Last Joint

Pull up a stool and leave the polite requests at the door, because the last cut on The Tip's self-titled debut is not a farewell. It is a wink, a grin, and a barroom sermon from a Nashville outfit that spent the early 2010s proving Music City still had a back room for grease, harmonica, and loud electric guitars. "Last Joint" closes the album the way a good closer should: loose, cocky, and built for a room full of people who already know the joke. Benny Carl sings it like a man who has just found the last good thing in the ashtray and has no intention of sharing the story straight. The band behind him does not tidy the edges. Ricky Dover, Jr. bends the guitar the way a roadhouse soloist bends it, Drew Uldrich holds the low end without fuss, and Dixie Carl keeps the drums on the floor where a song like this belongs. If you came looking for a Nashville country single, you took a wrong turn at the honky-tonk. This is album-rock mischief with a blues spine.

"Last Joint" is track eleven on The Tip, released independently on June 16, 2015, after the band had already been shaking rooms with a four-song calling card called Killin' It Wasted. Reviewers who lived on the sleaze-rock circuit heard the closer and called it a cult classic in the making, the kind of number that sits next to Salty Dog's "I Don't Remember, I Drank Too Much" on a mixtape you do not play for your boss. One of those write-ups came from Greg Troyan of the Nashville band Lipstick, who had shared a practice room with these guys in 2014 and knew the gag from the inside. On paper the song is about a blunt. In the room it is a double meaning stacked so high you can see it from the parking lot. The chorus leans on the oldest rock and roll trick in the book: describe something long and white that everybody wants a piece of, then let the listener decide whether the subject is smoke or something the band name already advertised. The Tip never spelled the punchline out. They did not have to. The name itself started as a runner-up. Benny Carl later said they had wanted to be The Drip until they found that handle taken, and The Tip stuck because it was tongue-in-cheek and because, down in the Mississippi Delta, the phrase had once meant the hottest girl in the room. Blues roots, bar joke, same sentence.

The brothers Carl, Benny and Dixie, were already Nashville rock-and-roll party boys when the winter of 2013 put them in a room with guitarist Ricky Dover, Jr. Benny brought the bluesy vocal, the harmonica, and a rhythm guitar that did not need a chart. Dixie brought a drummer's pocket that hit like a backbeat instead of a click. Dover, a Knoxville native who had been jamming with fishing buddies in a cover band and who had picked up the Nashville Numbers system at Middle Tennessee State, brought the bends. Discogs has the origin story in plain language: the seeds were sown that winter, and the band officially sprouted in the spring of 2014. By June they were on the stage at Atlanta's legendary Claremont Lounge, EP already in the bag. That fall they ran an East Coast and Midwest tour with Hollywood's Hammered Satin. None of it was a label plan. It was a van, a stack of songs, and a look that could have walked off the Sunset Strip around 1989 without ever becoming a spandex costume party.

Dover told Metro Silicon Valley in early 2016 that the self-titled record was about the fun of playing live, cut pretty much live, no overdubs, no click tracks. That is the whole production philosophy of "Last Joint." You can hear the room in it. You can hear a band that learned songs by shouting numbers and then dared the changes to keep up. A third of the album features Benny on a Hohner, a bold return for an instrument a lot of hard-rock bands had parked in the closet. "Last Joint" sits at the end of a track list that opens with "Welcome To The Night" and runs through "All I Need," "Outta Control," "L've Me E'ry Woman," "Ride Tonight," "Double Fistin'," "Don't Want It," "Favorite Sin," "Rock N' Roll Man," and "More, More, More." Half of those titles are open love letters to the party. The closer is the one that winks while it does it. Terry Martinson, writing for Sleaze Roxx, heard Kix, Salty Dog, Tora Tora, and the old gleam that ran from Aerosmith and T. Rex into the bands that still wanted sweat on the strings. Troyan heard Benny's range in the neighborhood of Steven Tyler and his stage manners closer to David Lee Roth, with a snarl that kept the whole thing from turning into a cartoon. Dover's leads carried a little Ace Frehley and a little Mick Ronson. The lyrics were silly on purpose. The riffs were not.

Benny was clear about the record collection behind the grin. In a Classic Rock Magazine Germany interview the band translated for their own page, he said they listened to Delta and Chicago blues as much as old rock and roll, '60s soul, Stax, and Motown, and that they liked Guns N' Roses and a few late-'80s bands without wanting to be a spandex gimmick. Bassist Robert Bote, who came aboard in January 2016 after Drew Uldrich's turn on the debut, agreed that a lot of what got labeled glam and sleaze eventually turned into a joke. The Tip's answer was simple: they were rock and roll now, not a reenactment society. That is why "Last Joint" still lands for a listener who grew up on freeform album rock. It is not nostalgia in a costume. It is a four-piece using the old tools, harmonica included, to tell a dirty joke with a straight groove. The follow-up, Sailor's Grave, arrived in 2017 with a lineup that eventually included Myles Baker on guitar, and the road took them to the Kid Rock Cruise in 2018 and a first European run in 2019, including a wild set at Wood Stock Guitares in eastern France. The debut, though, is the document of the original quartet, and "Last Joint" is the door they shut on the way out of that first long player.

Put it on after the rest of the album and it plays like the last round: the story gets looser, the double meaning gets louder, and nobody in the band looks embarrassed. That is the trivia worth keeping. A song reviewers filed under cult classic, a chorus that refuses to pick one meaning, a band that almost had a different name, a first gig in an Atlanta strip-club lounge, a record cut live because that was the point, and a harmonica that refused to stay in the folk drawer. Nashville did not hand them a country radio format. They built their own room inside it. If that kind of record is what you came here for, the rest of the stack lives with us at THE ZOO, where the deep cuts still get the full ride. The band keeps its own porch light on at thetipband.com, posts the road news and the leftover shirts at Facebook, and still has the old lightning-bolt dispatches up on X. Spin "Last Joint" once for the joke, again for the groove, and a third time because the last one is never really the last one.