December 1995

Before every show, Marcus Webb gives a briefing. He stands. It takes five minutes. It covers the layout of the venue, the audience capacity, the set list with timings and the status of every piece of equipment, and it is delivered to the three other members of the band, who have heard it several hundred times and listen to it every time. At the Runway Bar in Tucson on a Friday in October, Linda Vasquez, who owns the place, counted the house at the door while he spoke. She counts it again at the halfway point and again at the register at close.

The band is In BRRRRRRT We Trust. Its subject is the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the twin-engine ground-attack jet the Air Force flies out of Davis-Monthan, on the southeast side of the city, and which everyone who has ever worked on or near one calls the Warthog. The airplane was designed around its gun: the GAU-8/A Avenger, a 30-millimeter, seven-barrel rotary cannon that fires at up to 3,900 rounds a minute. From the ground it is not heard as a series of shots. It is heard as a single sound. The band has made three records about the airplane, and in a sense about that sound.

Webb sings. Dennis Kowalski plays lead guitar and, since 1993, has submitted a written cost justification to Webb before any equipment purchase over fifty dollars. Webb has approved all of them. Dave Pruitt plays bass and watches the floor in front of him as though the bass line were something he is walking across. Elaine Kowalczyk plays drums. In 1991 Webb auditioned eleven drummers against a written rubric. Kowalczyk arrived eleven minutes late, with a flat tire, and was the only one who met all four criteria. Tony Reyes keeps the van and the equipment, and inspects both, forty-five minutes before anyone else arrives.

The band's second venue, in 1992, received a fourteen-page technical rider with load-bearing calculations and egress routing. The venue owner asked whether it was a joke. Webb said that was a negative.

The venue owner asked whether it was a joke. Webb said that was a negative.

The new record is The Boneyard, on Cost-Plus Records, named for the storage yard at Davis-Monthan where the government keeps row on row of retired aircraft in the dry desert air. Its A-10 section runs twenty-two minutes. One song is called "Type 1000," after the storage category for airframes kept whole against the day they may be needed again. Another is called "The Warthog Is Not Beautiful (It Is Correct)." We have listened to it a number of times. It is correct.

Earlier this year, at a bar near the base, three A-10 pilots came to the show. Pruitt identified them from the stage by the way they stood at the bar. The band played the rest of the set, in Webb's words, with additional weight. One of the pilots told Webb afterward that the band had the right name. Another pilot from the base, who sits at the back of every Tucson show on the right side, near the wall, declined to speak to us. He did allow that the tempo on the title track was correct.

This year the band toured what it calls the Southwest Circuit: Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Antonio and Yuma, a parking lot outside Nellis, and a show outside the boneyard fence, as required. Webb keeps a log of every show: audience count, start and end times, load-in and load-out. He showed us the page for the night we were there. Our presence was noted. So was the time we left.