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Off stage, they're five regular guys -- working stiffs with 9-to-5 jobs, bills, girls and day-to-day drudgery.

On stage, however, they become rock gods.

Or at least, that's the appearance the members of Liars and Tigers want to keep up. It's a tongue-in-cheek stage presence, guitarist Kuyper Cummings told The Daily Times this week, but it's also one that gives them mastery over stage, crowd, note and song.

"In my mind, when we're on stage, I'm the best guitarist in the world, and Deano is the best drummer in the world, and Carrington is the best singer in the world," Cummings said. "It's just for that time, when we're on stage -- we have an almost better-than-you attitude to it. It's a presence about us on stage at all times, that we're completely untouchable. But then, after the show, we'll hang out and talk to people."

It's a swagger that's as intrinsic to rock 'n' roll as it is to the guys in Liars and Tigers -- and it's one of the reasons young fans have lined up to follow the group at all-ages shows around the area, like the one tonight at the Disabled American Veterans Hall in Knoxville, where Liars and Tigers performs as part of a seven-band bill to benefit Fountain City Ministries.

Cummings -- who lives in Maryville, is a former home-schooled student who once played in a local outfit called The Aftermath. As a 15-year-old guitarist, he would get up early to complete his schoolwork, he said, so that his bandmates -- all four or five years older, with jobs or college -- could come over in the afternoons to practice.

Liars and Tigers celebrates its one-year anniversary on New Year's Eve, but the band members bring much more experience to the table than such an anniversary would seem to indicate. Drummer Deano Leve is an Alcoa High graduate who once played with local Christian metal band Feeny; together with former Crash Addict bassist Jimmy Sterling, he founded Liars and Tigers after his old band, My Revenge Is Red, broke up more than a year ago.

When The Aftermath split up because of creative differences, Kuyper was brought into the Liars and Tigers fold. Within two weeks of playing together, the guys -- including vocalist Carrington Mitchell and guitarist Donald Reagan -- had already recorded a song and posted it to their Myspace page.

As time progressed, Cummings said, the guys devoted as much time to the technical side of the Liars and Tigers sound as they did the stage show.

"We try to appeal to any genre, so that people who like just about anything will like at least one part of our music or acknowledge that there's good musicianship there," he said. "We might have one song that's really poppy and could be played on the radio and another that's really, really hard that appeals to the metal crowd.

"Then there's the progressive side that appeals to people who like that. Not like jam bands, but the intelligent, prog-rock thing. We have many different time signatures in each song. I don't think we have a single song that doesn't modulate to different keys."

Leve coined the most apropos term for the band's music -- "Southern progressive rock," Cummings added. Throw in the appropriate amount of swagger, and fans get a band that personifies rock 'n' roll in terms of personality as much as it plays the genre.

Unfortunately, many of the band's younger-than-18 fans have to wait a while to see the group play. All-ages venues have dwindled around East Tennessee, and tonight's show is one of the few where younger fans can see Liars and Tigers play. There's an upcoming Feb. 1 show at The Longbranch Saloon on "The Strip" in Knoxville, but that's a 21-and-older venue, Cummings said.

"A lot of rec centers and places around Knoxville and Maryville won't let people play, because out of 200 or 300 kids who showed up, there were always a couple of people who would come in and just break stuff," he said. "The people left cleaning up have to explain why the furniture and windows are broken, so after a while, those venues dwindled to nothing. We're definitely trying to play as many all-ages shows as we can, and we'd love to play more, but people are going to have to start respecting venues."

In the meantime, the guys are putting together artwork for a recently recorded EP -- "The Carnivore Sessions," cut at Sound Lair Studios in Knoxville -- and hope to hit the road for an extended period of time before summer arrives.

Of course, they'll be taking the attitude with them.

"Playing in front of people can't be something you're nervous about -- it has to be something that just happens, and when we act a little bit cocky on stage, the crowd seems to enjoy it," Cummings said. "I remember one show, we messed up bad -- our drummer was maybe two bars ahead of us through the entire chorus, and we couldn't get back on time with each other. I went up and grabbed the microphone from our lead singer, stopped the song and started to say, 'I'm sorry, guys.'

"But Carrington grabbed it back and said, 'No! We're not sorry! They came here to see us, and we're playing because they want to see us.' He was basically saying, 'Screw you guys -- we'll play it how we want to,' and that really saved the show. People were laughing, and the rest of the show went great. I think people really get what we're trying to do."