Chattanooga Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with John “Barley Scotch” Wheeler, vocalist/guitarist/fiddler for the ”rockgrass” group Hayseed Dixie, about how the band got started, why they love Europe and why they held on to a framed copy of an article panning one of their albums.

CP: What in the world possessed you guys to create a tribute to AC/DC?

JW: It wasn’t supposed to be a tribute to anything. That was the record company’s name for it. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid in the afternoons, evening and in pubs, and I used to sit around and make experimental records I thought would be fun. When we made the first AC/DC record about nine years ago, the whole thing was done in one day. We weren’t thinking of making a band, we just thought it would be a fun thing to give to people to pass around and play at their parties. It was an experiment like “What would these songs sound like if they were played by a bunch of guys from East Tennessee?” There was no plan, no agenda, we were just drinking beer and amusing ourselves.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about this band is that things don’t tend to go the way you plan them. Nothing significant in your life is the result of exercising some brilliant plan, it’s more often the result of just following your nose and getting out of your own way. We passed around 20 copies around to friends, and before we knew it, all these radio people were playing it on these morning shows. I have no idea how they got it because I didn’t give it to anybody. We thought we’d try and get a record deal for it so people could buy it if they wanted. We got a deal for just North America with this label in Nashville, and the thing sold about 150,000 copies in just a couple of months. I started getting up in the morning to do these interviews on these morning radio shows, and I crafted this character of Barley Scotch to have something to do interviews from. He’s based on my grandfather, who was a moonshiner from Tennessee. He was a hogfarmer on paper, but that’s what he did.

Even then, I thought it would just be a cult item, but it grew its own legs. We thought we’d try and play a few gigs, and that was nine and a half years ago. We just got finished doing a 70 city tour of Europe. We did 71 cities in 74 days. I did the whole thing on a motorcycle. Some people say I’m crazy, and when I was coming through the snow between Norway and Sweden a couple of weeks ago, I thought I might be crazy, too. What can you do (laughs)?

CP: What kind of response have you gotten from Europeans? It seems like you spend a lot of time there.

JW: We’ve been much more successful in Europe than we ever were the states. The first record did really well in the states, and after that, we were never really taken seriously. Part of the thing is that radio in the United States is very formatted and corporate. If you’re not one of the 26 or whatever songs that week that are on their play list, you don’t get played. The United States is an all-or-nothing proposition when it comes to being a band.

Morning radio is the last bastion of radio freedom in a way because as long as the ratings are up and people are being entertained, the morning guys can play whatever they want without anybody play listing it for them. I’m not trying to bemoan the business or anything, I’m just trying to come up with a reason why we’ve done so much better in Europe in terms of a long-term career. In the states, it was sort of a flash, and then we went away.

CP: So do you live in Europe now?

JW: I’ve still got a house in Nashville, but I’ve also got a place in London. Everybody else goes back to the states at the end of the tour. I spend a lot more time here than the other guys because I’ve made so many friends. When you’re out on tour, it’s a different city every day, and you don’t get to see much, so I figure that between tours, I try to go back and take some of those people up on their offer to stay with them at their house. You’ve got to watch that offer me a couch in your living room for me to sleep on because I’m the guy who, it might be six months later, but I’ll take you up on the offer.

CP: When was your first show in Europe?

JW: Our first show in Europe was in April of 2004. We got hired to play at a bull ring in Spain. The guy bought us plane tickets, and that experience taught me to not let a promoter buy you plane tickets. Get the money and buy them yourself because this one went from Nashville to Chicago to New York to London to Paris to Madrid and one more stop. It was like 23 hours of flying for what could have been 10. We all determined right then that we wouldn’t let that happen. The first time we were out of the country was to tour in Australia in 2003. People over here make fun of us for only 80 percent of people owning a passport, but I can understand why more people don’t travel outside of the country. I went through all of grad school without one. The U.S. is a great big country, and they don’t teach you foreign languages growing up, at least they didn’t when I was growing up. I totally understand why more people don’t travel outside their own country.

CP: So why are you coming back?

JW: We decided we’d come back and play a handful of shows in May because we didn’t want to abandon our own country. But as far as getting a song on the radio again, name me one band with a banjo that’s been on the radio in any meaningful way in the last 35 years. I think it’s boring when people cuss the entertainment business, I just think it’s unfortunate that people’s access to things has been so bottlenecked. I don’t think genres are interesting. Musical styles in that sense are only interesting if you’re trying to sell advertising or catalogue something in the stores. I don’t think too many people who are music “fans” have just one genre in their record collection — at least nobody I’d want to drink a beer with. I can try to find something good in any song. I think “Hit Me Baby One More Time” has a fantastic bass line. It’s not really my thing, but it’s got a really cool bass line.

CP: What is the typical reaction you get to what you do?

JW: People have asked me a few times in the states why we want to make fun of AC/DC, but we’re not. I think AC/DC is great. The way I’ve always looked at it is that every orchestra in the world is a cover band. If somebody is making a jazz record, you’re not expected to make a whole record of songs you wrote. The world’s not really looking for that. They want three or four tunes that you wrote and another three or four that are your interpretation of the standards.

I think, when we first started out and were making our first few records, that was the model we worked with: making our interpretations of rock’n’roll standards like AC/DC, Aerosmith and Motorhead. We did them in a completely different way. Oddly enough, we actually got taken much more serious in Europe. The Guardian newspaper over here in the U.K. gave us a couple of five-star records. It’s odd. We got a good bit of good press in America, but it was either really good or really bad. That doesn’t bother me. The guy who reviewed “Kiss My Grass: A Hillbilly Tribute to Kiss” in 2003 for USA Today said it was the worst album of the year. I loved that, and I thought that was great. It was like “We really ticked this guy off. He really hated it.” I got it framed and put it on the wall. We hit a nerve — he really hated it, and that took some doing. Of everything that came out in 2003, he thought ours was the worst. We didn’t play it badly, we’re all pretty good musicians, so he just hated what we were doing. I would rather somebody absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. I think the worst thing you can get is for someone critiquing something you do to say, “Well, it was OK. Nice effort,” and then give it three stars out of five. That’s being damned with fake praise. Either say it’s great or that it sucks — nothing in the middle. That’s how it tended to go back in the day. Our music is pretty polarizing, and I think that’s a good thing because at least you’re making an impact.

CP: Growing up, did you play more bluegrass or rock?

JW: I loved a little bit of both, honestly. My dad was a cabinet maker, but he had a record player in his shop, and he used to play records by Flatt and Scruggs and Hank Williams. The first record I ever bought was one of Hank Williams called “Whisky Bent and Hell Bound.” I’m 38, so that would have been when I was seven. The next record album I bought was AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” I didn’t see too much difference between them. They seemed pretty similar to me. It was all rebel music from the working-class perspective. Both of them rocked pretty hard to me, as a kid. I think that’s true of most people in the Southeast. If you went to an AC/DC show in Nashville back then, half the people were probably wearing Hank Williams t-shirts, and vice versa. It was the same audience, the same people.

CP: Do you feel like, as a result, that people in the Southeast get what you guys do more than other areas of the country?

JW: I think the people in the Southeast always did get us better. We haven’t played aroundthe states extensively in a few years, but when we did, we always did the best in the Southeast up through the Midwest like Chicago. The reason we always did so well in Chicago was that there’s always been this hillbilly highway that took a lot of workers up there who just stayed. It was not so good in the Northeast. That’s all right. I tell people in Europe all the time that we’re not one big homogenous place, just like Europe isn’t. We have a national media that try and homogenize us, but we’re not. I always say our band is not here to represent our government. We’re here to represent the music, which we hope transcends borders.