The Daily Times

Singer-songwriter John Paul Keith may be a resident of West Tennessee these days, but the Memphis-based musician still has plenty of fond memories of his time spent in Knoxville.

A founding member of The Viceroys — a band that included Scott Miller, Jeff Bills and Paxton Sellers that would evolve into The V-Roys upon Keith’s departure — he remembers one of the first New Year’s Eve shows the band played at Tomato Head in downtown Knoxville. Fans were dancing on tables, and he remembers staggering out into the sunlight on New Year’s Day, having rocked the sun up.

“I also remember the time we played with Superdrag, and The Mercury Theatre (where Preservation Pub on Market Square now stands) sold out of beer,” Keith told The Daily Times this week. “They literally ran out of beer. I’ve never seen that happen, anywhere. Now that was fun.”

So many good times. It’s no wonder, then, that Keith was asked to return to town this weekend to help Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alternative weekly newspaper, celebrate its 20-year anniversary.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “Metro Pulse was the first paper to ever write anything about me, that’s for sure. And they might be the last.”

His commentary says more about the state of the music industry today than it does Keith’s talent, that’s for sure. After all, he’s an old-school rocker with a fondness for vintage sounds and has just released his second album, “The Man That Time Forgot,” on Big Legal Mess Records. It’s a nice progression from “Spills and Thrills,” his rockabilly-heavy tribute to the Sun Records sound of Memphis a half-century ago.

This time around, the influences are still there, but Keith’s dragged the sound forward in time and manages to sound both vintage and contemporary — jangly and rootsy and anchored in a sound that he cut his teeth on almost two decades ago.

Born and raised in East Tennessee, Keith played with the Filter Kings before hooking up with Bills, Sellers and Miller to put together The Viceroys. After leaving the group, he moved to Nashville and formed a band called The Nevers, which recorded for Sire Records. The band’s album was never released because of label politics, however, and Keith went on to play in various other projects — the Have Nots and Stateside, which wound up backing singer-songwriter Ryan Adams under the moniker the Pink Hearts.

After Adams and Keith had a falling out, the latter moved from Nashville to New York to Alabama, made another record with a reconstituted Stateside and eventually moved to Memphis, where he lives today. A few years back, Bills talked Keith into coming back to Knoxville for a one-off show with a pick-up band at the now-closed Corner Lounge, and the show got his musical fires burning again.

Now, he’s working as hard as he ever did back in his Knoxville heyday, taking his band — the One Four Fives — on the road to celebrate his last album, “Spills and Thrills.” And after losing his 9-to-5 job, he found himself looking at life as a full-time musician again.

“That freed me up to tour, so instead of looking for work, I started looking for gigs,” he said. “I was able to make it work and make a living playing, and here I am two years later, still making it work. I’m doing more touring than I’ve ever done before.”

Life on the road was a factor in the songwriting process for “The Man That Time Forgot,” he added. With the band always fresh after night upon night of rocking clubs, he decided to cut the record live at the studio of Bruce Watson, head of Big Legal Mess. Doing so, he said, allowed for that vintage sound captured so perfectly on “Spills and Thrills” to be preserved on the new album.

“Bruce had some really cool gear in his studio, and we cut to one-inch eight-track tape, which is kind of rare,” he said. “You have to be real selective with what you mic, because you only have eight channels, so you can only have two or three mics on the drums. That’s the way they used to do it in the old days, and that’s why the record sounds the way it does.”

In updating the sound, he added, he channeled an unlikely inspiration — the late Americana godfather Doug Sahm, who used to play with the great Freddie Fender in the Texas Tornados. In deciding how different “Man” should be from “Spills,” he let Sahm be his guide, he said.

“I didn’t know about him until fairly recently, but the past few years, I’ve really come to look at him as a giant in the background,” Keith said. “He was absolutely fearless and would do any style that he wanted to do. He would jump from this sound to that sound, sometimes on the same album. He was just totally fearless in that way, and that was sort of in the back of my mind when we were making it.”

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