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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2010 > January > 15 > Entry
Review: Fat Man and Little Boy at the Whip In
(Fat Man and Little Boy perform Thursday at The Whip In. Photo by Laura Skelding AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
“We’re gonna play without a mic,” announced Little Boy at the onset of Thursday night’s gig. “Normally we can place blame on a (bad) sound system … .”
“Or a bad sound man,” added his counterpart, Fat Man.
A mic might not have been a bad idea for Fat Man and Little Boy, otherwise known as the Atomic Duo, purveyors of “struggle” music for our modern day Depression. The setting was Whip In, a convenience store off the I-35 frontage road in South Austin, where the din of chatter and clanging of silverware born of the dozen or so diners communing over scrumptious Indian food and on-tap craft beers in the store’s refurbished eating area made for sometimes indiscernible lyrics.
But Fat Man and Little Boy were oblivious. They were too wrapped up in their self-deprecating banter and knock-knock shtick, and in making sense of live renditions of the mountain, swing, bluegrass, Dust Bowl, and Tin Pan Alley songs on their self-titled album. The album came out in November but because Fat Man had a torn rotator cuff then, the Atomic Duo’s just now celebrating its release, with a January residency at Whip In among other Texas dates.
Vocals were split fairly evenly between Fat Man (Mark Rubin, Austin’s resident advocate of old-time music, most notably with the trio Bad Livers) and Little Boy (Silas Lowe, an East Coast transplant equally enamored with Old, Weird America). Traditional and original songs were buoyed by ersatz country voices and the high lonesome sounds of mandolin, banjo and resonator guitar, and occasionally were assisted by vocalist Jenn Miori, fiddler Wayne “Chojo” Jacques, and harmonica player Sean Tracey.
“Texas City” spoke of the 1947 explosion of ammonium nitrate aboard the French vessel SS Grandcamp, which killed hundreds of people in the port town. “Turpentine Farm” was about “sadomasochistic animal husbandry.” And “Rope Stretchin’ Blues” affirmed the notion of an eye for an eye, wherein the song’s protagonist busts a home intruder’s head with a club.
Fat Man and Little Boy excelled at turning heartache into humor, with a vibe on par with White Ghost Shivers and the Gourds. For one departing customer, the lack of a mic was no big deal.
“You sounded great,” she told the duo.
“If you stick around,” Fat Man said, “we can fix that.”
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