To a large extent, the success of any given band can be deduced from the reaction of the crowd. For some reason, most concerts in Lawrence are painfully low-key—people just stand around with their arms crossed, as if they're too cool to move, as if they didn't actually come to hear the band at all but were merely on their way to the kitchen to fix a broken dishwasher or something. Very little dancing occurs, and when it does, it's usually a lone hippie, undulating in a rotary fashion so that her dreadlocks swirl into the air like little Medusa serpents. (Then again, this could be DTs.) But either way, it's nothing like the crowd response I witnessed at the good Reverend's revival last Saturday night at the Bottleneck. People were jumping up and down, throwing their bodies around, and crowd surfing. There was a genuine mosh pit. Remember: this is a rockabilly band we're talking about, but there was just so much drive to the music, so much punk energy, that it was physically impossible to keep still.

A little old man with white hair was doing the twist.

Hailing from East Dallas, Texas, the Reverend Horton Heat is composed of three members. There's "Jimbo" Wallace, thumping a massive upright bass; Scott Churilla reviving the lost art of the drum solo; and the Reverend himself (Jim Heath) on guitar and vocals, all spiffed up in a green suit with purple flames on it. They sing songs about cars, booze, women, bales of cocaine, and the $400 their girlfriends never paid back. These are clever, free-living fables, and at times the lyrics are hilariously raunchy. The members of RHH also demonstrate extreme musical versatility—one moment they sound like Link Wray & His Ace-Men playing "Rumble," and the next they sound like the Sex Pistols. But it works. Boy howdy, does it work.

They played a solid set, including a cover of the Johnny Cash classic, "Folsom Prison Blues," which had the crowd gleefully shouting along ("I shot a man in prison . . . just to watch him die.") But everyone knew the words to the Reverend's songs, too. With the first few chords of each song, there would be an uproarious surge of voices as the fans recognized it, then shouted the lyrics in the kind of delirious cult chanting phenomenon that I've only ever heard in two other contexts—any given bar playing that damn "Margaritaville" song, and Bible camp.

The fans venerate them, especially upright bass extraordinaire Jimbo, who has become something of an icon in his own right, what with the popularity of the band's song about him ("the Jimbo Song"). Before the show started, we sat next to some die-hard Reverend enthusiasts who were doing the John the Baptist thing, trying to prepare the way for the band by raving about what we were in for. One of them was quite drunk, and he explained repeatedly (with the kind of earnestness that can only come from considerable inebriation) that anyone who heard the Reverend would be a fan for life. Later, amid the mephitic vapors of cigarettes and sweaty bodies, with the psychobilly anthem "Martini Time" ringing in my head, I realized he was probably right.

Verily I say unto you, these guys are the holy trinity of rock.

Bizarre sidenote: There was a bit of excitement when some stoners at the next table misplaced the CDs they had just purchased. Because my friends and I had a couple of CDs stacked on the edge of our table, the head stoner (whom I shall call Geraldine Garcia) made the assumption that they were hers.

"Which ones did you get?" she asked, looking us up and down.

"We got the five dollar ones."

She nodded, and then one of the guys in the group came up with a flashlight, shining it under our table like an FBI agent carrying out an investigation. The flashlight came to rest on our CDs, and the guy started to pick them up.

"No," we said. "Those are our CDs. We didn't see where yours went."

"Oh."

Flashlight Guy seemed to accept this, but then the group of them stood around at the edge of the table, glancing furtively in our direction and muttering unintelligible things. All at once, Gerry Garcia began to cry, and Flashlight Guy made another few sweeps under the table. They glanced at us again, but were apparently too pacifistic to make any further accusations.

"No seriously," we said. "These are ours."

The stoners then decided to leave, and Flashlight Guy took the opportunity to comfort Gerry. We could almost hear her muffled sobs as she rested her head against his shoulder, crushed by the sorrows of the world.

Hey, Gerry, wherever you are. Why didn't you check in your hemp-woven, patchouli-soaked backpack with the marijuana leaves embroidered all over it? Did it occur to you that maybe your CDs fell off the table during one of the seventeen times you knocked over your bottles of Bud? I'm just asking, that's all.