Minnesota Daily- October 26, 1984
"The Mofos are a big band;really big. In fact, they're probably the biggest band in the Twin Cities. Well, alright, so bassis Caleb Palmiter doesn't tip the scale like his mates; he's still got a big guitar. "Bigness" is what the Mofos are all about: big hearts, big people, big sound, but most of all, big fun. They ain't pretty but boy, can they rock.
William (that's Billy to you, boy) Batson, the band's singer and frontman, positively sweats a good-guy nature to his audience when he's onstage. He's made a name for himself by interspersing songs with lines like, 'Yeah, did everybody like that one?' Audience: 'yeah.' 'Yeah? That's great, we love y'all.' Billy's battery of 'cool moves' includes the old shadow box one-two, the occasional flash of the "I know I'm cool" wry grin, and, saving the best for last, the Giant Electric Bean Bag Dance, something that has to be seen to be full appreciated. Ernest Batson, Billy's brother and co-rollicker, belongs to the old '60's guitar school of thought that believes 'if you bash the darned thing hard enough, it's bound to sound good.' The funny thing about it is that it works, and Ernie bashes with the best of them. Give then man a Wah-Wah pedal and he's downright dangerous.
Bassist Palmiter plays the archetypical bass player: you know, the thin guy in the dark spot at the back of the stage who looks only at the drummer if he looks at anything at all besides his bass. Well, Palmiter's one of those. It sure sounds like he's in this time dimension though. He plays clean, groovingly melodic lines that allow Ernie to bash without having the song fall into the oblivion of mush. Drummer Tommy Rey has a rep for being rock steady and he deserves it. He works well with Palmiter, accents the vocal lines, and keeps the beat insistent.
The Mofos (whose name, by the way, means exactly what you think it does) put on the kind of rock and roll show that gets better and better in direct proportion to the quantity of beer that either you or they drink. They know how to crank out the straight-ahead, garage-reared, American rock real fast and real loud. Rock that makes you dance like you never would in front of your girlfriend; these boys make the average slick, polished 'bowlband' look like a bunch of Lawrence Welks on Quaaludes.
The Mofos's set list reads like a '60's rock Who's Who. It includes soul classics like 'End of Our Road' by Marvin Gaye and 'Super Bad' by the master soulster, James Brown. The other half of their cover tunes reveal the Mofo's love for good old rock and roll: 'Bad Little Woman,' by the Shadows of Knight, an Everly Brothers' number, 'The Price of Love,' and 'LSD' by the Pretty Things, to name but a few.
Being the fun lovin' guys they love to be, the Mofos like to throw a curve-ball cover now and again. They pulled a fast one on the Lyres from Boston when that band played at First Avenue earlier this fall. The Lyres' perfomance of their 'big hit,' 'I Want to Help You Ann," lost its luster after those bad boy Mofos ripped off a super-rockin' version of it as the last song of their opening set.
Their original songs (written by 'everyone except Tommy,' Palmiter jokes, 'he doesn't know how') also show their '60's roots. 'The Untouchables,' a fast-paced, guitar lick workout, echoes the early Kinks and even the Jam. "Constant Funk" is exactly what it claims, an unforgiving groove-out that sounds like a cross between a Jackson Five riff and the Trashmen.
After you've seen the Mofos live you realize that their success as a band relies not only on their skills as musicians but also on their ability to get down on stage and really have a good time.
Their carefree, loose onstage appearance contrasts with the serious attitude they take toward what they're doing. Palmiter believes that 'if you're not good, tight and well-rehearsed, you can't have fun. We all really care about the way we play on stage. We like to think that we're professionals, not just a bunch of guys who hang out and happen to be in a band.' But, Ernie counters, 'Fun is a huge part of it for me. I mean we wouldn't do it if we didn't give it our all and had a good time going it.'
Their attitude is certainly not born out of lack of experience. The Mofos know this town's music scene and they've been around a long time, all of them in bands and Billy as a frequent soundman at the 7th Street Entry. Billy, Ernie, and Rey were all members of the late Hypstrz, a band that Billy and Ernie formed in 1976. Ernie quit in 1980, Tommy joined soon thereafter. Ernie rejoined the band last winter and after Palmiter joined six months ago they all decided it was high time for a change. Caleb says, 'Ernie is a style buster.' 'With Ernie back we were getting back to our old roots, the real rockin' stuff,' Billy explains. 'We decided to get a new name because we played new songs, we became a new band. Besides, Steve McClellan said he wouldn't book us as the Hypstrz becuse we really weren't the old Hypstrz. I always wanted to be known as a mofo anyway.' Caleb claims, 'Tommy didn't even know what it meant for about three months, somebody had to tell him.'
What's in the future for the Mofos? 'We're going to be doing some recording with Mark Freeman of Red House of an EP or a single' says Ernie. 'It's just going to be on a four-track, but what the hell, Sgt. Pepper's was done on a four-track, that's enough for us.' The recording probably won't be out until spring. In the more immediate future, the Mofos play tonight at the 7th Street entry with Laughing Stock. 'Tonight,' Billy says, 'We're pulling out all the stops.'" .....Michael Welch


