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It was one of those tongue-in-cheek moments that, in hindsight, probably says more about the nature of Webb Wilder's dual personality than anything else.

It was during the "name that CD" ritual that all artists undertake as the process winds down and a street date begins to materialize. Wilder -- real name John McMurry -- turned to co-producer and guitarist Joe McMahan and suggested the record be called "My Name Is John."

"It was a joke, and I never had any serious intent of calling it that, but that goes to show there just are no rules, which is a wonderful thing," McMurry told The Daily Times this week. "Someone once said that an artist should never arrive, that he should always be going to someplace. So I guess I really did wrestle with what is the Webb Wilder thing.

There have been elements of him on all the records, but to have this record well-received and to call it 'More Like Me' is really a gratifying thing. What did you hear when you were young? Just be yourself. There's really no black-and-white answer to all of this."

And there likely won't be any time soon -- for all of the midlife mellowing-out that McMurry has gone through over the years, it's all too easy to put on the Fedora and slip back into character, whether he's on stage or not. Wilder has been such a fixture of McMurry's life that he's taken on a life of his own, and at almost 25 years old, he's too big to be put back into the box -- just one more reason he's referred to as the "Last of the Full-Grown Men."

McMurry conjured Wilder shortly before he cut his 1986 album, "It Came From Nashville," and from that record and a touring schedule that bordered on the insane, the Webb Wilder persona began to take shape. The character was as much a part of the show as the music -- part "Maltese Falcon," Bogart-esque detective, part rock 'n' roll bad boy, Wilder described himself on a friend's short film one time as "Fess Parker on Thorazine."

Island Records picked up his sophomore record "Doo Dad" and it's follow-up, "Hybrid Vigor," but Wilder went back to the minors for his next two albums, the cover record "Town and Country" and "Acres of Suede," an excellent record combining rockabilly, country and lounge music with straight-ahead rock that didn't find a lot of shelf life.

After "Acres of Suede" came out in 1996, it would be almost a decade before Wilder went back into the studio. "About Time" was released in March 2005, followed last year by the live record "Born to Be Wilder," and earlier this year, "More Like Me" landed, the latest in a string of releases for his new label, Blind Pig. It's a jewel of a record, ranking up there with "Doo Dad" in terms of talent and surpassing everything else in terms of diversity, from the gentle ballad of "She's Not Romantic" to the classic Webb groove on "Ju Ju Man" to the out-there, borderline-insanity of the Roky Erickson cover "Don't Slander Me." ("I pulled out ever club in the crazy bag for that one," he said with a chuckle.)

"This album was done in dribs and dabs, and even though there are definitely little specific sorts of things that I hear on anything I've ever done, when the smoke cleared I really felt like we had an album that was really like a lot of my favorite albums growing up in that there's a lot of variety," McMurry said. "It's a combination of high-fidelity sonics with some vulnerable combinations of tones and performances, and some real virtuosity on the parts of others.

"I'm happy with my guitar tones and vocals, and it feels sort of like my first solo album in some ways, but it's very much a band album, too. It's cool to grow and change and have it well-received."

Saturday night, with many East Tennesseans camped out in a Middle Tennessee field for Bonnaroo, McMurry will bring Wilder back to Knoxville -- to Barley's Taproom in the Old City, to be exact -- for a run-through of the new material and a workout of the old stuff as well. Audiences have been more than receptive, he said, and even though the crowd may seem slimmer because of Bonnaroo, that doesn't bother him.

Correction -- it doesn't bother Wilder. Because when McMurry slips into character, the larger-than-life guitar-slinger sprays a diatribe like a scatter-gun, riffing unprompted on Bonnaroo and Barley's and somehow connecting them both with a line that hums with rock 'n' roll electricity:

"You know your Bonnaroo is a fabulous coming-together of people who pay homage to that great magnet in the sky, and while I fully endorse any participation in what some would call a pagan ritual, if you wanna come hear some fellers who really embrace a variety, or cornucopia of the gods, if you will, come down to that four-walled honky-tonk known as Barley's on Saturday night in Knoxville, Tenn., arguably the death-place of Hank Williams Sr. ..."