L've Me E'ry Woman

You can hear the room in "L've Me E'ry Woman." That is the first thing that hits you, before the lyric, before the joke in the spelling, before the harmonica even finds the pocket. The Tip cut the self-titled album pretty much live in Nashville, no overdubs and no click track, the way guitarist Ricky Dover Jr. told it when the record was still new. Track four is the slow one. The rest of the album kicks the door, and then Benny Carl drops the tempo, leans into the mic, and starts inventorying every woman he claims to have loved in every town he has ever rolled through. Black, white, bigger, small, brown, red. The man is not writing a valentine. He is writing a census.

The Tip came out of Music City the hard way, which is to say they came out of it sideways. Nashville in the early 2010s was still the country capital of the known free world, and the Carl brothers were not interested in writing for the radio down on Music Row. Benny Carl, vocals, guitar, and a Hohner that he treats like a second lead instrument, and his brother Dixie Carl on drums, started jamming in the winter of 2013 with Knoxville-bred guitarist Ricky Dover Jr. Dover had been fishing and covering songs with buddies, and he was done with pop-country. He has said as much, in plainer language than a liner note ought to print. They met the way bands used to meet. Backstage at the 5 Spot, Dover clocked a guy setting up amps, said something about the hair, and that was the handshake. The seeds were in the ground by that winter. The Tip officially sprouted in the spring of 2014.

The name was a second choice. Benny has said they were going to be The Drip until they found out the name was already taken. The Tip stuck because it was tongue in cheek, and because down in the Mississippi Delta the phrase used to mean the hottest girl in the room. That fits a band that wears its blues roots on the outside and its sense of humor right next to them. They are not a spandex gimmick act. Benny has been clear on that too. Guns N' Roses and a few of the late-eighties bands are in the blood, but so are Delta blues, Chicago blues, old rock and roll, sixties soul, Stax, and Motown. They were not trying to freeze one decade in amber. They were trying to play rock and roll as it stood in front of them.

By June of 2014 they had a four-song EP called Killin' It Wasted, with early versions of "More, More, More," "Outta Control," and "Welcome To The Night," and they played their first show at the Claremont Lounge in Atlanta, a strip club with a reputation older than most of the crowd. That fall they went out east and through the Midwest with Hollywood's Hammered Satin. Back home they shared a rehearsal room with Lipstick, another Nashville outfit that understood the joke and the riff in equal measure. Drew Uldrich held down the bass on the debut. The self-titled album landed on June 16, 2015, eleven songs, independent, no label babysitter. "Welcome To The Night" opens it like a Kix record that got lost on the way to Baltimore. "All I Need" slides in with a Salty Dog grease. "Outta Control" is the jet-fuel number. Then comes "L've Me E'ry Woman," the saucy low-tempo detour, and Benny screaming his adoration for any and all things of the female persuasion. After that the record climbs back up through "Ride Tonight," "Double Fistin'," "Don't Want It," "Favorite Sin," "Rock N' Roll Man," "More, More, More," and the closing cult item "Last Joint."

What the song is doing inside that sequence matters. Most of the album is a party. Dover figured about half the record was a straight paean to carrying on, and the reviews agreed. Sleaze Roxx heard Aerosmith in the bones and David Lee Roth in the grin, with a snarl that neither of those men quite owns, plus Dover's lead work pulling in Ace Frehley bends and Mick Ronson attitude. Greg Troyan, writing from the other side of that shared rehearsal room, called the debut one of the best he had heard, provided you could take lyrics that do not pretend to be Bob Dylan. "L've Me E'ry Woman" is the breather that is not a breather. Slow does not mean polite. Live, Benny walks it out like a sermon from a bar that never closed. Been around the great big world. Seen the shared dames. They sing, they scream the name, they do the laundry, they buy the clothes. It is boast and confession in the same breath, the old blues trick of listing what you want until the list becomes the groove. A third of the album finds him on harp. This is one of the spots where that instrument earns its keep, answering the vocal instead of decorating it.

The band kept moving after the record. Robby Bote came in on bass. Myles Baker took a turn on guitar as the road got longer. They opened for Buckcherry, The Darkness, Sebastian Bach, The Last Vegas, and Geoff Tate's Operation: Mindcrime, and they played Rocklahoma. August 2016 brought the second album, Sailor's Grave. In 2018 they were on the Kid Rock Cruise. In 2019 they took the Jakecola tour to Europe for the first time and tore up a stage at Wood Stock Guitares in eastern France, Benny and Dixie still brothers and still best friends about it, the rhythm section driving the room, the harp still out in front. A Bowery Electric set in New York, filmed for a birthday bash, caught "L've Me E'ry Woman" the way it was built to be caught, sweaty and a little too long and exactly right. Their own tag on the socials later read 2014 to 2019. The merch table still had shirts and leftover Sailor's Grave discs a few years after that. Rock and roll bands rarely end on a clean bar line.

Drop the needle on track four and you get the whole argument in one slow pass. A Nashville band that refused the country conveyor belt, cut a debut live because that is how they played, and parked a blues crawl in the middle of a sleaze-rock record so the singer could confess, at volume, that he loves them all. That is "L've Me E'ry Woman." That is The Tip.

Spin more of this kind of thing over at THE ZOO. The band keeps a page on Facebook and posts as The TIP on X. The full discography, from the Killin' It Wasted EP through the self-titled album and Sailor's Grave, sits on Discogs, and the long look at the debut, track list and all, is up at Sleaze Roxx.