Matter- June 1985
"the Mofos are an outgrowth of the Hypstrz, whose live records - '79's self-released EP and Voxx's Hypsterization in '80 - nipped in the '60's thing in the bud before every band was doing it. Besides resurrecting nuggets (the Troggs' '6654321' and a Kinks-via-Chocolate Watchband cover of 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else'), the guys write grinding rockers like 'The Untouchables.' The heart of the Mofos is the Batson brothers, Bill & Ernie, with Bill, the massive guy, shaking and stamping, jackhammer style. Vets and a class act to boot, they've got an EP on the way." ....Liz Phillip

(Madison, WI)
"Not far from the vast continents of '60's garage rock and late-'70's punk lies a tiny floating fiefdom known as the Mighty Mofos. Ruled by the good-natured dictators Ernest and Bill Batson, the band was, until 1983, called the Hypstrz, but its shadowy avenues haven't changed much and really only the name is different. It's still mostly a soul-rock village governed equally by street-tough, party-hard attitudes and sharp-edged, psychedelia-tinged doctrines. At first, it's a little disorienting. Then you start getting your bearings and recognize the unmistakable infuences of architects like Roky Erikson, early Pink Floyd, the Shadows of Knight and James Brown, as well as the Clash and the Ramones.
Saturday night at O'Cayz Corral, the Batsons split up the ruling chores. Ernest, the band's bald, soft-faced, hot-handed guitarist, laid down the law with bare-knuckled, Who-like power chords and sizzling, scissoring, ingenius modal melodies that crackled dangerously like live electric wires. But while Ernest wrote the regulations, it was up to Bill, the Mighty Mofos' singer and point man, to enforce them with big-stick shouts and palsied shakes. He backed those up with plenty of atonal, full-moon howls, not to mention wounded grimaces and lost-in-the-noise glares. In fact, he got so carried away that by the end of the set his Vitalis pompadour was in ruins.
Whether transforming the Kinks' "I'm Not Like Everybody Else", remaking in his own image two unnamed gems by the 13th Floor Elevators, or raving it up with the bands' own "Mindreader," the singer set the agenda with fanatic zeal. Meanwhile, bassis Caleb, autistically rocking away in the corner on his knees, and fleet-footed durmmer Tommy Rey backed the brothers up like all team-playing party men should.
Often, the danger for exotic little dots on the map like the Mofos is that they're discovered by the larger public. Word gets out, and soon the place is overrun by Airstreams full of curiosity seekers. Trendy teens and baby boomers desperate to be relevant pull into town. The landowners get rich, but the wonder and uniqueness of the place is forever lost. Whether or not that's what the Batson brothers dream of (and who could resist getting rich?), I'm not much worried it will happen. Even when the Mighty Mofos new EP on Midnight Records comes out this fall, I doubt the band members would be able to crassly cash in on their hidaway even if they wanted to. Too many streets wind toward dark, noisy places, and the houses are ominously sparse, rough-hewn and minimally furnished. Not that the Batsons don't want or need visitors. It's just that thye're too uncompromisisng and fervidly eccentric to allow their small piece of the world to ever become a tourist trap." .....Phil Davis

