Fallen Angels With Grizzled Faces

North Carolina's Backsliders step to the front

by David Menconi

The music scene around Raleigh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is about as balkanized as…well, the former Yugoslavia. You've got your punk rock kids, technique fetishists, frat-party bands, heavy metal bands, pop bands. Most all of them keep to themselves in their respective, mutually exclusive corners, which goes for the bands as well as audiences.

But if there's a single consensus band that cuts across the scene's different strata, it's the Backsliders, who rule the roost when it comes to Tar Heel country-rock. Locally, they're regarded with something akin to awe. They have the air of grizzled-yet-hip older brothers, partly because they're old enough to have been around the block a few times (all five are at least within shouting distance of 40).

All of them are also bordering-on-virtuoso players who wound up playing in this classic hard-core honky-tonk band after logging time in other far-flung quadrants of the scene. Guitarist Brad Rice and drummer Jeff Dennis played in hard-rock bands; guitarist Steve Howell played blues and bluegrass; bassist Danny Kurtz played pop and country; singer-guitarist Chip Robinson did a little of everything.

"That's why the band sounds like it does," Robinson says. "Everybody came from different, almost fringe elements and ended up in this band. Everybody brought their own thing to this big stewpot, and that's the soup we got out of it."

The Soup du Backsliders includes plenty of No Depression verities — Buck Owens, Lefty Frizzell, the Beat Farmers ("Gun Sale At The Church" is one of their live-set staples), Jason & the Scorchers, Neil Young and, of course, Gram Parsons. Had Parsons lived another 10 years, his voice probably would have aged into something like Robinson's likable ragamuffin twang.

Parsons probably would have wound up with a band as rocking as the Backsliders, too. Their triple-guitar lineup brings to mind the mid-'80s glory days of the True Believers, another band with three guitars that sounded nothing at all like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Except the Backsliders do have one song that sort of sounds like Skynyrd: "Hey Sheriff", a spooky redneck tale of a standoff with The Law gone horribly awry.

"Hey Sheriff" is the one song that appears on both the 1996 live EP From Raleigh, North Carolina (Mammoth Records) and the full-length Throwin' Rocks At The Moon (Mammoth/Atlantic, due out Jan. 28). The live record captures the Backsliders in their natural element — a hot summer night last July at their hometown nightclub the Brewery, a club that is to the Backsliders what the Armadillo World Headquarters was to Commander Cody's Lost Planet Airmen.

The Backsliders were always a great honky-tonk band, going back to their early days five years ago with local guitar ace Larry Hutcherson on lap steel. But it was the punkier leanings of Brad Rice, who joined in 1995 after Hutcherson departed to concentrate on his own blues band, that kicked the Backsliders into a higher gear.

There's plenty of octane on Live From Raleigh, especially Rice's withering guitar flipout at the apex of "Hey Sheriff". The record also captures lots of the irrepressible Robinson's priceless between-song banter, although nothing as colorful as his usual intro for the song "King of the World": "This one goes out to every woman who's ever let me put my face in that special place."

Actually, Robinson says he's been advised to pursue a more, shall we say, low-key direction. "I'd like to figure that people would be pretty open-minded and get that it's just a joke," he says sheepishly. "We don't thrive on making people mad at us, so we're trying to tone it down a little — and I've gone a lot farther than that on intros before, believe me. But I kept kinda…you know, hearing about it afterward."

Wherever you are, you'll probably get a chance to see the Backsliders sometime this year when they hit the road behind the album (Jason & the Scorchers, Wilco and even Mammoth labelmates the Squirrel Nut Zippers have been mentioned as possible touring partners). Hopes are high for the album, which was produced with a minimum of fuss by Dwight Yoakam guitarist Pete Anderson.

Throwin' Rocks At The Moon is as expert and elegantly simple as the live EP. From the first note of the driving shuffle "My Baby's Gone", the songs, the playing and Robinson's voice all intersect perfectly. Each element enhances the other without getting in the way, building on the lock-solid rhythms of drummer Jeff Dennis and bassist Danny Kurtz. While Robinson is better-known for his singing, his warm acoustic strumming adds texture to the exceptional electric-guitar tandem of Rice and Howell. Rice typically plays loud and Howell pretty, but each does a lot of both, and it fits together seamlessly.

Anderson's production is simple and no-frills, as it should be. The Backsliders are nothing if not professional, and this ain't the sort of project where anybody needed to fog up the synthesizers. Getting Anderson to produce the album was a lucky break, one the band didn't think they'd get. While they were negotiating terms with Mammoth, the label told the Backsliders to come up with a list of "dream producers."

"Pete was probably the most longshot name on our list, but we figured, what the hell," Robinson said. "We hadn't even signed the deal yet and Pete was on the phone the day he got the tape in the mail: ‘C'mon, man, I want you guys out here tomorrow! Let's make a record!' He was a great guy, real laid-back, didn't mess with anything too much. He basically tightened up the rhythm section, and let Brad and Steve do what they do.

"As far as arrangements, we had them really together. We've been playing these songs a long time — and we'll have to play them a long time some more, once we start touring. Good thing none of us mind playing them. We still like 'em."

It would be nice if the album did well enough to allow Robinson to give up fixing guitar amps for a living. The best part of the rise of "insurgent country" is that bands like the Backsliders — veterans who have been playing music like this for years in relative obscurity — have suddenly found popular tastes tilting more their way than ever before.

Really, things aren't so different today from decades past. Whether Bakersfield in the '60s, Austin in the '70s or North Carolina today, as often as not, the best country music is coming from acts on the margins in places other than Nashville.

"We've seen this all before," Robinson notes. "There's been fringe country all along. Hell, Johnny Cash was fringe country. Those early Sun Records, Hank Williams, Buck and Merle and Bakersfield, Emmylou. Way before anybody appreciated all these people for being the American treasures they are, they started out on the fringes.

"It's kinda cool that it's come back, though. We had heard rumblings from various pockets, that this same kinda thing was happening in other cities for whatever reasons. I think people just got tired of doing something they didn't want to do in order to ‘make it' in the business, and decided to go back to trying to write good songs and figuring out where their real roots are. We've been gettin' crowds the whole time, so maybe it's just something people missed hearing."

David Menconi is the Triangle music scene war correspondent for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer. He is also a member in good standing of the Trivia Bowl Hall of Fame.