O’KANES MAKE OWN KIND OF COUNTRY

One is a Nick Nolte type: tall, athletic and tan, wearing a sleeveless shirt and white basketball shoes. The other is red-haired and fair-skinned, wearing a lightweight blue cotton jacket and Birkenstock sandals--sort of an Irish-descended Don Johnson. Neither sings with even the slightest trace of a twang.

These guys are country music stars?

That’s right--or at least they’re well on their way.

Meet Jamie O’Hara and Kieran Kane--they have combined their talents and names as the O’Kanes--who open tonight for Emmylou Harris at the Universal Amphitheatre.

But it’s not just the low-key Hollywood appearance that makes the O’Kanes radical outsiders in Nashville. It’s their music and their approach to it.

These two just refuse to be a part of the Nashville machinery. Rather than pop dressed up in current fads and technology, the O’Kanes’ music is characterized by the pair’s harmonies (which have been compared to the likes of the Everly Brothers and the Louvin Brothers), Kane’s rollicking mandolin and Jay Spell’s jaunty accordion, all tied to a crisp, no-frills, driving beat.

“I think the mistake in what Nashville has done traditionally to break records over on the pop charts has been to somehow try to copy what’s going on in the pop charts,” O’Hara (the muscular one) said recently, sitting on the floor of his room in a West Hollywood hotel. “I don’t think that either of us feel like that’s an appropriate way to do it.”

Even more radical is the fact that they produced and wrote their recent debut album, “The O’Kanes,” and used their own band--which includes Kane’s brother Richard on fiddle, banjo and guitar--instead of the studio musicians who are responsible for the bulk of the sounds that emanate from Music City.

“I think that in our case there is a distinct sound, and it’s because we record with our own band and because we produce ourselves and write ourselves, and I think that was more clearly the case in the earlier days of country music,” said Kane.

“Johnny Cash had a sound because it was him,” he continued. “They were making Johnny Cash records, not a producer’s record. He was making Johnny Cash music and Merle Haggard was and still does make Merle Haggard records and it’s pretty clearly defined.”

Apparently there are a lot of people in the country music world who agree with the O’Kanes: In May, “Can’t Stop My Heart From Loving You” went to No. 1 on Billboard’s country singles chart, and a new single, “Daddies Need to Grow Up Too,” is at 39. The LP is currently No. 12 on the country album chart.

One irony of this is that both are veterans of the very Nashville machinery they knock. O’Hara, a 36-year-old former high school All-American football player, was drawn to Nashville from his Toledo home after a knee injury ended his athletic career. At age 21, he was given a guitar and began to write songs. Kane, 37, came to Nashville at the suggestion of songwriter Rafe Van Hoy in the late ‘70s after spending most of his life playing rock, bluegrass and country in his native New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

As staff writers at the noted Nashville publishing house Tree International, each wrote numerous successful country songs--including O’Hara’s “Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days)” and Kane’s “Gonna Have a Party”-- hits for the Judds and Alabama, respectively. But it was the stimulating environment of Tree, as well as emotional and financial support from the firm, that allowed the two to work together in developing the sound heard on the record.

“Kieran and I both spent a lot of time writing songs, trying to get them cut in Nashville, trying to tailor songs to fit in, and had gone through all the cycles, every kind of phase there is to go through as part of the Nashville songwriting community,” said O’Hara.

Added Kane: “All the time that has been put in learning and working and writing different things seems like it really made sense. I feel more in control of my own destiny in terms of the music. It’s a tremendous feeling.”

But the best part of success for the O’Kanes has been discovering that it’s possible to be an outsider and still get respect from the inside.

“We keep hearing that ‘The O’Kanes’ is an album people are playing on their buses as they travel down the highway,” said Kane. “We did (the record) because we love it and everything about it. To find out afterward that it struck a note in some people has been tremendous. The commercial success is really great, but to know that your peers, people who make a living either writing about music or playing it like your album, that’s been really exciting.”