Candidate for Change,” the only finger he’s pointing is at himself.
With a crackerjack band like his, though, it would be easy to overlook any preaching Rebel might care to do. Drummer Bob Barraza clacks along with a crisp, locomotive precision reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s stickman W.S. Holland. Cutting from steady thumps to swinging fills and runs, Hank Leinonen has as many upright-bass tricks up his sleeve as he does tattoos. Lee Harvey Hartwood adds ringing Telecaster leads and hyperspeed banjo licks in a wide range of flavors, from Appalachian to rockabilly.
Both live and on disc—they’ve released two full-lengths—the band provides a most appropriate setting for Rebel’s hard-won tales of defiance and woe. “The Ohio State Penitentiary, that’s where I got my education,” Rebel says about his drinking, drugging hellion days back in his native Buckeye State. “I wrote a lot of songs in jail.”
Along with staying busy in town, the band plans a shuffle down the West Coast next month. And, no, all his time spent working in drinking holes never tempts Rebel to fall off the wagon. He says there’s nothing like being the only straight observer in a room full of sloppy drunks to remind you how low you can go: “The bars keep me sober.”
