thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

Sitting across from local singer-songwriter Mic Harrison at Alcoa's Bread of Heaven, it's not hard to see the kind of man he would have turned out to be had he not followed the call of rock 'n' roll out of his West Tennessee hometown.

With a population slightly less than 1,200 people, Bradford, Tenn., is a little more than a speck on the map in Gibson County, to the northeast of Memphis. By comparison, Maryville seems practically cosmopolitan. Were it not for a few fortunate turn of events, Harrison might be there still.

If he was, he would be the sort of good-natured guy everyone in town seems to know, the guy in the trucker cap behind the wheel of a beat-up pickup that you pull over to the side of the road to talk with for a spell. Harrison is just that sort of guy — friendly, approachable and humble.

In other words, he's a simple sort, in the definition of the word as it relates to easygoing and uncomplicated. And after working for years in the local and regional music scene as a guitar-slinger of sorts, rounding out already-established bands like The V-Roys and Superdrag, Harrison is finally reveling in that simplicity. With local rock band The High Score, he has a new album set to hit stores Tuesday, and it's a lot like the meal in a joint like Bread of Heaven — no frills. Nothing fancy. But damned good, all the same.

Humble beginnings

You wouldn't know it by looking at him, but until his sophomore year of high school, Harrison was a baller.

"That's the thing about a small school — you could be a short, white boy and play basketball," Harrison told The Daily Times this week.

He was also a budding musician, turned on to playing guitar by his father, who would come home from work and relax with a six-string.

"He was a pretty good guitar player, and he would play these old blues riffs," Harrison said. "I always thought that was cool, and I wanted to learn how to do that. So he showed me some riffs; nothing fancy, but from there, I was in bands and after high school, that's pretty much all I wanted to do."

He went to the University of Tennessee-Martin for a while, but it was on a trip to East Tennessee to visit his childhood buddy Jeff Bills that Harrison's life would change. Bills was the drummer for a Knoxville rock outfit, The Viceroys. The band had recently shortened its name to simply The V-Roys, and after losing founding member John Paul Keith, the remaining three members — Bills, bassist Paxton Sellers and singer/guitarist Scott Miller — were looking for a new member.

"They weren't looking for a hotshot guitar player, thank God; they wanted another writer," Harrison said. "In the years of playing in all those [lousy] cover bands, that's how I learned to write. So I moved up here in May of 1995 and started playing with them. All I'd ever played was acoustic; so I moved over to electric guitar, and they were very kind and very patient. At one point, I think they were thinking it wasn't going to work out, but for some reason, it did."

Harrison's timing was perfect — The V-Roys had captured the attention of outlaw country-rocker Steve Earle and his production partner, Jack Emerson. They signed the band to Earle's E-Squared record label, and at the end of 1995, the band recorded "Just Add Ice." A regional phenomenon was born, and The V-Roys seemed poised to break into the ranks of national roots-rock artists.

For Harrison, still wet behind the ears from his West Tennessee upbringing, it was a heady time.

"God, it was great," he said, a touch of wistful regret in his tone. "I didn't have [a thing]; none of us did, but it was great going through these things with those guys. After that first record, we toured our asses off, and that was pretty much my learning year."

Almost famous

The band wound up on several national compilations and even contributed several songs to the soundtrack of the Laura Linney indie film "You Can Count On Me." But as The V-Roys started pre-production on their second album, "All About Town," cracks in the foundation were starting to show through.

"I don't know; it just didn't seem like it was working out," Harrison said. "Scott was wanting to do his own thing on the side, Paxton wanted to finish college and we all wanted a different producer for the second record, because we didn't want to sound the same on each one. There was definitely some tension there."

"All About Town" received warm reviews, but the boys were ready to go their separate ways. A joint decision was made to call it quits on New Year's Eve 1999, after one last, rocking show. While Harrison believes the band went out on top, he can't help but wonder "what if."

"I think we could have done a lot more, and I really think we should have," he said. "I was disappointed, sure. It was one of those deals where it had become like my baby, and I didn't want my baby to leave home."

