THE NEW BAD BOYS OF COUNTRY MUSIC

PTJTTTWCr NASHVILLE'S tomp your boots!" yells Dirty River Boys singer Marco Gutierrez into his mike. "Stomp your boots on this hardwood floor!" His band is playing Gruene Hall, a 137-year-old honky-tonk in a thick, green, swampy town near the southern tip of Texas called New Braunfels. Gutierrez whips the crowd into a ^^^^ semiballistic fury as he launches into a song. The heavily tattooed drummer, Travis Stearns, alternates between playing the drum set in front of him and pummel-ing the box on which he's sitting with his bare hands. The upright bass player's instrument is stamped with the words ditchthk bitch, lets go rodko. The raucous, beer-fueled crowd laps up every second of it, shouting the band's name at the top of their lungs. "They're just a bunch of hell-raisers," says country singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard. "They're these wild young roots-rock hellions singing songs that come from a higher place only true poets know. I don't see anyone else in Texas doing what they're doing." Ricocheting seamlessly between country, bluegrass and rock, the Dirty River Boys— along with up-and-comers Whiskey Myers and Turnpike Troubadours—are wrench­ing country music out of a staid rut and turning it into something else entirely. Just as music out of Nashville has taken a turn toward overproduced sounds made by truck-worshipping, back-slapping rhine-stone cowboys, these three bands in the barren Southwest are tearing through honky-tonks, ripping up dive bars and forging a gritty, raw new iter­ation of the genre. "These days country music is all pseudo cowboys wear­ing cowboy hats and singing about things they don't know about," says Dirty River Boys bassist Colton James. "It makes me ill. It's not country. It's not authentic." The band's musical influences run the gamut. "Some nights we get more punk, and some nights we get a lit­tle more country," says Stearns. "Some nights we hush it down and get seriously singer-songwriter. We just try to sound like ourselves." Turnpike Troubadours have knocked Texas on its siz- able ass by selling out shows across the state. Their music can best be described as Townes Van Zandt meets Bob Dylan meets William S. Burroughs. "Turnpike Troubadours came out of nowhere and freaked people out," says Fort Worth radio DJ Shayne Hollinger, refer­ring to the band's hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma. "They're on some next-level shit." And then there's Whiskey Myers, a six-man outfit hailing from tiny towns in east Texas. Their music is a Zeppelin-inspired, Skynyrd-loving backdrop of sexy slow guitars with a motorcycle-racing edge. If the lyrically minded Dirty River Boys are the state's bur­geoning poet laureates, Whiskey Myers are the raucous backwoods boys raised on South­ern rock, porch swings and hand-me-down rifles. "Lightning," a song off their most recent album, details running around drunk with "every pretty little whore" in town. "I was pretty fucked up when I wrote that song," admits lead singer Cody Cannon, "but our songs are fucking honest. We don't cover up. It won't sell as many copies, but fuck it." But honesty is what audiences want: Early Morning Shakes, Whiskey Myers's latest album, debuted at number one on the iTunes country chart. The Dirty River Boys and Turnpike Troubadours have experienced similar success, and they're doing it without record deals or national radio airplay. At a time when Top 40 country music has been spit-shined, polished, perfumed and commodified, America's heartland is thirsty for a new sound. These rough­neck raconteurs are ready to deliver. Hi "Gonna take you down to the river; you're gonna learn about the times, man. Bloodstains will make you shiver; you're eonna feel it in your spine, man." —"Down by the River" WHISKEY MYsns "My first rifle was a .243, Papa gave Daddy and Daddy gave to me.... I still fly that Southern ft whistling Dixieland enough to brag." —"Ballad of a Southern Man" TMPIKil TROUBADOURS "Could you spare a cigarette; I hate to be a bum. But here's to hopin' she'll still come; Vm too old to be this dumb." —"Empty as a Drum"