The Sovines still keep a ferocious pace three decades on

Bob Ray Starker described the prime years of the Sovines as “a pretty standard Columbus run.”

“Eight years, three or four albums, did some touring, never quit our day jobs,” said Starker, who joined his Sovines bandmate, Matt Benz, at a Clintonville coffee shop for an early July interview. “We had enough people spread around the country that it was worth going out [on tour], but it was never lucrative enough to quit our day jobs. And I feel like we’re in good company there, since I just described 90 percent of the musicians I know.”

Launched as something of a lark in 1995, the Sovines started off playing revved up covers of old truck driving songs, adopting its name from Red Sovine, the musician behind genre standards such as “Teddy Bear” and “Giddyup Go.” Starker and Benz both said the chemistry was immediate, and it wasn’t long before the crew expanded into originals, with Benz specializing in solitary trucker anthems and Starker leaning into rough and tumble numbers centered on the types of people who might have existed at the fringes of the Columbus rock scene then inhabited by the members of the band, who claimed the late, loved Stache’s as a formative haunt.

“I don’t want to say we got more serious, but we were also like, ‘Okay, this can’t just be Mojo Nixon joke songs,’ which I love. It had to be our own spin on country music,” said Starker, who will share the stage with his Sovines bandmates at Cafe Bourbon Street on Thursday, July 10, joined by Closet Mix and Bee Humana. (The concert is a benefit for WCRS-FM.) “And in that, I wasn’t writing that Marty Robbins ‘El Paso’-type stuff. It was more like some guy who lived in that same town and woke up one morning in the gutter.”

These included songs such as “Stuck on Planet Earth,” a tune Starker wrote early in his music career and attempted with two previous bands before finally unlocking its potential within the Sovines. “The first home recording, it sounded a lot like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ with just one guy, some mid-tempo acoustic guitar, and these laundry list lyrics,” said Starker, who uncovered different dimensions in the track once the band significantly increased the tempo, taking inspiration from the likes of Jason & the Scorchers. “And when we tried it at that speed, it was like, oh, shit. And I think that’s when it clicked in my head that I could write what were essentially Hank Williams songs, and then we could play them twice as fast and twice as loud, and they would be great punk-rock bar songs. … It was a lot like being strapped to the front of a train.”

Benz, in contrast, favored slower, more oddball tunes that pulled heavy inspiration from the trucker genre, which he said had its own unique language and cadence. “And I kind of figured out what the pattern was, where they’re telling this story, and there are these code words and this lingo used throughout,” he said. “And I think that’s why it worked so well with Bob, because he had these straightforward rock songs … that you could play out in a bar. And then I came along and added this extra thing.”

It helped, of course, that both created songs that centered on outsiders and solitary men. So, if Benz penned a song about a trucker desperate to get home to his woman following weeks spent riding the yellow line, Starker might come in with a track that imagined the scene when he finally turned up on the doorstep only to discover his home life completely upended. “Aw, hell no. All that shit you were doing when I was gone? No. Nuh-uh,” Starker said. “Now take my shirt off and get away from my woman.”

Coming into the band, Starker and Benz shared a number of influences, citing joint interest in everything from X and the Replacements to the J. Geils Band – an expansive musical palette from which to draw that also required them to establish some guardrails. “There’s no choogling,” Benz said. “We didn’t really ever play the blues. And we never covered ‘Six Days on the Road.’ We covered a lot of different trucker songs, but not that one … because that was the one that people knew.”

“And we only really ever did one Red Sovine song,” Starker said of the gloriously titled “The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel.” “We probably should have been called the Dudleys, because we did way more Dave Dudley songs. But who the hell wants to go see the Dudleys?”