Fight the power

Dead Reckoners take on Music City and win

Mark Edmonds

What do you do if you're a Nashville musician trying to make it in the music business, but you're unwilling to become another Vince Gill or Reba clone to do it? Well, if the members of the Dead Reckoners are an example, then it seems the best thing to do to fight the system in Music City is to take matters into your own hands.

That's exactly what guitarists Kevin Welch and Mike Henderson, songwriter Kieran Kane, and fiddle-playing vocalist Tammy Rogers did two years ago. With a handful of other like-minded musical refugees, they started their own label, Dead Reckoning, and then went to work in the studio recording six discs' worth of songs written around their own widely varied styles.

The results were impressive. Henderson's guitar-oriented Edge of Night and First Blood wedded muddy Delta blues to electric country-rock, while Kane's disc straddled the line between Nashville's contemporary sound and that of its '50s predecessors.

Meanwhile, Rogers's self-titled debut and a follow-up, In the Red, sported the same bright melodies and luxuriant arrangements that make fans of Mary Chapin Carpenter swoon, while the writing on Welch's Life Down Here on Earth eschewed New Country's predictable parables of porch swings and pickup trucks for darker personal tales.

With success as an incentive, the next step in DR's evolution was to unite all of the members' principals in one super session, with the result being the new, pseudo-live A Night of Reckoning. Recorded last fall, the disc finds Henderson, Welch, Rogers, et al doing what they do best. Henderson muscles his axes through all kinds of roots territory with Welch, while Rogers fiddles, Kane picks, and under-valued Music City drummer Harry Stinson keeps time with bassist Alison Prestwood. Multi-talented instrumentalist Fats Kaplin squeezes accordions, saws fiddles, and even blurts out the occasional spoken-word phrase.

This large and seeming unruly group, who will appear at Theodore's, in Springfield, on April 11, skirt train-wreck-style disaster, and also manage to come up with some of the most inventive roots music in years. Combining blues, country, early rock, and Appalachian rhythms, the group cook up a series of surging grooves and hyper-drive cadences, which are then used to power the disc's 10 tracks.

Among my favorites are Kane's thumping lead-off cut, "I Desire Fire," Henderson's "You Tell Me," and the galloping group anthem, "Workin' On It." Each comes with slashing guitars, fighting it out with undulating bass lines, pounding drums and fiddles, and wheezing accordions, making the proceedings sound at times like, well, a slightly schizophrenic symphony.

But it's a good and happy madness, and one that's balanced by a more conventional approach on tracks such as Kane's mandolin- and fiddle-powered "Rocky Road," and Stinson's "Always Will." With Welch's "Crying for Nothing," these songs are the kind of country ballads that recall the genre's earlier, pre-glamour days, with weeping fiddles, acoustic guitar strumming, and the whining of pedal steels, floating in and out of arrangements.

The songs also prove that the Reckoners are a band who can go anywhere they want to musically.

"Hey, the way I look at it, it's all just music," explains Henderson, who landed in Nashville from Missouri with a background in blues. "To me, there's never been that big a difference between blues and country. In the old days, black records were marketed to blacks, and they kept white players separate. But that kind of thing never really mattered much to musicians. They were always exchanging ideas and being influenced by each other. So, to me, country, blues, or whatever have always just been different sides of the same coin. It all fits, and that's all there is to it."

Henderson promises the group will deliver much of Night's spontaneous feel when they perform in Springfield next Friday.

"It's really cool. When we play, we normally go for two-and-a-half hours straight with no break," he says. "And speaking as one of the people on stage, I'll tell you, that time goes by like a 45-minute set because there's so much variety and so many different things happening. It gets to where, by the end of the night, we find ourselves saying, `Gosh, we have to quit already?'"

And for material? "We'll probably do a couple off the new record, but I'm really not sure what else. Because each of us tours so much on our own, and everybody's running around doing their own things, we haven't had time to sit down and play any of the songs on the CD since we recorded them last September. Some may show up, eventually, but it's really going to take us three or four nights for things to get clicking and cool. People will just have to come out and see what happens for themselves."

The Dead Reckoners appear at Theodore's, in Springfield, at 9 p.m. on April 11. Call (413) 736-6000.