Three Man Band for Three Band Men (and a lady)

Has Will Fist finally found his dream band?

Don’t let the generic name throw you — brash trash blues-punk quartet Three Man Band is one of the more exciting, visceral live acts currently performing regularly in town. With the combined powers of polygamous band addicts Carey Balch, Will Fist and Bill Warden, along with one band loyalist Abby Wintker, Three Man Band has been destroying ears and minds at Pilot Light and the Birdhouse for the past year or so.

Its genesis is in Fist’s one-man band act, wherein he played self-penned skuzzy blues-based songs on electric guitar and bass drum. An almost decade-old recording titled Tornado Treatment captures the raw, early stage of the bulk of the band’s material, sounding like something that might have been excavated from that grimy trash can in Fat Possum’s logo. One Man Band eventually mutated into Two Man Band with Balch backing Fist on drums, and Warden soon joined on second guitar, creating a sound akin to what the Stooges covering early '70s ZZ Top songs for In The Red Records might yield. Wintker returned to Knoxville after several years in Brooklyn and soon joined the band, thickening the sound with bass and the occasional female vocal, while adding a visual reflection of the sound with her leg kicks and headbanging. 

A good example of the band’s aesthetic can be found in its pained lament on the high cost of health care, “I Can’t Afford My Medicine.” Fist and Wintker offer repeated screams of  “I can’t afford my medicine!” before Fist takes to the verses like a demented Henry Rollins raging over Damaged-era Black Flag thrashing, the song ending in a bluesy outro that seems indecisive about whether or not it wants to be funky. “Transaction” went from its origin as a one-and-a-half-minute blues stomp to an extended, hi-speed noisy maelstrom with a sludge metal bridge and extended psych solos, buffered by manic flailing from Balch. The tempo of the live shows basically oscillates from brisk to breakneck, and energy levels among musicians and the crowd are
appropriately high.

The group seems an especially cohesive effort for Fist, who’s been accused of spreading himself thin among numerous musical projects.

“With this band, the songs stay the same,” says Wintker one recent Wednesday night during a group huddle in the corner of Pilot Light as Nathan Moses spun records for the barflies. “Somebody told me, ‘The nature of Will Fist is that everything is always changing, he’ll do something different in a song every time he plays it,’ but that’s not the case with this band.”

“Who fucking said that?” Fist demands.

“It doesn’t matter. I said it,” jokes Balch.

“Well, this string section is locked in,” Fist insists. “It’s like a padlock. One of us can be wasted drunk but it’ll still come off. There’s like a kundalini yoga edge to it.”

I mention that Warden once said he played the wrong song during a show, and didn’t realize it until the song was over.

“Oh, it was more than once,” Warden laughs.

“See, and nobody noticed,” Fist says.

I admit I’ve been three or more sheets to the wind most every time I’ve seen Three Man Band play, which is in the spirit of the performance, as Fist encourages the crowd to “raise ’em up,” shouting “let’s all get drunk” between each song. But even if I were stone cold sober, it’s doubtful I’d decipher much of what’s coming out of his mouth as he barks into the mic above the racket Three Man Band makes. You can catch phrases such as the aforementioned “I can’t afford my medicine,” and hear clear as a bell when the music pauses for Fist and Wintker to lean into the mic and yell “Big tittied womaaaaaan! Won’t get the best of me!” before they all resume pounding your eardrums to dust.

When I mention I can’t really make out many of the lyrics, Wintker says, “That’s too bad. They’re really good.”
Fist proceeds to toss off a few couplets for me, commenting on the final one: “Who else is gonna rhyme ‘drunk’ with ‘church?’”

Despite his dubious interpretation of the word “rhyme,” as I later give a closer listen to the humorous wordplay on Tornado Treatment and reflect on the vast number of CD-Rs and tapes Fist puts out on his DIY Whisk-Hutzel label, I realize he might be Knoxville’s own rock equivalent of Lil Wayne.

With the exception of Wintker, the members each participate in at least three bands (occasionally with each other, such as Balch and Warden together in Black Sarah and Fist recently joining Warden in New Madrid), and Fist seems to start a new project every few weeks.

This constant activity can occasionally cause mild consternation, such as when
trying to agree on a practice time and inevitably encountering difficulty accommodating everyone’s work and practice schedules. So I ask, “Why do you all have to be in so many bands?” There’s a brief pause as if no one had ever considered the question, and I am a fool to have asked it.

“Different bands let you play different music,” Warden states matter-of-factly.

“God, and Will just started another band!” Wintker complains.

“I didn’t start it, I was hired as a drummer,” Fist retorts.

“And talk to this guy about band addiction,” Wintker continues, indicating Balch, who seems nonplussed about the whole thing.

“I’d been playing with Matt [Hall] and Dave [Basford] in New Brutalism so long, when I did finally play with other people it’s like I forgot how,” Balch says. “I could only play the way I had been playing with them. So I’ve grown paranoid about that and try to play with as many different people as I can.”

This idea seems to be endemic to a lot of local musicians of the Three Man Band ilk, and is something of an antidote to the typical idea of band as brand, a careerist-minded four-piece operating as a sort of gang or nuclear family simulacrum. 

“Besides,” Balch continues, “when so many of your friends are great players, the temptation is too great.”

Everyone is discussing how this band differs from others they’re in when a song comes over the PA that elicits a sudden “Woooooo!” from Fist, who heads to the bar to talk to Moses about it.

“I think a lot of people have misconceptions about Will, but I think this band shows how good his songs and guitar playing are,” Warden continues.

When I ask what sort of misconceptions, Warden looks at me as if I’d just said I thought Sarah Palin was awesome.

“Wooooo!” he yells, imitating Fist. “That. When you have this persona, if you talk about getting drunk and having a good time, people think you’re not serious or something. But if you talk to musicians who play with him, like Cain [Blanchard] or Josh [Wright], who have played with him for years, they’ll tell you how good he is at what he’s doing.”

Fist does have a boisterous persona he takes no shame in cultivating and celebrating (I mean, just look at his chosen alias), and it’s probably this that creates the kind of false impressions Warden mentions. The constant activity and numerous projects he’s involved in have led to accusations of charlatanism, but that judgment is unfair, misunderstanding both the aesthetic and ethic behind his work — in a way I’ve rarely encountered, there’s little separation between the artitst and the art.

Three Man Band could well be the high point of Fist’s guitar-led songwriting efforts up to now (he also drums in Fistful of Crows, among other groups), the result of years of playing in different types of rock bands. They’ve shown up out-of-town headliners they’ve played with, but their mettle may be put to the test Sept. 29 when they open for shitgaze sensations Tyvek and current underground buzz-band Vivian Girls. It’s an exciting triple bill that could end up being the must-see lo-fi rock show of the season.

“I wanted to be in a good rock band for so long,” Wintker says as we’re wrapping up. “When I was in Brooklyn I just wanted to be in a straight-up rock and roll band, but everybody had to have a flute or didgeridoo or something. Then I came back here and started playing in this band and it was like a dream band.”

“Yeah,” Fist says, grinning, as he lets the thought sink in. “A dream band.”