Twin Cities Night Beat-July 7, 1985
"The Mofos name is no accident. Oh, it reflects singer Billy Batson's sense of humor, his mocking but manically serious self-conception as white soul brudder No.1, his smiles-and-sweat stage character. But when it comes to the mixed mayhem of the psychedelic garage, no one cuts the Mofos. If Billy ever wants to resurrect the James Brown routine from his bag of expressionistic stage-hound tricks, few loyal fans will cry foul.
What Billy and Ernie Batson, bassist Caleb Palmiter and drummer Tommy Rey do is give voice and credence to every scruffy, crazed band of drinking or acid buddies to ever land one hit or no hits. Yet they're too unique to be revivalists; too schooled in the '60's rock underground to be merely playing at this game. The Mofos feel deeply the real rock'n'roll ethos: that it unites people, both on stage and in the audience; that it's a cathartic slave for the often twisted psyche; and that it's a great excuse for a bump and a beer on Friday Night.
The Batsons brought it home again a couple of weekends ago at McCready's Pub, housing the newest freewheeling stage in downtown Minneapolis. The bar occupies a middle ground between an almost open stage for young hopefuls and a weekend host to bands well-established at the Entry and the Uptown. The small music room set off from the main bar was once a disco, which, as one staffer says, drew a troublesome crowd to the unobtrusive little pub on Third Street. When owner Pat Mus began booking bands, the stage was merely a small patch of floor in an awkward corner of the room. Ensuing renovations have brought the room up to standards in the tradition of the Yukon, Pillar and Post, and St.Paul's MacCafferty's. Unfortunately, those places are all memories. But if McCready's - known to sports fans and families as 'The Gateway to the Dome' - has a leg up on survival as a music bar, it's the kitchen's 'Jim Marshall,' a half-pound slab of beef and bun that'll make you wish you were wearing a bib.
The Mofos seemed to encounter none of the PA difficulties that have plagued other bands there in recent weeks. Rather, they gave it a workout with Billy rudely pummeling his mike stand into the stage and sagely miking the amp during his balking brother's wilder guitar solos.
Billy, of course, is a born exhibitionist. Maybe it was his girth that prompted him to take the stage with the Hypstrz in the previous decade. Instead of taking curious glances at the happy fat boy, people were forced to stare at him onstage and wrestle with his performances on the lunatic fringe of the new white wave. Punk meant drawing attention to individual expression, and Billy played that angle to the hilt. In retrospcet, it seems the forgotten Meatloaf was flattering himself when he declared that he had to take oxygen after a show.
Much has changed. Billy and Ernie are reunited in the Mofos (Ernie left the Hypstrz) and Billy has lost so much weight that he now looks almost as svelte as Buddy Holly in his trademark black pants and white button-down shirt. For many, I suspect, the McCready's show was an unveiling of the singers' new form, which gives much freer reign to his incredible, almost mime-like performances. Of course, the good Brother Bill still sweats like the Godfather. His goal is to visually communicate the song - no small feat for brain-shattering volleys of precision noise.
Ernie's loping guitar lines pack a heavy wallop and prop some of the songs up with a motorvatin' punk/soul sound. 'I Got Mine' and 'I Know What You Want' (with its great, hackneyed classic reading of the phone number) stood out, as they do at most Mofos shows. Some songs were delivered with frightening intensity ('I Got Mine'), others with a smirk ('LSD,' preface by Billy's message: 'LSD, our destination, `only stop for unrination'). But behind it all lurks the sheer inplosive joy of being near or past age 30 and having so much goddamn fun with the secrets you have learned having you ear pressed to the radio at night.
Those lessons are lost on none of the group. Palmiter spends half the show on his knees, looking tripped-out and playing that way, too. Rey masterfully fills in the spaces with bright, ringing rolls reminiscent of Ringo's classic fills in 'Ticket To ride' or 'Rain.' Music so fierce, yet so reverent, is rare from any group, much less a quirky tribe of killer Mofos hiding in Minneapolis.
Not strangers to even the most obvious cover versions ('Louie Louie,' 'All Day and All of the Night'), the Mofos neared the end of the set with the proudest proclamation they could make. The Kinks' 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else' had the Batsons trading the line in a manic call-and-response, standing side-by side; two grown-up teenagers who shared parents and used to wet the bed in the same house and won't ever forget it. They're not like everybody else. And that's good." .....John Gessner

GOLDMINE
DECEMBER 5, 1986
MIGHTY MOFOS - THE MIGHTY EP

This 5-song 12-incher from this Minneapolis combo is an intense, primitive garage rock release that should find some instant acceptance within the genre. Originally known a the Hypstrz (with an LP on Voxx) the lack of a marketable identity kept them from breaking out, and unfortunately, that problem still seems to haunt them. Good stuff here, which won't disappoint, yet won't have many mourning if it's their final release either. Charles P. Lamey

FORCED EXPOSURE - #11 Winter 1987
MIGHTY MOFOS - The Mighty EP

...this's more 'r less what the legendary Hypstrz have become and, while it looks as if one of the Batson Bros. has shed some serious poundage, their sound is still as big as a house if their m.o. is no longer to meth-amp their way through nuggets of SIX-OH Cheese. In fact their barrel-rape of the Elevators' "I got levitation" is the only track here that could be mistaken for the Hipstrz. There is, however, a new kinda wildness to their stance that let's all sorta overt-modernity of voice-guitar-rhythm-movement into the sound-porch. Not surprisingly, this new attack still beats the beef like a thousand adolescents and it shows the Mofos to be perhaps the best twin cities band this side Halo of Flies.
BYRON

LAB 36- January 1987
MIGHTY MOFOS-THE MIGHTY EP
These motherfuckers are from Minneapolis, but they do NOT sound like Husker Du. Nor do they sound like the Replacements, or Prince, or even the Trashmen. They do, however, draw inspiration from the Trashmen era. No fashion show, though. Three of the four Mofos are ex-Hypstrz. They ROCK! "I Need You"-- not the Kinks tune-- includes a brief burst of wah-wah, of which I'd like to hear more. And "Levitation" is the 13th Floor Elevators song--it burns. Not essential stuff, but very cool nonetheless. Good 'nuff.