Money Shot

You know that scene in The Shining?

What am I saying? Of course you do. Even if you haven't seen Stanley Kubrick's cabin-fever cautionary tale, you still know the scene. It's the only thing anyone remembers: Jack Nicholson's character has just gone three shades of batshit insane. He's chasing his wife with an ax. He chops a hunk out of a locked bathroom door, sticks his leering, maniacal mug through the splintered door and howls, Heeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!

Well, heeeeeeeeeeere's Matthew Dunehoo!

The lead singer of Doris Henson is peering with a deranged grin through the front-door blinds of the house on 40th Street that he shares with drummer Wes Gartner.

Redrum. Redrum.

Not that I expect a hatchet in the chest when I cross the threshold. But everyone is wary of the thin strand of sanity that separates genius from madness. You can easily tell when someone is afflicted with one -- or both. It's in the eyes. And as his eyes dart mischievously, Dunehoo appears to possess traces of at least one of the traits.

It's not the first time I've seen these restless eyes. Onstage, Dunehoo's boyish face is very much that of an animated frontman. He is all wild eyes and wildly catchy riffs, even as he delivers somber, pensive lyrics disguised in the brown-paper wrapper of indie pop and tied up with guitar strings.

But tonight he and the rest of the members of Doris Henson are merely gracious hosts offering me a can of Old Style and a chair in a living room cluttered with furniture, instruments, bicycles and the familiar detritus -- Taco Bell packets on the coffee table and crumpled beer cans beneath it -- of a musician's bachelor pad.

Not that they aren't wary of their visitor. Reporters have only just begun to show up at Doris Henson's front step. And tonight, the band's appearance at the South by Southwest music festival and the release of its debut, Give Me All Your Money, are still two weeks away. My initial questions are met with apprehension, four-word sentences and nervous laughter. The band members seem a little ... what's the word?

"Skeptical?" guitarist Jamie Zoeller says, laughing. "Oh, definitely. It's part skepticism and part excitement. Whenever anyone asks how the band's doing, my answer is 'I'm not sure yet. Ask me in a few months.'"

Money was recorded nearly a year ago as a local Anodyne Records project before Washington, D.C., label DeSoto Records scooped up the album. Previously, the Doris Henson logistics -- scouring for media coverage, booking shows -- were left to Dunehoo. But with DeSoto in its corner, the band is suddenly endowed with the small amenities that indicate an act is moving on up.

"Are we expecting big things on the horizon?" Dunehoo asks rhetorically. "I think we're just expecting things -- besides touring to [play for] no one. Just having a publicist, having a booking agent and radio promotion -- those are all things that I don't think any of us has experienced before. It helps substantiate the effort. It frees me up a bit to have a little faith, to feel a little more confident about our prospects."

The prospects are solid. After the band's South by Southwest appearance and this Saturday's album-release show at the Brick, Doris Henson hits big cities -- Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles -- before joining indie stalwart And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead for three shows, including an April 27 stop at The Granada.

Moseying down the Trail of Dead would be a minor entry in a "What I Did on My Spring Break" essay if Money lacked musical currency. But the album is filled with gleaming pieces of '90s underground rock and '70s garage pop. "The Most," "A Dark Time for the Light Side of Earth" and "Big Future" make for a viciously delicious one-two-three punch in the album's beginning stages, and "Sidestepping" provides a coda that shoves Money(and Doris Henson) out of the shadows and into a spotlight. The glare still requires some adjustments.

"It's kind of a touchy thing to talk about -- but the truth is, we're always checking [for reviews] online," Dunehoo says. "We had positive stuff come across at first, and now we've had a couple negative things. A bit of it has been touching in a saddening sort of way, but I'm real sensitive ... [and] a big asset of the band is the live performance, and that's not going to easily transfer to somebody who has no idea what this band is."

But getting anyone to shows away from home hasn't been easy. Doris Henson has been met with a muted response outside Kansas City, fueling the band's reluctance to count chickens before they've been hatched -- and embraced -- by strangers.

"I will beat this into the fucking ground -- we need a crowd [outside of Kansas City]," Zoeller says. "It hasn't happened yet. It needs to happen ... we need to have an audience to perform in front of so we can at least see if what we're doing is worth anything."