The Luxury Liners

Performing July 20 at The End, 2219 Elliston Pl.

$5; for information, call 321-4400

David Dewese is no musical scholar. He learned the guitar at an early age, practicing 30 minutes a day at his guitar-playing father’s behest, but he wasn’t exactly an avid rock fan. “I came really late to music,” Dewese admits. “It was my senior year of high school when Nirvana hit. But my dad had been making me play guitar for lunch money, so luckily I already knew all the chords when I got to college.” He fiddled about with a couple of bands while pursuing his degree, and after graduation he moved to Dallas, where he and pal Jerry James started making lo-fi living-room recordings. “He wrote words and I knew chords,” Dewese says, chuckling. About that time, Dewese became fascinated by the burgeoning alt-country movement, and he decided to move to Nashville to pursue “the whole Music City dream. I knew I had to go somewhere, and I figured Nashville was more like Texas than Los Angeles or New York.”

Dewese arrived in Nashville four years ago, and in that brief span of time, he’s taken up residence in three bands. The first and most prominent is The Luxury Liners, who were originally intended as Dewese’s country-rock outfit, but quickly evolved into throwback power-pop. While The Luxury Liners were establishing themselves, Dewese’s early musical experiments in Dallas were released under the name The Foxymorons, and the “non-band” began attracting national attention without having ever played a live show. And just recently, Dewese’s wife Andrea formed her own band Verde as a two-piece with David on drums.

And yet, when Dewese is told of the strong tradition of rock-’n’-roll two-pieces, from House of Freaks, Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, and The Spinanes to the husband-wife combos of Timbuk 3 and Dos, he confesses that he doesn’t know much about those bands. He’s still learning his rock history; he’d never heard Big Star or Badfinger until The Luxury Liners became more about chunky riffs than rootsy twang, and friends suggested that he check out some of his musical forebears. His music may come out polished and mature, but it emerges seemingly without influence.

Dewese laughs off the gaps in his knowledge and admits that he’s catching up as fast as he can. He also confesses that he amazes even himself with the distance between what he intends and what he produces. When The Luxury Liners first formed, they played regularly at Billy Block’s Western Beat Roots Revival dressed in rhinestone shirts and sequined pants. But, Dewese says, “This retro-’60s thing just kept coming out. They thought we were alt-country at first, but people caught on eventually.” It’s certainly hard to spot a trace of country on The Luxury Liners’ EP Believe, which features three cuts of booming, glittering love-rock (including the title-track cover of the Cher hit).

As for The Foxymorons, that band’s two CDs to date, Calcutta and Rodeo City, were assembled through a long-distance process during which Dewese and James shipped tapes back and forth from Dallas to Nashville. The albums are unassuming but entertaining—especially Rodeo City, which was recorded with the foreknowledge that it would be heard by the public. With ragged slacker-rock anthems like “Left Sideways” and “Baby Blue,” this disc is smoother and catchier than Calcutta, whose songs were never intended as anything more than a fun project until the California-based American Pop Project label decided that the tracks were releasable.

This past March, The Foxymorons had their first gig ever, at the prestigious Austin, Texas, music festival South by Southwest. “We just sent them our CDs and they asked us to play,” Dewese shrugs.

Now, between his day job as a Web page designer and his stints as a drummer for Andrea (who spends her days as an elementary school teacher), Dewese cranks out songs for his two bands and tries to decide who gets which. Typically, he says, “Foxymorons gets the artsy songs, and Luxury Liners gets the cheesy hits. [Luxury Liners] want to be Top 40...you know, total sellouts. We want to be big.”

Occasionally, the lines get blurry. The Foxymorons’ “Baby Blue” has the monster hook of a Luxury Liners song, and Dewese acknowledges that “The Luxury Liners attempted that one, but it came out really boring.” Adding to the confusion of who gets what is the fact that The Foxymorons are essentially a two-piece (with a theoretically infinite number of instruments played by James and Dewese), while The Luxury Liners are a three-piece. Dewese says that he prefers to work with a limited number of personnel because then he “can mix my songwriting in really easily.”

Then he laughs, “Maybe one day I’ll have a zillion people in my band.” In the meantime, he’s applying his impressive talent for melodic inspiration to arrangements that are within the scope of his still merely fundamental grasp of rock ’n’ roll. In less than a decade, Dewese has gone from having only a passing interest in music to becoming a rapidly developing, often stunning tunesmith. What possible explanation could there be for the artistic success of this affable naif? Dewese isn’t sure. “We don’t do anything the way we’re supposed to do it,” he suggests, “but it always seems to turn out great.”

Star gazing

12th & Porter booker John Bruton scored a major coup when he got Big Star to add Nashville to their limited summer tour itinerary; the band play a free outdoor show at Uptown Mix this Wednesday, July 25. The legendary power-pop prototypes—led by renowned rock crackpot Alex Chilton and featuring original member Jody Stephens and honorary members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow—only get together a couple of times a year, when Chilton gets a wild hair and Auer and Stringfellow’s activity in their main band The Posies permits. Nashville-based Big Star acolytes have previously had to travel to Memphis or Atlanta to catch one of the band’s sporadic dates, and odds are good that the crowd at Uptown Mix is going to be packed with true believers from in and out of town.

Reports from the field suggest that Chilton has been enjoying the attention that Big Star get whenever they reunite. The band play their most populist material—like That ’70s Show theme song “In the Street,” and the not-quite-a-hit stomper “When My Baby’s Beside Me”—and largely steer clear of the troubled compositions on the group’s mopey masterpiece Sister Lovers. Since reforming at a supposed one-shot gig in Columbia, Mo., in 1993, the aforementioned lineup, which has become known as “the Columbia lineup,” has earned a reputation as perhaps an even more potent version of Big Star than the original, maybe because the various members are no longer lost in a haze of drugs and mental instability.

Soon after playing Nashville, Big Star head to Europe for three shows in August. After that, who knows? There’s always the chance that Chilton may never perform with Big Star in any form again. Given the enduring power of the band’s youthful, slightly forlorn sing-alongs, it would be advisable to catch them while you’ve got the chance.

Uptown Mix takes place at the corner of 20th Avenue and Division Street. For information, call 321-3043.