Black Diamond Heavies
Go! FEATURE
Listening to Black Diamond Heavies’ debut, “Every Damn Time” sounds like one of those bad nights at one of 
those hole-in-the wall dives with a sound man who’s worked at about a thousand too many punk rock shows and keeps turning the sound up until the speakers rattle like a blow-out on your front tire going 80 down I-75 until your ear lobes fold themselves over on their own to muffle the feedback but you can still feel the bass drum thumping against your chest until it alters your heart beat and you either run from the bar with your ears bleeding — or you dance.
“Yeah, that’s about what we were going for,” said frontman John Wesley Myers. “It was very loud in there. Van (Campbell, the drummer) was in one room and I was in the other, so a lot of what you hear is us hollering at each other because we couldn’t see.”
The son of a Southern Baptist preacher, Myers learned to play piano at his daddy’s Texas church until he, like the stereotypical PK, began to sow wild oats as a teenager and started pounding the keyboards to the wicked punk rock’n’roll instead. A natural progression, he said.
Then NPR changed his life.
A program on Howlin’ Wolf got him listening to the blues and he decided to see what would happen if one mixed equal parts Stooges and Muddy Waters.
When he first pulled together Black Diamond Heavies to try out that recipe, it was a four-piece ensemble based in Chattanooga. Attrition and a move to Nashville, not necessarily in that order, found the Heavies boiled down to a two-piece, keyboards and drums, but with all the shouting, distortion and feedback of an entire nation of punk.
“The biggest difference is that with only two players, the drums really become a lead instrument,” Myers said. “The music is more wide-open and it makes touring a whole lot easier.”
