"When we got together, we said, "Let's do a rockabilly band.' But at that point, I realized that I wasn't good enough to be a rockabilly lead guitar player," says Kamran Mir, to general laughter from his bandmates. "And I probably still am not now."
The first song Michael Snayd wrote in 1998 for his and Mir's nascent project was called "Hot Rod Girl"; the second was "Devil Child." Seriously — to paraphrase Chandler from Friends, could you be any more rockabilly? But a life of tattoo sleeves, pompadours and pinup girls wasn't in the cards for the two singer/guitarists. As their collaboration evolved, the pair discovered their style gravitating more toward a blend of tuneful twang-pop and gritty roots-rock.
"We just wrote from our hearts, and rockabilly's not what came out," Snayd says; this candid comment likewise draws boisterous response from the group gathered outside drummer Jeff Blackburn's carport-cum-practice space.
Too many late-arrival insurgent country acts are composed of bored indie rockers with no real knowledge of or appreciation for American roots music's varied sounds and traditions. They're perfectly content to drawl along over the same major-key riff they played faster as a punk act, blissfully ignorant of the notion that a love for punk was only one of several things that made Uncle Tupelo so special. The Urbane Cowboys, on the other hand, came to the table with neither a desire to be the next Ryan Adams nor any hard-and-fast notions about how they were going to sound.
Snayd, a fan of every C&W flavor, basically learned how to play guitar after deciding to start the band with Mir. So did original bassist Dave Leslie. Mir took a circuitous route to loving roots music, digesting tuneage from punk to ska to swing to rockabilly. Drummer Jeff Blackburn contributed an upbeat rock energy. Later, the addition of former Thrusters bassist Steven Schumacher lent the band a more pronounced surf-rock edge, and mandolin player Adam Karpay has been a live-set fixture for some months now. Karpay was a member of a seminal "70s Florida country-rock outfit called C&W Mow Company; when asked whatever happened to the Company, he reports that they "went out to California — and died there."
These disparate elements, and the presence of two primary songwriters in Snayd and Mir, lend The Urbane Cowboys a surprisingly broad signature. Some songs rock with roadhouse abandon, some would slide nicely into contemporary pop-country airplay, and still others ply that jumpy surf-a-billy backbeat. By refusing to narrowly define what they do, the Cowboys have crafted a fun, eclectic and widely appealing style.
"We cover a wide range, that's for sure. It just comes from having a lot of years listening to all kinds of music," says Schumacher. "It's hard to classify what we are. It's almost just Americana."
"I couldn't sit here and explain it to you," adds Mir, "but we know it when we hear it. We know what it is, and what it isn't."
Nearly four years of playing for just about anyone who asked, from a massive barn-party in Wimauma to WMNF's annual Tropical Heatwave, have paired the Cowboys' music with an engagingly loose "n' rowdy bar-band persona. The party atmosphere, between-song ribaldry and occasional bald fuck-ups seem to mock the self-image of so many local bands obsessed with their own weighty, professionalized emotion.
"Until I'm making my living playing music, I'm not a professional," says Mir of such ideas. "So fuck them."
Like the man said, it's not Shakespeare. But it is a hell of a lot of fun, and the Cowboys' unpretentious vibe certainly works for them. It's endeared the foursome to fans from every cell of the Bay area's somewhat fractious original-music scene. More importantly, it's endeared them to folks from outside the scene, from that great and seemingly unreachable mass of potential ears, the general public.
"The people that come up to us after shows, they're not hipsters or scenesters," Mir observes. "They're people that happened to be there, and liked what they heard."
Any given Cowboys crowd is a study in disparity, from rogue rockabilly purists and the usual representative peers to jam-band heads, bikers and parents. And it's virtually guaranteed that at least one of the venue's regulars will become intrigued enough to dance, hoot and pick up a copy of the band's debut full-length June to November.
"I don't think it's luck, I think it's the fact that people realize we're having fun, and they want to be a part of that," Schumacher says. "We put on a show, even if it's Dave's Lounge and we're playing to five people."
During a trip home, Los Angeles resident Bob Haas noticed The Urbane Cowboys' easy accessibility right off. A former roommate of Snayde's, Haas has since found success as a director, filming commercials for the prestigious (read: extremely expensive) marketing firm of Saatchi & Saatchi. He asked the Cowboys if he could use their material in a new project, the feature-length independent baseball flick 108 Stitches starring Rick Marzan (Bull Durham, Heat) and Jennifer Austin (My Fellow Americans). The band ended up contributing five tunes from June to November. They've also been commissioned to write another song for the soon-to-be-released film's closing credits, and new music by Bruce Springsteen may appear alongside theirs in the movie.
Such a feat definitely qualifies as a step toward the "professional," as does the quartet's impressive list of national acts they've opened for — including, paradoxically, skacore stalwarts Reel Big Fish. But even as they make short work of converting Tampa's pedestrian music fans into local-band pundits, the group insists that it's still all about having a good time.
"We don't plan much of anything," says Schumacher. "We're lucky if we have a set list."
Music critic Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or e-mail him at at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2002.