T W A N G - Meet The V-Roys

"You're scaring me," Jeff Bills says, only half-kidding. He straightens and scoots to the edge of the mercilessly-worn sofa in the offices of E Squared Records. Without meaning to, I have busted the smart-ass, it's-only-rock-and-roll bubble that he and the rest of the V-Roys float around in by reminding them that they are now on the world stage, being measured with the same scrutiny as the real guys. For once, the drummer is left searching for a snappy retort. Guitarist Mike Harrison picks up the ball: "We spend most of our time in Knoxville, so we don't reallly see much of what's going on. Not yet, anyway. We go out on the road and open for someone, and sometimes there aren't very many people out there in the house. I guess that keeps us down to earth." "We haven't sold all that many albums," adds singer/guitarist/head wiseguy Scott Miller, "but we come to Nashville and get all this good press, so maybe it's starting to happen."

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Maybe so. In a twist on grass-roots career building, The V-Roys could be the most talked-about band nobody's ever heard. Too country to be pegged as rock, too rock for a country band, the airplay they've garnered on idiosyncratic AAA and Americana stations doesn't begin to match the stir they've created among industry insiders and media types. Just Add Ice has been lausded by critics all over the US as the debut of an important band. One to watch, they say. "Witty." "Progressive." "A beer blast of an album," they call it. Music City itself is fawning over the group nearly as much as it does over their bad-boy-turned-mini-mogul producer, Steve Earle. Here, finally, is the band everybody's been waiting for, the one we've all heard must be coming someday. Four slightly angry young men who will erase any doubt about this town's ability to serve up something with more grit than, wel, grits. In response to such lofty expectations, the 'Roys offer a resounding "huh?"

"We're still just finding our feet," cautions Miller. "We're just trying to write the best songs we can, you know? The biggest thing that's happened to us so far is that we played 'World Cafe' on NPR. Maybe we'll see something from that. But as far as being a big deal in Nashville, or anywhere else for that matter, it doesn't feel like it to us at this point."

Miller's songwriting provides much of the group's creative fuel. With degrees in American History and Russian, he combines intellectual wordcraft with musical innocence (he calls it ignorance) in much the same way as countless other over-educated songsmiths, but with noticeably catchier results. No doubt his curious mix of cohorts is one reason. Falling into the right hands didn't hurt, either; Just Add Ice bears unmistakable imprints from Earle and co-producer Ray Kennedy. Miller, Harrison and Bills have all been Steve fans since 1986's Guitar Town and owe much of their raw, righteous sound to him. Recording at Kennedy's Room And Board studio was the final dip in the hipness holy water. Hidden away on the ground floor of a suspici9ously mainstream office building, Ray's place is a veritable Mecca of twang. Vintage mics and instruments - the cool ones - are everwhere, lining the walls and filling spare rooms. (Note to would-be late-night "shoppers": the place is lousy with cameras, and the graveyard-shift security guy doesn't take any crap.) Like an Eagle Scout turned loose with an M-60 tank, Ray crusades tirelessly against the kind of toneless, overproduced music that once threatened all of Music Row. Together, he and Earle have guided the V-Roys to organic listenability.

"Ray is amazing," says Bills. "He might be a god - we're not sure. We came down here before and did some stuff, like a demo, before he and Steve were involved, and it was terrible. Just awful." Miller received sage advice from Earle:

"He told me to write every day, no matter what. Even if it's just a letter, make yourself write something down." Miller had made stabs at Music Row before the V-Roys. Slogging around the region as a folkish singer/songwriter, he played the famed Bluebird Cafe regularly after making the cut on one of its open-mic Monday nights: "I had a kind of circuit I played for about two years. I wasn't writing good songs... I hadn't gotten down to the subtleties of all that. You're playing bars, 'hey, notice me,' all that vibe. I was pretty much done with that, ready to get out of the whole endeavor. Then Jeff turned me on to Roger Miller."

