The last time Drag The River played the Bay area, an oddly timed booking found them in Ybor City amid of the annual populists' quaff-and-stumble that is Guavaween.
Not exactly an ideal gig for a bunch of punk heroes turned strum-rock troubadours.
"Guavaween? It was a little weird," allows frontman Chad Price. "The fact that there were a million people around and five people in the bar watching us play, it was a little strange. But it was interesting — there was a lot of stuff going on all around."
Wait a minute.
Guavaween?
Wasn't that, like, a month ago?
What's this bunch of Colorado musicians doing in town again so soon?
That's what they do. In fact, since the handful of diehard fans that braved the 'ween's cover charge and beaded throng saw them last, Drag The River have spent a grand total of about a week at home.
"I love it," says Price of the itinerant lifestyle. "I wish we could spend more time on the road, actually. We do as much as we can. I don't know if everybody [in the band] wants to be gone that much, but some of us definitely do."
Price learned the ropes of the road singing for All, the latter-days offshoot of Descendents, those on-again, off-again pop-punk pioneers/icons. The seeds of Drag The River were planted when, while hanging around his fellow band members' Fort Collins, Colo., recording studio The Blasting Room, Price began swapping songwriting ideas with friend and fellow punk-scene veteran Jon Snodgrass of Armchair Martian. The pair gelled instantly, and a few acoustic shows later, the late '90s found them availing themselves of The Blasting Room's facilities, not to mention its clientele.
"Anybody that happened to be walking by the room could come in and play any of the instruments that we couldn't or didn't want to play," recalls Price.
Eventually, word of the ad-hoc side project spread along the punk-rock grapevine, facilitating the release of the Price/Snodgrass recordings as Hobo's Demos in '00. Armchair Martian drummer Paul Rucker and "J.J.," bassist for the late cult-punk outfit The Nobodys, signed on for some touring. The crowds, originally made up of friends and fans of the louder, faster groups with whom the members of Drag had made their bones, got bigger.
Somewhere in there, they discovered they had a band.
"We never actually sat down and said that, but I mean later on, when our shows started getting bigger and better and we started selling CDs and whatnot, it just grew into something else," Price says. "We weren't even really trying, it just happened. And I was really happy with it that way."
These days, Drag The River can boast a lengthy and tangled catalog of full-lengths, singles and vinyl-only releases on various staunchly independent imprints (the latest, It's Crazy, came out on Suburban Home in June), and a fanbase that includes everything from loyalist old-school punks and greased-up rockabilly fans to alt-country hipsters and indie kids.
"We're playing for — well, we rarely play all-ages shows these days, but, like, young punkers to people our age, and people who'll bring their parents," says Price. "It's like a huge age range at our shows. I love that. It seems that normally, we play the rock 'n' roll bars for the most part. But every now and then we'll play someplace that's very country."
The straightforward country-rock sound that Price and Snodgrass initially began bouncing back and forth a decade ago is still intact and hasn't evolved so much as refined itself — simple yet sprawling, earnest yet attitude-laden, inebriated yet insightful, Drag The River's style pays homage to seminal American acoustic and C&W traditions but retains an innately original character. Though Drag evinces little of the volume and tempos that characterize punk, the members of the band (now rounded out by former Pinhead Gunpowder drummer Dave Barker and lead guitarist/pedal steel artist "Spacey" Casey Prestwood of Hot Rod Circuit) intuitively understand the expressive thread that runs through folk and raw country to punk's cathartic origins.
"It's all just simple, honest, good songwriting, I guess," Price says. "It just seems kind of like the same music to me, it's just that one's quiet and slow, and one's loud and fast — and neither really has to be either all the time."
Despite their inarguably cred-heavy punk pedigree and alt-country's seemingly constant just-under-the-mainstream-radar vogue, Drag The River have managed to remain something of a category-eluding cult phenomenon; they don't get associated with the likes of Ryan Adams or The Drive-By Truckers too often, though their music often butts up against the styles devoured by fans of such fare. A few more tours like their current jaunt with Memphis y'allternative favorites Lucero might — probably will, in fact — change that status and find them popping up in the blogs of the sort of obsessives who pore over articles in No Depression and Magnet a hell of a lot more often.
But it doesn't seem like they're in a hurry to do anything other than get back out on the road whenever they can.
"We're not really kind of trying to fall in with anybody," says Price. "There's no real way to really define what we do, I guess. Some of it's basically rock, some of it's really country, and there's everything in between. We're just kinda goin' along, and whatever happens, happens, and whoever wants to accept us, as long as people like us, it doesn't really matter who."
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.
