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- Dixie-fried
Hayseed Dixie makes music for drinkers. In addition to their own raucous hillbilly odes, the Hayseeds have made a career out of turning AC/DC classics into hell-raising bluegrass anthems. Debuting with 2000's AC/Dixie, fiddler/ singer/philosopher John Wheeler plus Don Wayne and Del Reno, sons of "Feudin' Banjos" innovator Don Reno, continue to mine other genres for gold.
"After you've been touring for a while, your hear stuff on the radio, think, aw, it'd be kind of fun to make a pass at that," Wheeler said by phone from a tour stop in Hilton Head. That prompted the band to include Green Day's "Holiday" on their latest, A Hot Piece of Grass. "We thought it was kinda fun to play while drinking, figured heck, maybe other drinkers might enjoy listening to it."
Wheeler discovered the drinking/bluegrass connection while playing sets of mostly R.E.M. tunes at frat parties in college. The first time he played AC/DC's "You Shook Me" like a country song, the crowd went nuts. "I thought, 'Hey, it works pretty well that way,' and I kept doing it."
The band has branched out a bit since then, including Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," on the latest outing. "Politicians hide themselves away/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor," Ozzy once sang. But Wheeler says his intention wasn't necessarily to promote any messages. "While you're sitting around drinking, you're gonna be thinking about the stuff that's on CNN behind the bar."
The Hayseeds spent 12 out of the last 16 months playing abroad. And the first question asked everywhere the band went was "What do you think about Bush?"
"And our answer was, 'We're all in favor of it, but when they go to shaving everything all the way off it makes us feel like pedophiles, and we're into full-grown women.
"'I mean the president,' the foreigners would reply. And we'd say, 'Well, hell, we don't represent him. We represent music, man -- we ain't political.'"
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