Bob Log III

Chicago born, Tucson raised, six years in Doo Rag

Robert Logan Reynolds III was born in Chicago on 21 November 1969 and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, which remains one of his two bases; the other is Melbourne. He was given a guitar at eleven and had moved to slide by sixteen, working back towards Mississippi Fred McDowell while taking what he wanted from AC/DC, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Hasil Adkins. Speaking to an Irish paper in April 2024 he put the whole thing down to a Tucson childhood with nothing much in it: "Being bored was the best thing that ever happened to me."

His first professional work was in Mondo Guano, a Tucson slide-guitar and percussion outfit. After that came six years in Doo Rag, a Delta blues rock duo with Thermos Malling that released Chunked & Muddled in 1994 and Doo Rag, What We Do in 1996. The solo act began as Doo Rag wound down; venue copy dates his international touring to 1996, and by the 2024 interview he was describing thirty years of it.

The rig has barely changed since. He plays old Silvertone archtops with a slide, works a kick drum and a homemade foot cymbal, and sings through a telephone receiver wired into a full-face helmet, which is the point of the helmet: it keeps both hands and both feet on instruments. The suit is a full-body one-piece, sometimes described as a human cannonball outfit.

The records

The solo catalogue starts with School Bus in 1998 and Trike in 1999, then Log Bomb in 2003 and My Shit Is Perfect in 2009. It has moved across a run of small and mid-sized labels over the years, among them Bloat, Sympathy for the Record Industry, Dropkick, Fanboy, Epitaph and Fat Possum. The Fat Possum association also put him on the road with R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford, which is where a lot of the touring stamina came from.

A live album, Suprise! Bob Log III LIVE!, appeared in July 2008, and a run of singles followed between 2012 and 2015, including Ooo Ah Ooo Uh!, Shake The Boot, Party Van (The Hermit Strut) and Do That Thing You Think You Did That Thing To. April 2016 brought two albums at once, Guitar Party Power and Bump Or Meow Volume 1. The opening music of his current set is still drawn from the first of those.

The next two records came out of the pandemic and were not conventional albums at all. Cut off from touring, he took commissions for personalised birthday songs and wrote more than five hundred of them, in several languages; Happy Birthday Baby arrived in July 2020 and Happy Birthday Baby Vol. 2 in May 2021. Since then there has been one new piece of music: the single Consuela Did It, released in May 2024, written about a litter of kittens found under his porch and named after the mother cat.

The furniture of the act

The show has accumulated props the way a long-running act does. A toaster sits on stage and the audience feeds white bread into it, which he then throws back out into the room. Balloons are handed out and inflated. There is a rubber duck. A wireless guitar link means he can leave the stage entirely and keep playing, and he has done so from the crowd, from the ladies' toilets and from an inflatable dinghy passed overhead. Audience members are invited up to sit on his knee while he carries on kicking the drum.

The most notorious piece of business is older than most of the records. The song Boob Scotch takes its name from a routine in which willing audience members stir his drink with a breast. He has been consistent about the framing of it — that everything in the act happens between consenting adults, and that anyone arriving at one of his shows has had ample warning about the register of the humour.

Underneath the equipment is a real playing style, fast and percussive, and a fairly hard-nosed working philosophy. Asked in 2012 why he had never gone back to a band, he said that alone "you are the complete master of time and you can do whatever the fuck you want to time". Asked what a good night looked like: "I want them to get so sweaty that they don't care what their hair looks like." On the economics, his own line has been blunter still: "I'm a professional, God damn it. I live in a car."

Where he is now

As of April 2024 he was putting in roughly 120 shows a year, and the routing is genuinely global rather than a token overseas leg. That spring took in DeBarra's Folk Club in Clonakilty on 16 May 2024 as part of a UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and US block. Setlist.fm has 1,216 of his shows logged going back to 1998, with the busiest stretch in the middle of the last decade — 2014, 2016 and 2018 each cleared 120 documented performances, with 123 in 2018 and 84 in 2019.

2025 was spread across three continents. He played Polaris Hall in Portland on 8 March and the Biltmore Cabaret in Vancouver on 13 March, recorded a session at BBC Studios in Salford, appeared at Blues on Broadbeach at Kurrawa Park on the Gold Coast, and took a July run through the American east that included The Southern Cafe & Music Hall in Charlottesville on 5 July with Gull and Space Saver opening. Australian club dates ran into the autumn, including Maitland on 8 October 2025.

The current activity is a US club tour running through September 2026: Beat Kitchen in Chicago on the 14th, the Lager House in Detroit on the 15th, MOTR in Cincinnati on the 16th, Portal in Louisville on the 18th, The Basement in Nashville on the 20th, Santos Bar in New Orleans on the 23rd, Dusty's in Dallas on the 27th and The Sinkhole in St Louis on the 30th. These are rooms holding a couple of hundred people, which is where the act has always worked best. Twelve 2026 setlists have been logged so far; more than 6,600 people track him for concert alerts on Songkick, and the cities he has returned to most often are London with 26 shows, Los Angeles with 24 and Melbourne with 19. Bills are frequently shared with Left Lane Cruiser and The Pork Torta.

What the room does

Reviews of the last decade describe the same evening in different postcodes. Counteract covered the Hare & Hounds in Birmingham on 13 December 2016, with Swampmeat Family Band supporting, and recorded the dinghy crowd-surf with the guitar still going: "Any sense of decorum or structure is left outside the door. Bob Log III plays by his own rules." 1st3 Magazine caught a capacity crowd at The Lexington in Islington on 8 April 2023, opened by The Jonny Halifax Invocation, with Log in a glittery black velour onesie, bread going into the toaster and coming back out over the heads of the crowd, and balloons everywhere; the verdict was "surreal, utterly captivating and mind-bendingly brilliant".

The recurring note from people seeing him for the first time is the mismatch between the size of the man and the volume of the noise — one Songkick reviewer wrote that "one cannot expect the amount of energy a small guy can make, nor the presence he gives on stage". The playing is what keeps the regulars coming back rather than the toaster; his own venue billing calls it finger-picked lightning that stops when it wants to and starts again when it feels like it.