Nashville, TN. (Chris Scruggs Official Website) - To join venom and finesse in unholy matrimony, to burn the Grand Ole Opry Retirement Village in order to save it, to kick ass in every key - this is the dream of every good Southern boy. But it took the grandson of the 20th-century's most explosive banjo artist to get the dream up and strutting. Every time Chris Scruggs has taken the stage, whether with BR549 or under his own name, he has unloosed the formal skills and precision of the country legends he reveres and the bravado of the hyper snot-nosed punk that, until about yesterday, he was. His hardwired genius encompasses guitar, bass fiddle, steel guitar, singing, and writing.
Chris was born in 1982, to the hit singer, producer, and all-around Nashville maverick Gail Davies. As a boy he sketched compulsively. By the time he was 11, an acoustic guitar had become the object of his obsessive artistic drive. He went on to bass guitar, and at 13 joined his first band, a punk outfit that appeared frequently at Lucy's Record Shop, Nashville's equivalent of CBGB's.
A family move to the U.K. the following year proved pivotal. An Eddie Cochran record Chris happened upon ignited his imagination and sparked connections. Now the Everlys' records his mother played when he was young, the community of his birth, the echoes of the hillbilly heroes down through other generations and idioms, all began to harmonize. "When I moved to England I had a kind of hometown inferiority complex," he remembers. "I was from there - but I was not a dumb hick. Then I realized that these English people like the Clash were listening to people from right down the street from me."
When Chris returned to the States in 1997 his pure-punk period was over. "I thought it would be cool to mix the Eddie Cochran into what I had been doing," he says. He formed a band called the Hoptown Tigers with a friend at school. After a year in the basement they went public at the Bluegrass Inn on Nashville's tourist-clotted Lower Broadway. The hip Lower Broadway scene, largely established single-handedly by BR549 in the early Nineties, is a proving ground for rising country talent, particularly traditional country with a rebel-rouser angle. By late 2000 Chris was ready to graduate to full-time roadwork, as bassist for country and rockabilly legend Rosie Flores. Before long roots-country fans far beyond Nashville were talking about the intense wunderkind in the thick-rimmed glasses and rockabilly attire.
It was also in 2000 that Chris began appearing regularly on WSM's Grand Ole Opry, at first as his mother's sideman. He has since appeared on the venerable broadcast about every other month. Having personal access to the true giants of country is a privilege that - regardless of his birthright - he doesn't take lightly. "I'm real lucky to be hanging out at the Opry, running into people like Little Jimmy Dickens or Carl Smith," Chris says. "And I was lucky enough to meet both Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl." This kind of immersion gives Chris one advantage over his competitors: if he stumbles on a lick he's trying to cop off a classic record, he can always ask the guy who played it.
In late 2001 personnel changes in Nashville's hottest roots-country band brought Chris a phone call from BR549. He was enlisted first as bassist, and then took over co-frontman and guitar duties from the departing Gary Bennett. Playing 200 dates a year with BR gave Chris a strong taste of worldwide press and popular attention, recording experience (his playing and his writing helped make the band's Tangled in the Pines CD their finest) and, not least of all, skull-battering roadwork. When he amicably left the band, in January 2005, he was ready to devote all of his toughened chops and brain cells to the sounds in his own head.
His first solo record had in fact come out three years before. A self-released limited-pressing called Honky Tonkin' Lifestyle, it offered a ferocious, savvy take on rockabilly and honky-tonk that made most other traditionalists sound instantly tepid. No Depression pronounced it the hottest roots-country record since Wayne Hancock's debut. But it's more about what the 22-year-old has yet to reveal with the fullness of time. Asked to describe his latest recordings, Chris says they're hard to describe. "It has a Western swing flavor, but it's not so tied to nostalgia - it's poppy, kind of a mix of Milton Brown and Revolver." It's this openness to adventure and insistence on musical values over all others that, along with the chops and attitude, make Chris Scruggs a truly rare and delightful animal. And, with his drive and DNA, could it have turned out otherwise? "If I weren't a musician," he reflects, "I'd probably be a drummer."
