Fillmore Design Group

Free & Easy with The Reverend Horton Heat

On stage, the Reverend Horton Heat sticks like a sore thumb with flying colors. It is a great big man with a big husky voice and big red guitar, and his costumes are strong enough to silence the frenzied psychobilly riffs blasting from his Fender Super Reverb. The Reverend is also a road warrior in good faith, after recording thousands of shows, at some point on tour 275 days a year. But in the game, it's just a normal guy named Jim Heath of Dallas. It is easy Talkin ', down-to-earth and humble flat-out. Out on the highway like always (he doesn’t have an album to pump—just touring to tour) Synthesis ] Well, that would be top secret, but I get ‘em from a couple of places, but the main guy is a guy named George Esquivel in Orange County. He’s really a shoe designer—he makes some unbelievably killer shoes, but he’s just good all around and helps design and work out the details of my suits. And I had one done in Nashville by a lady named Katy K , she’s really cool. Once the band got a little more successful I was able to actually get these people and pay ‘em to do cool suits, but before that it was all about hittin’ the vintage stores.

In all your years of gigging, who was the greatest honor to share a stage with? Well, that’s a tough one, because some of my heroes I’ve gotten to do some shows with… We opened for Johnny Cash at The Fillmore one time, and that probably was the most meaningful, ya know, but that being said, man, we just did a show with Jerry Lee Lewis a while back. We [also] opened up for Carl Perkins and that might have been all around the best one, because after the show was over, there was a little green room area, and he was just sittin’ there by himself and I went and sat next to him. And he started talkin’ to me and told me stories for about an hour and half. That was way cool.

By that same token, have you ever toured alongside another band, gotten off the road and said, “What a bunch of assholes”? Ummm, yeah, but I don’t wanna name names. In all honesty, most of ‘em aren’t like that. The successful ones [became successful] because of years of touring, and broken promises, and dreams unfulfilled and they just kept striving through that. And that has a way of humbling people, so it’s usually the younger, inexperienced people that are assholes.