It would be easy to dismiss Jordan Cook, aka Reignwolf, as another blues interpreting cock-rocker. He’s a coarsely shorn, physical player on permanent pentatonic solo, who snarls at the crowd just like his guitar. Hell, today he even had a hype man to run a fan and a smoke machine to make his racks look like his licks were so hot they were burning Neumos down, but he’s one of Seattle’s sons, and showmanship is something that is bred here.

• Josh Bis
• Jordan Cook aka Reignwolf

After a quick soundcheck, he wasted no time laying into "Electric Love," his go-to hammer-on mantra in which he pounds a bass drum with his right foot, a distortion pedal with his left foot, and the pickups with his hand. Playing solo at first, Reignwolf not only used his bass drum but the one on his drummers set while calling upon the disembodied hand of John Lee Hooker to finger-tap blues notes on his fretboard. All this while simultaneously churning out a beat using a single drumstick in the other.

'Twas then he simply dropped his own guitar on the stage (somewhere a guitar technician gently weeps), broke out a little electric mandolin, and slashed through a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s "The Chain". When he couldn’t make the sweet little mandolin sound scary enough, he simply banged it on his own mic stand to get it pissed, wrenching out a solo that sounded like a cherub humping a harp in rock 'n' roll heaven.

• Josh Bis
• Bad little mandolin

After that rather showy intro, with Reignwolf already dripping in sweat, his band mates took the stage and helped him through the rest of his catalog. Like a feral child stalking the stage and planning to attack the crowd, he climbed all over the monitors and drum sets, hybrid picking his way through some new songs, which fold grungy, chunkier, power-chord rhythms, into his greasy blues.

Near the end of the set, he even took the lead with a bass guitar to try out more new material, and when he’d worn that out, picked up his semi hollow body once more, jumped into the crowd and played one last extended solo between mingling with his constituents and crawling on the stage.

• Josh Bis
• The People's cock rocker

He’s a cock rocker for sure, but he’s the people’s cock rocker. Shredding smoky half stacks and sweating out blues while trashing his own equipment is clearly what he’s born to do. All of his between-song banter was gracious admiration for the opportunity to play in his hometown again, and the admiration was mutual.