Lost & Found

Tearing It Up (l-r): Trey Robles, Mike Poppit, and John Schooley (Photo By John Anderson)

With a population of 450, Niangua, Mo., doesn't have much going on. Springfield is the closest town of any size, and it's 40 miles away. Even the closest Wal-Mart is a 20-mile drive.

John Schooley's high school senior class, meanwhile, consisted of 16 kids, and recently, the one-stoplight town in the Ozarks lost the accreditation of its high school because test scores were so low – making it the only town in Missouri to have that dubious distinction.

The one thing a town like Niangua does offer, however, is time, vast stretches of time with damned little to fill them. One can either figure out a way to cope with the mind-numbing boredom that comes with such a backwater town or get the hell out while the getting's good.

In Schooley's case, it was a matter of playing guitar every night while still in high school, then ejecting himself from Niangua like it was a burning car and heading for greener pastures at the University of Missouri in Columbia. After a meat-and-potatoes diet of radio-fed classic rock and crushing, small-town monotony, Columbia was a revelation for Schooley.

"I didn't even hear Link Wray until I was 18 or 19," marvels the guitarist, 30. "There was a great indie record store in Columbia that had a lot of more obscure stuff, and that's when I got turned onto punk rock, all the rootsy stuff. It was a big eye-opener."

This was also the time and place where Schooley hooked up with his first band, the Revelators, a gritty guitar-and-drums outfit whose first show was an opening slot for the Oblivians.

The Revelators soon hooked up with Crypt Records for an album that featured covers of songs by Sonny Burgess, Link Wray, and Billy Boy Arnold – which should give you some idea of their direction – as well as a slew of originals. After a European tour and an American trek or two, the band recorded their second album here in Austin with the help of Mike Mariconda. That's of course when the Revelators broke up, so the album was never released.

Fast forward to 2003 and the Hard Feelings' second CD, Rebels Against the Future. With 2001's scorching You Won't Like It ... 'Cuz It's Rock n' Roll under their belts, it was time for a follow-up, but things weren't exactly working in the band's favor.

"That's the thing I was worried about with the new Hard Feelings record," nods Schooley. "Like the second Revelators record, I didn't want this to be the second lost album of my short career."

Rich Stanley is the band's man in Australia, and since he worked at Corduroy, Down Under's only vinyl pressing plant, he was able to get a good price on pressing, CD duplication, and European and Australian distribution for his label Dropkick Records.

Originally, plans called for Rebels Against the Future to be ready in time for the band's European tour, for which Stanley did come across with 200 copies. That, however, was when the pipeline dried up, and the album's local release date, August '03, was put off. Stanley had been diagnosed with cancer.

"It was really touch and go for a while as to whether he was even going to live," notes Schooley. "We didn't want to shop the record around to other labels because I thought that would be pretty shitty.

"It was really nerve-racking, though, because I'd e-mail him and not hear back for a couple of weeks and wonder if he was even OK. And of course there was nothing he could do about the record, since he didn't work at the plant anymore and had more pressing things to worry about."

So the Hard Feelings took a two-month hiatus while waiting to see how the situation shook out. Other than a few promotional copies of Rebels given to the press, the album went unheard. That is until Stanley, on the other side of chemotherapy and now minus a kidney, was finally declared cancer-free. There would be a future for the Hard Feelings to rebel against after all.

Now, the band is planning long-weekend, guerilla-style Midwest tours again. The CD will bear the Dropkick imprint overseas, and Beerland Records here in the States. As with You Won't Like It ... 'Cuz It's Rock n' Roll, the Red River institution's proprietor, Randall Stockton, helped with some seed money toward the CD. Schooley knows all about support.

"I've just tried to be supportive the whole time, because [Stanley's] not just putting out our record, he's my friend," he says. "I haven't been e-mailing [Stanley] all the time saying, 'Hey, where's my goddamn CDs?'"

Of course, the Revelators and Hard Feelings are only part of the picture. Not only is he something of a musicologist in his given genre, Schooley also has some stories from said same realm. Tales like touring with R.L. Burnside back before the 77-year-old Oxford, Miss., bluesman fell into the indie mainstream with Matador's A Ass Pocket of Whiskey in 1996.

Seems that Burnside's guitar player Kenny Brown couldn't drive after a run-in with the law, so Schooley was invited into the band; they toured the West Coast and played a blues festival in Finland and Norway.

"It was the only time I've actually made good money from playing guitar," cracks Schooley.

Then there was the time Schooley drove equally ancient bluesman and Burnside's one-time Fat Possum labelmate T-Model Ford and his drummer-savant Spam from Oxford to Phoenix for a gig.

"T-Model only talks about three things," reveals Schooley, "pussy, times he's kicked ass or had his ass kicked, and how stupid Spam is."

Much of that particular trip consisted of Schooley keeping Ford away from whiskey; the old guy drank himself unconscious in Phoenix and had to be revived by EMS, giving him a second wind for more whiskey. Then there was Spam leaving his suitcase back in Oxford, and Schooley running him to the nearest Goodwill for a new wardrobe to get him through the trip.

And then, of course, there's the time Schooley drove the Continental Club's favorite psychobilly pioneer, Hasil Adkins, from Boone County, W. Va., to Oxford in a rented Oldsmobile. Adkins had to be picked up on the side of the road since his house was down in a holler surrounded by junked cars and a big dog Adkins didn't leave food for.

"There were tufts of hair and bones around, though, so I guess he was taking care of himself," adds Schooley about the canine.

After a brief tour of the house, Adkins gathered up a box of clothes, a case of Milwaukee's Best, and a carton of GPC 100 cigarettes, and it was time to go, a roach skittering out of the clothes box when he set it in the trunk.

"He never slept, he just ate meat," recalls Schooley. "He drank warm beer, smoked like a chimney, and talked the whole time."

Of course, during the Hard Feelings' downtime, Schooley has stayed busy; his one-man-band disc is slated to come out on Switzerland's Voodoo Rhythm label. If you haven't seen the racket he can make all by himself, it's definitely worth checking out.

Schooley may be a long ways from a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Missouri bend in the road, but chances are you'll always hear his rural roots in the honest and sometimes brutal music he puts out.

The Hard Feelings, along with DJ Mike Mariconda and the dancing Boom Chica Boom girls, celebrate the release of Rebels Against the Future at Beerland, Saturday, Feb. 28.