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When The Dexateens roll into town a week from tonight, it won’t take long for those in attendance at “The Shed” at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson to recognize their own.

Southern boys with a penchant for working hard and rocking out. Blue-collar dudes with calluses on their fingers from manual labor and almost 10 years of rubbing against guitar strings. Voices filled with that Deep South drawl, the kind that’s both comforting and familiar to people around these parts.

The band may not be a household name, but give them time. They’re working on it, and to give them credit, it was only about four years ago that they started to take themselves seriously.

“We’ve never been a big touring band, and the reason at first was just because we were lazy and complacent,” singer Elliott McPherson told The Daily Times this week. “Back then, we were all still single and pretty lazy; we weren’t doing anything except partying and having fun. We didn’t give it the respect we do now. It’s pretty obvious by looking at our track record — our first record didn’t come out until 2004, and we’ve been together since 1998.

“That was the turning point, that first record. It wasn’t our best record, and we never really talked about it out loud, but that’s when we all realized this project had some meat and potatoes to it. That’s when we realized it was time to start taking it seriously, and we were ready to talk about the next batch of songs as soon as that one was done.”

The guys started playing together back then when McPherson and drummer Craig Pickering (affectionately referred to among his bandmates as “Sweet Dog”) started jamming together in their hometown of Tuscaloosa, Ala., after splitting from their individual bands. Rounding out the band, guitarist John Smith and bassist Matt Patton helped add the right amount of Southern grit and punk spirit to The Dexateens, and the group found itself cutting some demos with the Mississippi blues-rock label Fat Possum. Early success was not to be, however, and the band spent the next several years cutting a swath through the Southeast.

“It’s always stayed interesting, and it’s always been a thing, whether good or bad, that we’re always changing — we don’t write the same material for every record,” McPherson said. “Every recording process poses different challenges, and we realized it was worth doing it for that alone. I think we’re just now starting to get noticed just for the sake that we haven’t stopped doing it.”

McPherson’s grimy, heavily Southern, whiskey-scarred vocals draw comparisons to such acts as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The twin guitar attack is a nod to the blues-rock of “Exile”-era Rolling Stones, lightly sweetened by the soulful country flavor of a little Gram Parsons.

The Southern feel of it all is tempered only by the working-class authenticity that the members bring to the table. McPherson is a cabinet-maker (whose grandparents are buried at Sherwood Chapel and Memorial Gardens on Alcoa Highway); Patton does survey work; and Smith is a school teacher. They’ve starting to tour around the country — they just returned from a jaunt to Europe — but at the end of each run, they go back home to Alabama and pick up their respective tools that earn them hard dollars instead of just rock ‘n’ roll dreams.

It doesn’t hurt to dream, however, especially when you love the influences that are so distinguishable in the band’s music.

“Our inspirations? Big Star, The Ramones, Gram Parsons and certainly, without a doubt, the Rolling Stones,” McPherson said. “The way that they played country was, for me, really exciting when I first heard it. How would I describe us, though? I guess it depends.

“To some guy on a construction site, I just tell them Lynyrd Skynyrd to keep it easy. If it’s somebody I run into at a record store, I tell them that it’s amped-up country music with a lot of traditional rock ‘n’ roll influences. It feels like we’re somewhat purist about what we do and the way we decide to approach things. I don’t think we’re too far out there.”

Indeed, the ragged feel of devil-may-care rock, honed over countless beers, under countless smoke-grimy stage lights in dozens of bars, clubs and watering holes from Gulf Shores to Florence, is still evident on the band’s third album, “Hardwire Healing,” released earlier this year. McPherson’s voice retains an edge that sounds as if its been sharpened by a tobacco scythe, and the guitars are so rough-and-tumble you can practically hear the sound pinging off of every dent and scrape those old battle axes have been witness to over the years.

It’s authentic, and that’s something the band prides itself on, McPherson said.
“The fact that we’re willing to keep it pretty loose and ragged — at first it was by default, but now we realize it helps us — works in our favor,” he said. “If we don’t think about it too much, we put it together right there, and we treat our live performances the same way, by hitting the audience at a different angle every time.

“The live energy is pretty good, and we always seem to get excited as hell right before we play. We usually pull it together and get on the same page, even if we’re all fighting with each other right before we go on. The records have some very mellow moments on them, but there’s very few of those on stage.”

Credit some of that energy to Tim Kerr, the producer in the booth for 2004’s “The Dexateens” and 2005’s “Red Dust Rising.” It’s the same sort of authenticity and blue-collar appeal that’s landed The Dexateens in the middle of the pack of neo-Southern rockers like Lucero, the Drive-By Truckers, The Drams and others. In fact, Truckers founder Patterson Hood worked as one of the producers on “Hardwire Healing,” and with the addition of a third guitarist — Nikolaus Mimikakis, who joined in time for the “Hardwire Healing” — the band seems more poised to strike at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll greatness like never before.

Not that McPherson and his bandmates are holding their breath. They may take the band a little more seriously than they used to, but at the end of the day, all the fun and artistic expression in the world won’t make a mortgage payment or a light bill. The Dexateens have grown up, and while they haven’t forgotten how to rock, they certainly know where their priorities are.

“We never have a definite answer when we’re asked about the future of our band,” he said. “We have managers and agents, but they all know what the deal is — our families come first, and then our day jobs and then the band, and we let everything fall into place around those parameters. Whatever happens beyond that, happens; we just don’t think about it too much.”