That was always true, but the Old 97's attracted the No Depression cabal because they flirted with standards dear to hardcore country fans like Merle Haggard's songwriting, the Louvin Brothers' harmonies and Bob Wills' Western swing propulsion. Still do. As Dallas writer Robert Wilonsky once said, the band put the "honky" in honky-tonk.

But there was always a little R.E.M, some X, a lotta Clash and all sorts of old rock 'n' roll in the Old 97's mix. "Fight Songs," the band's fourth album, is the first Old 97's record to take another significant step toward the rock. The dusty "Crash on the Barrelhead" and "Let the Idiot Speak" wouldn't sound out of place on Johnny Cash's "Live at Folsom Prison" (which is to say, they wouldn't sound out of place on the first three Old 97's records). From the giddy hand claps in "Oppenheimer" to the sweet lament of "Valentine" to the straight-ahead pop of "Murder (or a Heart Attack)," for the most part "Fight Songs" crackles without affect or twang.

Sometime in the last year, Miller -- who is a seventh-generation Texan -- moved to Los Angeles to be near his girlfriend. He also lost his thick, black eyeglasses, which zealous No Depression devotees cite as some sort of major label conspiracy. The rest of the band -- guitarist Ken Bethea, drummer Philip Peeples and bass player and singer Murry Hammond (who still wears a pair of circular Coke-bottle lenses) -- stayed in Dallas. This interview took place in the New York offices of the Old 97's' record label the morning after the band's first national television appearance on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien."

Murry's keeping the faith, but Rhett, what happened to your ...

Miller: My glasses, I know. I still have them, but they're really tiny and they fit on my eyeballs.

You're not going L.A.?

Miller: Well, I am sitting back in my chair, and I probably have a cell phone somewhere on my person. No, it was purely logistical.

What does that mean?

Miller: Onstage [with my glasses] I couldn't see the audience or the set list or the guitar neck after about the second song. They'd fog up and crust over with salt. Or they invariably fell off my head and I'd kick them into the drum set.

It seems like something calculated, sort of a marketing maneuver, but it was more logistical than anything.

You guys got lumped in with all of these alt.country bands, or insurgent country, or y'alternative bands and all that. Have those terms outlived their usefulness? At one point you were happy with them ...

Hammond: We're still happy with it.

Miller: It's funny how, again with the glasses, something that's just kind of organic-slash-unbeknownst to you can seem like a maneuver. We got lumped in with those bands, with that genre. It just kind of happened. We thought that we were just this folk band; we didn't know there was such a thing as alternative country.

You were sort of a folk band.

Miller: Yeah. And at the same time there was no such thing as alternative country. Uncle Tupelo had put out records -- of which we were mostly unaware until "Anodyne" [1993].

Hammond: When we first came out, they were just first defining the movement. I think there tends to be a perception that if your music changes you don't associate with the movement or that you're rejecting it. That's not really the case with us. And plus, it's selling the movement short by saying that it's just one thing. What people don't realize is that this alt.country movement is creating a true music community, the likes of which we haven't seen in years. I mean, these artists -- the Jeff Tweedys [of Wilco] -- are going to be playing music and putting records out with pretty much the same identity for themselves. You got a bunch of Joe Elys and Jimmie Dale Gilmores, but you got a young crop of them.

Is that who you look to, those old-school Texas songwriters?

Hammond: It's one of the things. It's not the main thing that I reference.

Miller: Yeah, but I think there's a big difference [between them and us]. I know Ken [Bethea, guitarist] is a big Joe Ely fan.

I'm not saying in terms of influence, I'm saying in terms of a supportive music community, a like-minded ...

Hammond: Yeah, that was our original goal: to be big in our state, then big in our region. We know that the bigger we are, probably the longer we can stay in the game without going crazy.

Miller: Last night we were watching TV and Eve 6 came on the David Letterman show, and I was thinking that among our peer group, our fans, this movement or whatever, there's an emphasis on career, on songs, on traditional American country songwriting and musicianship. I watch bands like Eve 6 or Elektra's Marvelous 3, and they're out there in this much more cynical world. They're trying to be alt.rock.pop for the tattoo-on-the-neck set.

Hammond: In other words, temporary.

Next page | Miller to Hammond: "Too bad you suck"