There's been talk of a V-Roys reunion over the years — in fact, organizers of last year's Southern rock festival Mucklewain tried to convince the four to reunite — but so far, things haven't worked out.

In the meantime, Harrison went through a string of other projects before striking out on his own. After Miller left The V-Roys, Harrison, Bills and Sellers recorded as The Faults. The band released one album of power-pop rock markedly different from anything The V-Roys had done, but then the group started to fall apart.

"I think Jeff and Paxton just wanted to record another record, but neither one of them wanted to go back out on the road," Harrison said. "They both played live a few times, but we had to find a while new lineup to tour, and that didn't last long — maybe 12 or 15 shows."

At the time that The Faults imploded (at an infamous show at the Exit/In in Nashville, where the band's drummer — not Bills — trashed his kit two songs into the band's set), Harrison had been asked to add guitar firepower to Knoxville pop-rock band Superdrag, which had found fame in its early years thanks to the MTV spin of the video for the song "Sucked Out." Harrison agreed, but once again, fate had other plans — after recording "Last Call for Vitriol," Superdrag decided to go on indefinite hiatus.

"I was with the band maybe a year and a half, and the whole time I was in Superdrag, I wanted to do a solo record," Harrison said. "I had been writing the songs that would end up on 'Pallbearer's Shoes,' so when the guys decided to take off for a while, it was the perfect time to record my own project."

With Superdrag drummer and studio wizard Don Coffey Jr., Harrison recorded a darkly intimate album featuring the occasional rockers ("Hole in My Heart," "River City Bluff," "Journey's End") but filled with low-key, almost-melancholy songs. It's a beautiful record, but even Harrison admits it's difficult to replicate live in its entirety, and the overall sound goes against the grain of what most fans expected from him.

"I think it was a record I had to get out, because pretty much every song on there is about a family member or a family situation," he said. "It's a little bit dark; maybe it had to do with feelings I had in regards to missing West Tennessee, I don't know. I don't think they come across live, but I still love the songs on there."

Striking out solo

By comparison, Harrison's new album — "Push Me On Home" — is almost happy-go-lucky. It features local rockers The High Score, which started touring with him on short jaunts to promote "Pallbearer's Shoes" and a band that Harrison himself backs up on the road.

Recording "Push Me On Home" was a group affair, hence the decision to include The High Score in the album's credits. High Score bandleader Robbie Trosper produced "Push Me On Home," and drummer Brad Henderson contributed a number of song titles and lyrics.

"Putting these songs together, I was actually sitting there thinking about this particular band and what we had played live, and what it would be like for the crowd to hear us play it," Harrison said. "I just really wanted to get up and have a good time and make that come across. I think it has so far, because I don't want to be one of those droopy guys who strums his acoustic guitar and tries to make people cry. I want to have a good time.

"You can't fake having a good time. If you are having one, everyone else will too. I think I'm finally starting to learn that most people don't really care what you're saying until they hear something they like. If they really like that one guitar lick, then they'll start listening to what your saying. And I think that's what we tried to go for on this one — the meat and the potatoes."

It's a simple formula, really — good music plus good lyrics equals a good time, especially when that music is being played by a group of guys tighter than a group of fraternity brothers and friendly to anyone who wants to sit down and crack open a cold one with them.

Simple — there's that word again.

"I'm getting more simple the older I get, I believe," Harrison said. "Maybe I'm finally figuring out how to do it. Look at Hank Williams Sr. — he wrote some of the best damn songs ever written, and he didn't use a whole lot of words. They were very simple words and very few of them, and they still got his point across. I think that's the key. If you can do that and get your point across, you're a damn good writer.

"And really, the writing is what keeps me going. If I ever quit writing, I wouldn't want to do this anymore. That's the challenge, and then the fun part is going out with my buddies and doing this. If I wasn't doing this, what the hell would I be doing? I know that everything comes to an end; I just hope mine isn't anytime soon."