The full effect of Ghostriders in Disguise doesn’t sink in until you’ve been watching for a while. Playing steady, plain-faced surf-country-punk stripped down to guitar, bass and drums, each member in the Vegas trio sports a black Lone Ranger mask strapped to his face, black cowboy shirt with white detailing, black cowboy hat, black boots and plain dark bootleg jeans crisply turned up once at the ankle. Any skin exposed from clavicle to fingertips is inked.
The best kind of costume, like the best kind of music, only gets richer the longer it steeps. Details emerge from the simplicity: the once-alive striking snake that’s wrapped around guitarist Texas Bob Marlar’s hat, the mellow little frills wafting from his ax.
At the Zia Record Exchange in-store performance last Friday evening, they don’t introduce themselves—they just get onstage and strike it up. In fact, despite the two microphones roosting onstage, one each in front of Marlar and bassist Andy Crews, they speak about a paragraph’s worth of words throughout their entire 35-minute set. A neon sunset serape covers Michael Stevens’ kick drum, muting it to a gentle gallop in the distance; in front of it grins a battered cow skull. There’s no grandstanding or showboating here; even the whammy bar is used tastefully. The most raucous it gets is when they play one obligatory ditty of hippie hippie shake, the kind you hear bad bands in movies playing in roadhouses.
It’s obvious from the pompadours who’s not there just to browse. A pretty, saucer-eyed woman in denim Daisy Dukes and shit-kickers has her bouffant tied up in a red bandana, a giant sparkly tarantula broach nestled in the thicket, and she’s swaying her hips ever so slightly. Little kids in tie-dyed T-shirts bearing skulls dance with mommy, a pigtailed redhead.
I’m leaning on the Beyoncé CDs (and by the way, why didn’t one of her handlers tell her that B’Day can be phonetically misconstrued as “bidet”?), developing a slow case of the shivers as their song about the dangers of peyote—so they claim—develops. It’s a little darker than the rest, a rugged churn with two—two!—breakdowns and a drawn-out Metallica-worthy fireworks grand finale.
They exit the stage quickly with a quiet thank you, and dismantle in no time. They’re the strong, silent types, the way cowboys should be.