Margaritas and Cocaine

You are locked in with The Zoo, the station that still believes a song ought to have dirt under its fingernails and a story behind the riff. Right now the needle is dropping on a cut that does not ask permission. “Margaritas and Cocaine,” by The Rhyolite Sound, off the 2019 album Mojave Gold. Two minutes and fifty-six seconds. One hundred thirty-six beats a minute. A train beat that does not slow down for anybody standing in the aisle.

This is desert honky tonk with the amps turned up until the Southern rock starts leaking through the seams. Las Vegas boys, formed in 2013, playing the kind of rooms where the well drinks are cheaper than the truth and the three-set nights teach you how to hold a crowd that came for the slots. Larry Reha is the big red-headed front man, voice and rhythm guitar, the guy in the driver’s seat when the song gets hard-charging. Erik Alesi, James Caselton on lead guitar, A.J. Palluck on drums, Jason Aragon on bass. Saving Country Music pegged the lineup that way when Mojave Gold hit, and the record still sounds like five men who learned their trade in casino lounges where smoking was still legal and the dance floor was not optional.

The song itself does not hide. The title is the plot. Credits list Lawrence Carleton Reha Jr., Erik Alesi, James Caselton, and Ashlee Marie Watson as the writers, which tells you this was a band job, not a lone cowboy scribbling on a bar napkin. It sits near the front of Mojave Gold, track three on the common running order, right after “On Stolen Time” and “There I Go,” and before the heartbreak of “He Can Have Her.” Self-released on October 25, 2019, through the band’s own imprint, later pressed for the folks who still want vinyl under the arm on the way to the dance barn. No major-label polish. The bass drum pounds, the Telecaster bites, and the whole thing leans so close to rock that a freeform station like this one can claim it without apology.

Trigger over at Saving Country Music heard the album the week it came out and called the band a bunch of bad characters breaking out of Las Vegas with an appointment at a high desert cathouse. He wrote that there is no hiding what “Margaritas and Cocaine” is conveying. That is the whole trick. Outlaw country spent a decade winking at the bad decisions. This cut names them in the title and then plays them like a Saturday night that already went wrong and does not plan to get right. Fans who found the record on release weekend said the same thing in the comments: after one pass, all they wanted was the drink, the powder, and a cheap excuse. The band would probably take that as a compliment.

Trivia worth keeping in the booth. Rhyolite is volcanic rock, kin to granite, scattered around the Las Vegas basin. It is also a ghost town on the edge of the Mojave, northwest of Sin City, a boom that went bust and left the name for a band that wanted Southern Nevada on the country map. Mojave Gold was the second full album, after 2017’s Desert Honky Tonk, and the one that put them in front of people who had never set foot in a Strip lounge. They opened for Mike and the Moonpies and American Aquarium around the release, and over the years the shared-stage list grew into Willie Nelson, Whitey Morgan and the 78’s, Blackberry Smoke, Junior Brown, the Reverend Horton Heat, Wanda Jackson, Shooter Jennings, Dale Watson, and Koe Wetzel. Twice nominated for Ameripolitan Awards in the honky tonk and outlaw categories. Three times voted Best Breakout Band in Best of Las Vegas by Desert Companion. A live cut of this same song later turned up on the 2023 Jam in the Van session recorded in Las Vegas, proof the tune still worked when the monitors were hot and the room was close.

The album around it is not one color. Erik Alesi steps up for the Southwestern flavor of “There I Go” and the honest inventory of “Ain’t No Outlaw.” They cover Mickey Newbury’s “Why You Been Gone So Long” and leave the machismo at the door long enough to do the song justice. “I Think Too Much, When I Drink Too Much” stretches the musicianship, funky guitar and keys, the kind of closer that reminds you these are showmen who can play, not just posture. Mojave Blue followed in 2022, along with singles like “Rooster” and “The Day My Daddy Died,” but Mojave Gold is the record that still gets cited when somebody wants the hard-twang version of the band. The songwriting is not always poetry. The music is. That is a fair trade on a rock station.

What you are hearing is the sound of a band that spent years entertaining people who were often there for the domestic specials and the quarter slots, and came out of it deadly tight. They call themselves purveyors of pure honky tonk in an impure world, a rousting roster of pickers, kickers, and stompers. Desert honky tonk, they say, built to pull the hardest traditionalist and the casual fan in the same room, with banter between the songs and enough mayhem that nobody checks the phone. On a record, that translates to a cut like this one: short, loud, named after the night that got away, and built so the train beat never lets the listener sit down.

If you want the rest of the catalog, the road stories, and the nights they still play the rooms that raised them, the band keeps house at their own site, therhyolitesound.com, posts the gig sheets on Instagram at instagram.com/therhyolitesound, and still talks like a bar band on X at x.com/RhyoliteSound. Fans tracking the live dates keep a board over at Bandsintown, bandsintown.com/a/13166718-the-rhyolite-sound. And if this kind of record is why you landed here in the first place, the whole freeform mess lives at thezoorocks.com. No commercials. No focus groups. Just the deep cuts and the bands that still sound like they closed the bar.

“Margaritas and Cocaine” does not moralize and it does not apologize. It states the order, counts it in, and lets the rhythm section do the persuading. That is the old contract between a band and a radio station. They bring the song that would get a room on its feet in a lounge off the Strip. We play it loud enough that you can hear the ghost town in the name and the bad decision in the title. The Rhyolite Sound, Mojave Gold, 2019. Keep it here. The next one is just as dusty.