Thirty minutes into the interview, Wammo has to go on stage. "We're about to start," he says from his cell phone. "But if you want, call me tomorrow night after 10. My parents should be in bed by then."
His band, the rowdy Texas octet known as the Asylum Street Spankers, is playing in San Antonio tonight -- an hour's drive from their home base, Austin. Wammo will head back for a family birthday party tomorrow. His brother turns 40 and he's bought him a guitar.
It's easy to envision someone with a name like a cartoon sound effect as the life of any party. That's Wammo, and the music his band plays certainly is a ball. Sex, drugs and other staples of rock 'n' roll excess dominate the lyrics, but don't expect mosh pits at their shows. The Spankers play acoustic blues and hot jazz -- well, sort of. Their genre-bending formula mixes the clarinets and fiddles of ragtime and Tin Pan Alley with the guitar picking of country-western, blues and roots-rock. Mark Keresman of Jazz Review once described them as "a cross between R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, Tom Waits and The Squirrel Nut Zippers, with a touch of the mutant/eclectic sarcasm-rock of Camper Van Beethoven and They Might Be Giants!" Wammo listens to the comparison and agrees, but he feels it's incomplete. "It's hard to put icing on that cake -- I think the closest anybody ever came [to describing our sound] was . . ." He hesitates before saying, "Somebody once called us a postmodern jug band. I liked that."