For The Rockabilly Blubinos, Success Is In Togetherness

The Blubinos with the Picketts, Crocodile Cafe, 220 Second Ave., tomorrow, 9:30 p.m. Cover $6. 448-2114. --------------------------------------------------------------- Blubinos guitarist Monti Amundson is a pretty big guy. An easy 6-foot-4 - and that's not counting his mile-high hair - he plays like he stands: straight and strong.

Along with bassist Debbie Smith, a woman just slightly bigger than her Fender, and a blur of a drummer Cory Burden, Amundson makes muscular, no-nonsense roadhouse rock 'n' roll. Rockabilly blended with blues. A high-speed, hot-rod hybrid. The kind of music that makes you move despite yourself, not unlike the effect reggae will have on you. Once it starts, your heartbeat's on line. It's chemical.

"I started playing guitar when I was 11," Amundson says after a recent gig, easing into a folding chair in a combo storage space and dressing room at The Backstage. "We were a musical family, I had studied piano, then guitar. When I was 12, the boys next door were, like, 16, and always working on their cars and listening to the radio, which I thought was cool.

"I'd always be listening. One day I heard `Sunshine of Your Love,' `Foxy Lady' and `Purple Haze' and that was it. After that I got serious about the guitar."

Born in Seattle, raised in the Northwest, Amundson met Burden in Eugene nine years ago and they began working together. They eventually moved to Los Angeles to try to crack the music business.

After a year and a half they returned to Portland. Amundson looked up Smith, whom he knew as a teenager.

"Debbie had played with the Silvertones," he says. "She had a mohawk and everything. But she had gotten out of the business. Music can be a pretty disgusting business and she can tell you, if you're a woman it's even more disgusting.

"But I had a theory. We get together and just never break up. It'll take a while, but if you can just stay together, all other things being equal - like you're moderately talented, you've got a few songs - anything beyond that is a big bonus. If you can just stay together, you'll be all right."

The theory worked. The Blubinos have been together for five years, are happy together and have no intention of stopping. They work 120 dates a year and Amundson says they could play 200. They've released two cassettes and a recent CD compilation of their mostly original songs.

"We're our own record company. The record companies, for whatever reason, have not made contact with us, so we decided we were going to have to do it ourselves.

"Long story short, I just felt I had songs that we had to get out." The new CD is called "The Mean Eighteen." The Blubinos sell the work at their gigs and outlets such as Cellophane Square.

"I just like to write about anything," Amundson says. "Most of the time it's awful, but every once in a while I get inspired. `Cruel is Your Name,' for instance, is about a woman I knew that was so mean. She was cosmic and intelligent, but really mean. And of course I loved her to death. I'd take any amount of punishment. When we finally broke up I wrote the song that day, line for line without change."

Amundson writes his songs within a traditional format. The changes are simple but melodic, the lyrics heartfelt, and underlying everything, a driving, unrelentless rock beat. Amundson plays hard, fast and loose. He says he's totally free as a guitarist. He can go anywhere. He adds that his music is always real, what you see is what you get. There are no tricks.

"Entertainment is sampling and lip-syncing and all that included. It's something I'm trying to come to terms with so that I'm not like Mr. Sour Grapes. To me, musician has always represented someone that has his own style - the good ones at least - and you can recognize them in a second. When (Carlos) Santana plays his three notes, you know who it is. That gets lost when people are sampling or whatever.

"I don't know where rock 'n' roll is headed," he says. "I just know I really got hooked by this thing. This is what I really love.

"Even if it never gets to the level I thought I deserved when I was 22," the guitarist chuckles, "that's just the way it goes. At least I'm going to be doing what I want to do."