King Louie Bankston

A mainstay of the Southern rock & roll underground, King Louie Bankston was a wildly prolific singer, instrumentalist, and songwriter who embraced the passionate primitivism of punk rock and the roots music traditions of Memphis, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana, two of the cities he called home. Bankston recorded extensively on his own but was also a respected sideman who worked with garage rockers the Royal Pendletons, raw Southern punks the Bad Times, old-school melodic punk revivalists the Exploding Hearts and their offshoot project Terry & Louie, and many more. As a bandleader, Bankston fronted the revved-up garage band King Louie & the Loose Diamonds, power pop-turned-punk outfit King Louie's Missing Monuments, and the no-frills punk-blues onslaught of the King Louie One Man Band; he assembled a career-spanning anthology titled Harahan Fats in 2023. Louis Paul Bankston was born in Harahan, Louisiana, a town 12 miles from New Orleans, on December 18, 1972. His family ran a hardware store, and in his early teens, Bankston developed a passion for skateboarding, so much so that on his advice, his father began selling skateboards and skating gear at his store. In time, it would become one of the most successful skate shops in the state, and Bankston would meet skating legends such as Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen. As he immersed himself in the local skate community, Bankston was turned on to punk rock and metal, and in 1987 he formed his first band, a two-person punk combo called the Intelligenitals. He next formed another punk band, the Lame Ones, with a bunch of fellow skaters, and was soon invited to join a garage rock band, the Clickems. In 1990, Bankston teamed up with guitarist Michael Hurtt to form the Royal Pendletons, who played garage punk leavened with Southern-style frat rock and beach music. With Bankston on drums, the group's work as a live act far outstripped their recording career, but near the end of their run, they cut an album, 1998's Oh Yeah, Baby, produced by Memphis legend Alex Chilton. While still working with the Royal Pendletons, Bankston formed another garage rock outfit, the Persuaders, where he handled guitar and vocals, and issued a solo single as King Louie the 69th & The Harahan Crack Combo in 1993. He took part in a one-off project with fellow garage punk heroes Jay Reatard and Eric Oblivian, Bad Times; a one-day demo session recorded in 1998 was released on LP in 2001. 2000 saw Bankston move to Portland, Oregon, and the following year he joined the tuneful punk outfit the Exploding Hearts, invited by singer and guitarist Adam Cox, who was impressed by his songwriting skills. Bankston played keys with the group for just under a year, though the departure was amicable and he was invited to continue writing songs for the group. Bankston's parting from the Exploding Hearts proved to be a blessing in disguise for him -- in July 2003, while returning home after a show in San Francisco, their van flipped over on the highway. Only guitarist Terry Six survived the accident; ten years later, he and Bankston began writing and performing together under the banner Terry & Louie, releasing the album A Thousand Guitars in 2019. Bankston performed occasional solo shows where he played percussion using foot pedals as he sang and played guitar; in 2001, he took the King Louie One Man Band into the studio to record a 2001 LP, Jesus Loves My One Man Band. (He released a second One Man Band album, Chinese Crawfish, in 2005.) While releasing lo-fi singles with his projects 10-4 Backdoor and Kajun SS, Bankston formed a relatively more polished ensemble in 2003, Rat Tail, that also included Jack Oblivian, Harlan T. Bobo, Adam Woodard, and Chad Booth. Renamed King Louie and the Loose Diamonds, they released an album, Memphis Treet, in 2007. Guitarist Julien Fried would later join the Loose Diamonds, and he'd play alongside Bankston in Missing Monuments, who cut an LP, Painted White, in 2011; a self-titled follow-up arrived in 2013. Filtering psychedelia through garage punk, guitarist and singer Ben Glover formed Bipolaroid in 2003, and Bankston joined in time to play drums on their third album, 2010's Illusion Fields; he also appeared on 2013's Twin Language and 2019's Paint It Blacker. As prolific as Bankston's discography was, he also performed live frequently, sat in with his friends, and cut plenty of solo sessions where he laid down dozens of original tunes and covers of everything from gospel classics to underground hip-hop. King Louie Bankston's non-stop creative journey finally came to an end on February 12, 2022, when he died in a New Orleans hospital from complications of heart failure, aggravated by decades of alcohol and drug abuse. Near the end of his life, Bankston made plans to compile a number of rare and unreleased tracks from his archives on a two-cassette anthology titled Harahan Fats. Bankston passed before he could finalize its release, but Goner Records, a Memphis-based independent label that had released a number of Bankston's projects, paid homage to Bankston with the November 2023 release of Harahan Fats, in a 15-track edition on CD and LP, and a limited-edition double-cassette version, as Bankston originally intended, with an expanded 22-song sequence.
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