If you want to go to Hell, mixing whiskey, bluegrass and AC/DC – authors of the hard rock classic, Highway to Hell – should give you a good head start. And that’s exactly what has put Hayseed Dixie on the music map as the self-proclaimed torchbearers for the darker side of hillbilly music. “For some reason, in the past decade or so it seems like all the hillbilly music has been centered on the Gospel side,” says frontman Barley Scotch, AKA John Wheeler. Wheeler admits there’s nothing wrong with that, and says he has a great deal of respect for people like Doyle Lawson and Ricky Skaggs, but he just doesn’t think they present the whole picture. “It’s all like “let’s go to church for an hour and a half.’ That’s cool, but we want to present the other side.”
For the last four years, Wheeler, a Nashville musician with a master’s degree in philosophy, has been playing a slightly bent version of bluegrass with Don Wayne and Dale Reno, sons of legendary bluegrass banjo player Don Reno. While in the studio making a straight-ahead bluegrass record to be called The Kerosene Brothers, the trio was fooling around one day drinking whiskey and stretching out some, with the tape running. The result, 2000’s AC/Dixie, a bunch of AC/DC tunes done bluegrass style, sold 100,000 copies and put their straight-ahead project on hold. The follow-up, 2002’s Mountain Love, included Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” J Geils’ “Centerfold,” and Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” all set to a bluegrass beat. While recording Mountain Love someone gave Wheeler a KISS greatest hits record and the band knocked out another album’s worth of hillbilly versions of the blood-spitting circus act’s timeless treasures including “Love Gun,” “Rock and Roll All Night” and “Christine Sixteen” for KISS My Grass.
When the group finally got around to putting out their original project last year under the heading Choose Your Own Title, the group hit the road as a double bill, the Kerosene Brothers opening for Hayseed Dixie. But the record only sold about 10,000 copies, mostly off the stage. “Not like it’s all about the money or anything, cause it ain’t,” Wheeler says. “But you can’t just rename yourself and just go out and play as the Kerosene Brothers, because most people out there don’t even know what that is.” Radio wouldn’t help – the record got no airplay. “We just fell into that gap between rock and country. The rock guys all said, “well that’s a banjo,’ and the country guys all went, “that’s rock,’ so….”
Despite the record’s lukewarm reception in the States, an August overseas release, Let There Be Rockgrass, and a recent follow-up tour went well. “We just got back from doing 27 shows in 27 days,” says Wheeler. “Called the No Sleep “til Kirkwall Tour. Kirkwall is a little town in Orkney, and I think that’s a record, for a hillbilly band anyway, to do that many shows in a row. Sold out everywhere. Had like a thousand people in London.”
The group is back in the States doing business as Hayseed Dixie once again. But Wheeler is quick to point out that the show is more than a novelty act doing AC/DC covers. “Even at the beginning of the band, we never came out and just played all AC/ DC songs,” he says. “There’s a novelty aspect to it, sure, in the same way there’s a novelty aspect to AC/DC. I mean the guy’s out there running around in a schoolboy outfit and stuff. The same way there’s a novelty aspect to KISS – they’re all in that devil makeup and blowin’ stuff up. But we have started to put more of our own material in the set.”
Their next release, Hot Piece of Grass, due out in the Spring, contains half originals and half covers, including their takes on Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” this time around.
Although he said during the Kerosene Brothers tour that if he was able to get the Kerosene thing going it would give the band a lot more avenues to make more interesting records down the road instead of just repeating the formula, Wheeler’s not feeling trapped in the Hayseed Dixie persona. “We’re just trying to evolve that into whatever that evolves into next,” the singer says. “Every time we’ve tried to plan anything out, it’s never worked out that well. Maybe the new philosophy is don’t have a plan. Just aim in the direction that seems to be having fun and walk through those doors when they open up.”
Hayseed Dixie plays the Neighborhood Theater Friday at 9pm. Tickets are $12.
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2004.
