Preston Long, a guitarist from Detroit, played in Wig, a punk-rock band led by Preston Cleveland, brother of John Brannon of the Laughing Hyenas. After the mini-album Lying Next To You (Nocturnal, 1990), Long recruited the rhythm section of the Laughing Hyenas (Jim Kimball and Kevin “Munro” Strickland) and formed Mule, who debuted with the single Tennessee Hustler/ Black Bottom (Nocturnal), marked by a dreadful mutation of “Texan” blues-rock (ZZ Top and Vaughan). Their second single, Drown (Quarterstick), an infernal blues in the style of Captain Beefheart, would remain their masterpiece, the ultimate inferno in which to immerse the damned characters of their stories.

Mule (Quarterstick, 1993) deploys an impressive array of influences, notable less for their number than for their diversity: Lynyrd Skynyrd (Mississippi Breaks), John Cougar, Stevie Ray Vaughan (What Every White Nigger Knows), Crosby Stills Nash & Young (I'm Hell), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Holy Modal Rounders (Mama's Reason To Cry), Led Zeppelin (Sugarcane Zuzu), voodoobilly and cowpunk—all distorted by an imposing arsenal of detunings, harshness, dissonances, and brutalities, by ten years of harmonic revolutions introduced by Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and Henry Rollins, by the cavernous register of the vocals and by disjointed rhythms, collapsed into a dense web of abrasive sounds, and immersed in horrific atmospheres of zombies and maniacs.

Kimball, however, left the group to devote himself to DK3. Their blues, soul, and funk roots are even more evident on the EP Wrung (Quarterstick, 1993), a collection of four extremely powerful tracks: Ass, a heart-on-sleeve ballad sung by a psychotic murderer; We Know You're Drunk, exemplary of their clattering, ramshackle rhythm and blues; the deafening The Rope And The Cuckold, bordering on heavy metal; and above all the tribute to B.B. King that is Searchlight, which a “Beefheartian” treatment turns into a pandemonium of detunings and screams. “Hendrixian” cadences and slashes run rampant everywhere, raising the decibel level.

The album If I Don't Six (Quarterstick, 1994) sends chills down the spine in more than one of its blues hiccups. But theirs is a thoroughly wrong kind of rhythm and blues, played with such a roar, such a “swampy” gait, and such a troublesome drunkenness as to turn it into a ritual of self-destruction. Hayride manages to compress the frenzy in a more or less linear fashion, thus chiseling a boogie worthy of the annals of Texan saloons (but also of Led Zeppelin, judging by the echoes of Whole Lotta Love). X & 29 echoes the Bob Seger of Nutbush City Limits, that noisy and wild charge, and Beauteous the Beefheart of Safe As Milk, messy and bombastic behind a jumble of more or less coherent instrumental sounds (the former crossbred with some hints of Cream, Deserted Cities or thereabouts, and the latter with some CSN&Y “acid jams”). Traces of country rock instead surface in Obion. From the other tracks seep Vaughan, Joplin, Kooper, and many other blues-rock heroes. It is only a pity that some of these long ballads indulge a bit too much in heartfelt lamentation, a pose that does not always engage the listener (unless your name is Janis Joplin). The simultaneously casual and stormy way of playing the guitar, the simultaneously bored and criminal cadence of the drums, and the vocal register as hoarse as it is menacing, combine into a brilliantly muscular sound that pairs the melodramatic suspense of the blues with the neurotic vigor of hardcore. They have become a cross between Fugazi and the Allman Brothers (or even Janis Joplin). Mule’s operation, more genuine and emotional than that of the many groups experimenting with “blues/punk” (among them the excellent Red Red Meat), still has room to grow and become something truly singular.

Mule injected strong doses of Southern blues into the anarchic noise of the Laughing Hyenas, preserving, thanks to Long, the same wild vocal fervor. Their sound fuses the most unsettling aspects of city and countryside: the neurosis and violence of the former, the impulses and barbarity of the latter. In their music, boogie, hillbilly, and hardcore—and the cultures underlying those genres—find a swashbuckling meeting point.