HOWLERS GOT THEIR HOODOO WORKIN’

When a rock musician uses the word spiritual these days, it’s generally either in the context of Christian quests or new-age mysticism.

When singer/guitarist Omar Dykes uses the term, he’s talking pure hoodoo.

“Where I grew up was swampy,” said Dykes, who will lead his band Omar & the Howlers at the Palomino on Sunday. He was born in McComb, Miss., near the Louisiana border. “A lot of hoodoo down there. Everybody carries good luck charms--rabbits’ feet, black cat bones. A lot of my music comes from that.”

Anyone who’s heard Dykes sing wouldn’t doubt his claim to swamp magic. His voice is a pure bayou bay: Howlin’ Wolf crossed with John Fogerty. And the Howlers’ music comes from the same Gulf States stock as that of Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who like Dykes and crew are based in Austin.

Songs like “Dancing in the Canebrake” (which Dykes says invokes the ghosts of his Choctaw ancestors) and the self-explanatory “Mississippi Hoo Doo Man,” carry a menacing undercurrent that matches Dykes’ bearlike figure.

But over coffee in the restaurant of his Hollywood hotel recently, the 35-year-old Dykes was anything but menacing. Dressed in black save for a shell-and-turquoise bolo tie, the bearded, baby-faced singer displayed the gentility of his Southern breeding.

Still, the stories he told make it clear that the specters in his music were put there by a lifetime of worship in the church of the blues.

“I was in a band ever since I got a guitar,” he said. “The first band I played with, the other guys were quite a lot older than me--I was 13 and the next youngest was 50. We had a drummer named Sleepy who was 80. He’d fall asleep but keep playing. I was like a novelty to them, but they let me play. I wanted to play real bad.

“We played at a place called the Courts of Lulu, which was a combination motel, barbecue, beer joint and washeteria,” he continued. “It was a ‘no-tell motel,’ but I was so young I didn’t get the significance of it. All I knew was I wanted to play the blues.”

To play with this group, Dykes recalled, he had to sneak out of his parents’ house at night. “They wondered why they couldn’t wake me up for school in the morning,” he said, laughing. “I’d been out all night drinking white lightning.”

From there, Dykes went on to play in various bands and eventually hit the road for one-night stands at an endless string of joints with names like Skinny’s Barbecue and the Briar Patch.

“I played the redneck honky-tonks,” he said. “You had to have a gun to get in and a knife to get out. When I moved to Austin in the mid-’70s I was surprised at how calm everything was in clubs in Texas.”

But when the road life style--especially the drinking, which Dykes calls “an occupational hazard”--started to interfere with the music in the early ‘80s, he summoned the swamp magic and cleaned up his act. “It was a pretty spiritual thing,” he said. “It was an awakening. I think I was being pegged as a traditional bluesman: get drunk and play blues all night. But you’ve got to grow up.”

With the Howlers (bassist Bruce Jones and drummer Gene Brandon were joined by keyboardist Eric Scortia a few months ago), Dykes set down to business, releasing two small-label albums in the early ‘80s and working his blues roots into a more contemporary rock ‘n’ roll context. A year ago the band caught the attention of Columbia Records executive Joe McEwen and recorded its first major-label album, “Hard Times in the Land of Plenty.”

Having made the journey from McComb to MTV, Dykes now finds himself answering charges that he’s sold out his musical heritage.

“You got to be smart,” he responds. “It’s 1987. You can’t sound like a band from the ‘50s. But it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you stay with the blues, they say you’re just a blues band. If you change it, they say you’ve abandoned your roots.”

Still, Dykes feels the hoodoo stays strong with him. In fact, he doesn’t even carry good luck charms anymore.

“I gave them to people in need of good luck,” he said. “My luck seems to be working for me. And if I run out of luck, I’ll just go down to the Tex-Mex Newsstand in Corpus Christi and buy another rabbit’s foot.”