Album Review: The Endtables, The Endtables
by: Howard Wyman
http://www.crawdaddy.com/index.php/2010/04/20/album-review-the-endtables-the-endtables/The Endtables
[Drag City, 2010]
With weird sounds crackling out from New York and L.A. in the '70s inspiring greasy pariahs everywhere to pick up instruments and take a stab, it seems like there's been a punk band from every town in America that probably wrote at least one great song. The Endtables, however, were from Louisville, KY, a town whose reputation as a wellspring of creativity and grit grows deeper the longer you look at it. In their brief tenure from '77-'80, The Endtables put out but a solitary 7" EP, with a posthumous single that followed in '91, all of which has been collected here along with seven live tracks that prove that The Endtables were no fluke. This is the real s--- right here, and were it not for the irreconcilable "musical differences" that triggered their implosion, these guys could really have spread their damage far and wide.
Unfortunately, the furthest they got from Louisville in their day was Indianapolis, though with the caustic thunder of Alex Durig's guitar and the platinum transgender spitfire Steve Rigot hollering in disaffected yet impassioned monotone from a towering and husky 6'4", a lasting impression was inevitable. Drag City describes Rigot as "a flamboyant transgender giant from the shores of southern Indiana who reinvented himself as a Warhol Factory superstar," and that alone makes this a curiosity worth checking out.
