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Gentlemen of Four Outs / Press

“He’s a musician, has been for 20 years now -he’s just never called himself as such. “I’ve always just said, ‘I play rock ’n’ roll,’ ” notes Clay Heximer, best known locally as drummer for stage-trashing punks The Mapes. Across from him sits Rob Bell, singer-bassist in The Psyatics and The Unwieldies, and Rich Coffee, frontman for blues proselytizers The Swamp Gospel. Together, along with saxophone-clarinet player Gene Howley, they’ve formed Gentlemen of Four Outs, a new band posited on old sounds, whose repertoire is rooted in reinterpretations of the music of the 1920s and 1930s. So far, the group’s songbook ranges from standards such as “St. James Infirmary Blues” to more contemporary numbers by Soda and his Million Piece Band. Befitting these dudes’ background, they’re playing everything with an edge. “This is the band I want to see play in Vegas,” Heximer says. “They haven’t showed up, so we went ahead and made it."”