The New Bad Boys of Country Music(possible NSFW)

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Stomp 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 pummeling the box on which he’s sitting with his bare hands. The upright bass player’s instrument is stamped with the words DITCH THE BITCH, LET’S GO RODEO. The raucous, beer-fueled crowd laps up every second of it, shouting the band’s name at the top of their lungs.

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Turnpike Troubadours have knocked Texas on its sizable arse 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 shite.”

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 fricked up when I wrote that song,” admits lead singer Cody Cannon, “but our songs are fricking honest. We don’t cover up. It won’t sell as many copies, but frick it.”

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With dozens of venues like Gruene Hall, the state’s oldest honky-tonk, Texas is fertile ground for bands that don’t play by Nashville’s rules.

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