Biography
Originating on the streets of San Francisco as buskers, the unruly D.I.Y. trio Rube Waddell built their early reputation with an array of homemade instruments, among them the one-string guitar, plus assorted found percussion that yielded a sound as idiosyncratic as the hard-drinking, wild strikeout pitcher from the early 1900s whose name they adopted and who once ruled the American League. Their skewed reading of American roots music, centered on blues yet also touching folk and country, regularly folded in German cabaret textures that, paired with the junkyard percussion, could summon the rawest lo-fi work of Tom Waits while also absorbing stray world-music inflections from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Ireland. Local recognition came chiefly through steady appearances at Leeds, the Mission district shoe store in San Francisco that happened to share its name with the site of the Who’s storied live album, though the two places were unrelated; long after the shop closed, the group maintained its routine performances there. Reverend Wupass, who supplied most lead vocals, Mahatma Boom Boom, and Captain Feedback, later renamed Captain Legit, moved their gear between shows in shopping carts, an improvisational habit mirrored in the cheerfully threadbare aesthetic of their recordings. Much of the 1996 debut album Hobo Train was tracked inside the band’s apartment on a battered four-track, emerging as a one-sided LP pressed in a limited run of 1,000 copies. The follow-up, 1998’s Stinkbait, arrived after the group signed with Oakland’s independent Vaccination Records and upgraded to eight-track recording. In 2001 Vaccination reissued Hobo Train on CD with several bonus tracks, and the next month the trio delivered its third album, Bound for the Gates of Hell.
Albums
