Lump guitarist and vocalist Lou Thevenot readily admits that he often writes lyrics that are “kind of nonsense.”
So it was easy for an onlooker at a recent gig to interpret the incredulous look he shot saxophonist Ben Ellman in the midst of “Hole In the Sky” as, “Can you believe the shit I’m singing?”
No, laughs Thevenot when asked about it a few days later, “It was probably, ‘I can’t believe the shit you’re playing.’ He hates that song. That’s like the Lump punk-rock song that Ben has to lower himself to play. He always finds a way to go get a drink during that song, and just barely make it back for the solo.”
Ellman, you see, first made a name for himself around town with (and continues to play for) the New Orleans Klezrner All-stars. His duty with Lump—who will attend this month’s South By Southwest music industry conference in Austin after winning OffBeat‘s annual Rock-A-Rama—is to weave sax melodies into the sometimes discordant cacophony of sound that is Lump.
Thevenot and Lump’s rhythm section, drummer A.P. Gonzalez and bassist Mike Joseph, first teamed up in The Black Problem, a heavily Minutemen-influenced alt-rock quartet that attracted a modest local following before disbanding in 1990. Shades of the Minutemen carried over to Lump, whose precision execution, marked by an overactive bass and slashing guitar—and nonsensical lyrics—makes Primus an obvious point of reference.
But Gonzalez inherited a large cache of old jazz records from his father, so snippets of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman mingled with the ghosts of King Crimson and Frank Zappa from the band’s earliest days, before Ellman signed up.
“Back then we were even saying that we wished we had a horn player—a lot of the stuff we wanted to do wouldn’t sound as good without the horn,” remembers Thevenot. “In the later stages of Lump, before Ben joined, we were doing jazz stuff.”
In early ’93, they recruited Ellman, whom Thevenot met at a Kermit Ruffins jam session at the Little People’s Place in Treme. “Once Ben joined, we really started writing a lot more jazz-oriented, instrumental stuff.”
Both the band’s debut cassette, Plumbing Tips From a Parallel Universe, and its first full-length CD, Sloppy Atrocities (due out at the end of March), exhibit all the pieces of the puzzle. Local brass band culture even makes an appearance, when Lump covers “Santa Cruz,” which was recorded by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and is a staple of Rebirth sets, on Atrocities.
That song is free of the puns and word plays that Thevenot scatters throughout compositions like “Yeah Baby, Yeah Maybe” (“You say you want rice/and I say how much gravy”) and “Peanut in the Butt.”
“There’s nothing really to be read into that, either, I don’t think,” Thevenot says. “It’s not sexual or, anything—it’s just nonsense. I’ll get on a certain wavelength, where all the things that I’m saying, even if they don’t make sense, they’re coming from the same spot in left field.
“‘Peanut in the butt,’ then I’ll say, ‘You got a sty in the eye’—I’ll just dwell on the body. One thing that I’ve noticed—food and body parts are recurring themes in my body of work. I don’t know why. Maybe some Freudian psychologist can figure something out.
The regulars that turn out for Lump’s frequent Warehouse Cafe gigs gleefully sing along to Thevenot’s quirks, but if ever they arouse a hostile response, his day gig has prepared him: he teaches elementary school students with behavior disorders. “There’s nothing an audience can say to me that hasn’t been said at school already. They’re very verbal.”
