What do you get when you take alumni from an assortment of Lafayette bands like Red Beans and Rice Revue, Filé, Lucky Playboys, Hadley J. Castille’s Sharecroppers, Basin Brothers, Coteau, The Traiteurs, HardHeads, Native Sons, Tortue, and countless more? You get the Has Beans, a veteran group with a quarter of a millennium’s worth of experience, give or take a month.
Accordionist and vocalist Ward Lormand says the name came about when he played at a Mardi Gras party with pals Tommy Shreve, Steve LaCroix and Danny Kimball. Shreve looked around and suddenly realized that he, LaCroix, and Kimball were once part of the legendary Red Beans and Rice Revue and quipped, “Oh, we’re a bunch of Has Beans!” The offhand remark stuck with Lormand, who christened his newly-minted aggregation the Has Beans, which includes Kimball. It patterns itself after its inspirational namesake Red Beans and Rice Revue by also stirring a steamy caldron of swamp pop, Cajun, Creole, zydeco, R&B, and Gulf Coast rock ’n’ roll, an indigenous South Louisiana recipe.
Joking aside about Has Beens and Has Beans wordplay, it’s a formidable dance band with a devoted following. Kimball heats the beat with his swinging, dance-enticing drumming style, and if the Has Beans should unveil a tune that doesn’t attract gyrating dancers onto the floor, out it goes, never to be heard again. By all accounts, the group elevated its game a few notches with newest member fiddler Henry Hample. There’s also a strong guitar presence with Phil Kaelin (slide) and Blake Castille, whose interleaving leads and fill-ins lead to myriad sounds, including Southern rock undertones.
As evidenced by its debut CD, having six members, five vocalists and four songwriters lends itself to endless possibilities. Bassist and vocalist Tommy Bodin seems to be the Beans’ sparkplug, having written and/or co-written five originals. His songs are clever, as evidenced by “Hello.” His protagonist laments about his lady spending all the money on filet mignon, Dom Perignon, and Louis Vuitton (all rhymes), followed by the group answering, “There goes my money.” The twist comes when the money is all spent, “there goes your honey.” “If I Didn’t Know You” is a classic, belly-rubbin’ swamp popper. Bodin and Lormand’s high-energy “Has Beans Cookin” could almost be a band theme song since it’s the perfect opener to pique intrigue and cement an identity.
Of the other band originals, Lormand’s “Ce Macaque M’a Frappé un Coup D’Brique Sur La Jambe” (The Monkey Threw a Brick at My Leg) is a topsy-turvy cruiser, and one of the many spots where Hample’s clean, precise fiddling can be appreciated. Kimball tosses in the playful Calypso-tinged “Porch Dancing” that’s a great gear-shifter from the preceding medley of Nathan Abshire’s “Pine Grove Blues” and the Doors’ growling “Roadhouse Blues,” a crowd favorite.
Along the way, Has Beans salutes Canray Fontenot with the graceful “Bon Soir Moreau” and the dirgy “Les Barres de la Prison,” as well as the lesser-known Jay and the Traveliers with “Traveliers Special Reprise,” a Cajun instrumental where the band added a third segment, a “C” part, to give it new life.
An album with many moving parts, it reads like a musical roadmap of South Louisiana. Yet, in this case, the Beans are their own cartographers.