"I worked as a record store," Bills explains, "and I heard this album called Country Tunesmith. It had all these songs that other artists had recorded. I mean, we'd all heard 'King of the Road' and all that when we were kids, but this just hit me somehow. I listened to it all the time, and then I started buying up every one of his albums I could find. He was brilliant. he really was. A lot of country is perceived as being, you know, not that intelligent. Aw, shucks - Hee Haw" and so on. But back when "Dang Me" came out, he was in the charts with the Beatles. That's no small feat. So when Scott and I started hanging out and messing around with music, that was a heavy influence. For a while, we did this cacophonic noise we called "Milquetoast." Just me and him on guitar and drums. Man, that was weird! Some friend probably should have steeped in. If ever a situation cried for intervention..." Bills admits to as much book-poisoning as Miller, having earned sheepskins in business and philosophy. ("I can see myself never getting to the bank with a check, cause I'm sitting there going, 'what does this mean?'")

Bassist Paxton Sellers, a Tennessee University music student, was a frequent jamming partner. "The Viceroys" became an official band with the addition of guitar wunderkind John Paul Keith. Soon, Knoxville rumbled with excitement over the hot new local act, and indie labels began to flirt.

The band signed with Praxis, only to watch as the company imploded. Jack Emerson and Earle brought the group to the newly-formed E-squared, though, and plans were made to start recording. Keith bailed only months before the first sessions, and was replaced by Harrison, an old buddy of Bills' from northwestern Tennessee. Newly christed "The V-Roys" ("Some reggae band already owned the name - the nerve."), the group was finally ready to roll tape. What resulted was a mixture of '60s pop and country, roughly split 60/40, with generous amounts of modern sinsibility and cynicism thrown in for flavor.

"We have retro elements," Miller confesses. "For sure. but we try to remember that we want to give something new, something that we could hear on the radio today or five years from today and not be ashamed of. I don't think any of us worries about whether we're rock or country or whatever. Who cares? The songs are the sound. If it's good, it's good, and if it isn't, well, fine. What is rock, anyway? Or country? I had a bluegrass band for years. I'll always love that shit, and you can't tell me that bluegrass and rock&roll aren't the same thing. Goddamn right they are. Exactly. It's the emotion and the energy - that's all it is. We were up in Vermont a couple weeks ago, and on the way home we hit all these radio stations, just trying to help the record out. This one station, I think it was in Massachusetts, had a guy named Johnny Memphis interviewing us. He says, 'Well, a rock & roll band from Tennessee! That's pretty unusual.' And I said, well, uh, there was this guy named Elvis that did pretty well... Jeff goes, 'yeah, from Memphis, just like you.' Really pissed him off. We get ready to leave, and we ask him if he wants us to leave any pictures or anything. He says, 'we're not a newspaper, we're a radio station.' It was hilarious."

When they aren't out terrorizing radio personalities, the V-Roys dig in at home to work on new songs and hone their sound. Miller notes that the others are increasingly involved in writing the ban's material, and is quick to compliment Harrison's contributions:

"He's got this incredible melodic sense. It's weird. He's lazy, though, and he'll write something that's just great, and then the next thing will be, like, solid. Solid is what we say when something just sucks, but we don't want to trash anyone. It's kind of a code. (To Harrison) Some of your stuff is really solid, Mike."

"I think he likes me," says Harrison, raising his eyebrows. "All I ever did before I came to Knoxville was play guitar in my bedroom. I worked in my dad's sawmill, and I hated it. Writing songs was just something to do to get away from all this other bullshit. Then all of a sudden I'm hanging out with mister 'I knoweverthing about music,' (Sellers) so it was pretty strange for me. I'm learning a lot about writing, though. I'm coming along."

In the album's liner notes, mentor Earle reminds us that Knoxville, not quite 200 miles east of country's capitol, is more than just another redneck college town. It is, he writhes, "the home of James Agee, Quentin Tarantino and the last place anyone saw Hank Williams alive." It is far too soon to tell if a real scene will erupt there in the wake of The V-Roys' success, but you can bet they won't spend much time worrying about. The band, says Miller, has enough worries in their own little world:

"Roger Miller had a quote in some magazin .. he said, 'I just write from my soul, and I guess I have a funny soul.' I have plenty of problems with focus, just staying with an idea for a song, to think about the grand scheme or what the industry's doing. If we can just keep working for those times when a song just kicks our asses, when it does what you were trying to do, we'll be happy. And then if enough other people out there like it that we can make a living, that'll be great. Not solid - great."