The Legendary Shack Shakers’ Colonel JD Wilkes is a formidable and endlessly entertaining front man. He mimes, contorts his face, climbs on top of front row standers, and at one point at last Tuesday’s show at Plush, he even clipped a portable fan to his pants. If he was fronting a band of 80-year-old polka musicians he would still be worth your 10 bucks. Fortunately, he is fronting the Legendary Shack Shakers, a band whose recordings are influenced by country, punk, blues, rock, rockabilly and even occasionally, gypsy music. Live though, the Shack Shakers are rollicking punkabilly, speeding down the interstate at 125 mph.

Wilkes is a photographer’s wet dream. In the spirit of Iggy Pop, his every move and gesture is photo-worthy. He’s the kind of performer that makes photographers carry around extra batteries and memory cards with them, lest they run out halfway through the performance and miss a great shot of him swinging from the rafters with a rubber-faced grin or blowing feverishly into his harmonica.

When I spoke with Wilkes the other year before and after their show at Club Congress, I was not surprised to find him a very intelligent, energetic and intense person, but was rather surprised to find him so serious. He described the comic books that he draws and writes with the serious face of a funeral director amped up on a Thirstbuster full of coffee. Turns out, Wilkes has an art degree under his belt and has had his comics appear in various publications as well as lending his graphic stylings to the likes of Sony, RCA and Bloodshot Records. You might call him a Kentucky hillbilly renaissance man or sorts. (He lives on a farm in Kentucky, though the band officially hails from Nashville.)

Wilkes’ artistic genius has not gone unnoticed. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant hand picked them to tour with him after seeing them at a SXSW show. He has been called ”...the last great Rock and Roll front man” by Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. And Alarm Magazine called him an “Ambassador of Genuine Traditional Southern Culture.” But before Ambassador Wilkes and company took the stage, the always dependable Al Foul did.

Now having first seen Mr. Foul strut, shake and serenade the unsuspecting downtowners in the early ‘90s, I know he’s been doing the rockabilly thing for a long time. Most people who regularly take in local live music have seen him countless times. You would think that this would get old, but incredibly, Al Foul (sometimes mistakenly referred to as Elf Owl) just keeps getting better. It seems like he’s been subtly mixing other influences in with his get-up-and-shake-it style of rockabilly. On this night, he performed as a one-man band, but if you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t guess it. Al’s voice is a strong as he likes his drinks (and that’s dang strong!), and with his face constantly dancing in a come-and-get-me snarl, he would surely draw more than a few Elvis comparisons.

Now there are a lot of versions of “Frankie and Johnny” out there. Even Lindsey Lohan tried her hand at the 100-plus years old song in “A Prairie Home Companion.” But so far, the best versions that I have heard came from two Tucson acts – Al Foul and the Solace Brothers. Al starts out slow and then slowly builds speed as he reaches the climax of the song, where Frankie shoots her man Johnny, for “doing her wrong.”

The song couldn’t have been done more justice from a one-man show.

When the Legendary Shack Shakers took the stage, they wasted no time diving into their first song, full speed ahead. The band’s relentless energy brought the crowd to the front of the stage immediately (no easy task on a Tuesday night). Pompadoured, chain-walleted boys bobbed furiously. A girl with a Mohawk danced nonstop with a grey-haired gentleman.

And those standing within arm’s reach (or spitting distance) of Wilkes were almost guaranteed to get sprayed with water or saliva or have their hair rumpled by the singer. Also worth watching is the Shakers’ larger-than-life guitar player David Lee, whose torso and arms were dark with tattoo ink. His silver teeth gleamed in the spotlight as he played while interacting with Wilkes and the audience. The rest of the band, were clearly more than adept at playing, but with the two spotlight hogs up front it was easier for them to hide in the shadows. Mark Robertson pounded away on an upright bass that looked like it was made out of knotty pine and drummer Brett Whitaker looked like the kind of sweet boy you could take home to mom, but became savage once two sticks were put in his hands.

As previously mentioned, the Legendary Shack Shakers live is a different experience from the Legendary Shack Shakers on vinyl or disk. It seems like the music is forced to speed up and intensify in order to keep up with their front man. For example, he infectious, relatively leisurely paced “CB Song” (you may have heard it the other year in a Geico commercial) was nearly unrecognizable when it was transformed from a trucker country masterpiece to a lightning–paced rockabilly rager, almost worthy of a mosh pit.

And while the blues, country and rock influences fade away when the band is performing live – they’ve been plowed down by the punkabilly speedster that is the band live – you probably won’t miss them. When you are watching a band as entertaining as the Legendary Shack Shakers, you really won’t miss much of anything.

The Legendary Shack Shakers most recent album, Swampblood, is out on Yep Roc Records.