When Defiance, Discord and Honky-Tonk Collide : Pop Beat: A number of new bands are finding that backwoods country and punk-rock are oddly compatible. The result: bluegrass ‘on steroids.’

“Wahoo!” hollers a blue-haired man in the audience at Emo’s nightclub, as the Bad Livers pluck banjo and upright bass at such furious speed that you could barely wedge a piece of straw between the rollicking notes. In fact, most of the young crowd are howling in approval after starting out merely amused.

There’s nothing ironic or novel about the Bad Livers. The Austin trio is just a modern-day hillbilly band whose members once stomped their feet to Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys.

Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe probably never dreamed there would ever be anything like the Dead Kennedys, let alone that the music he invented would someday be meshed with punk’s discordance. And the Dead Kennedys probably never considered bastardizing a Bill Monroe tune. But some 70 years after the introduction of bluegrass and more than 15 after the birth of punk, the spirit of backwoods country and punk have collided.

And such bands as the Bad Livers, Killbilly, Mule, Doo-Rag and Southern Culture on the Skids prove that the two are quite compatible, and maybe even strangely related.

Speed, spontaneity, recklessness and a do-it-yourself approach, as well as a defiant and sometimes dark attitude, are common elements in both styles. Both are also raw forms of bigger commercial presentations--popular Nashville country and palatable mainstream rock.

“The reason I was brought into punk in the first place was for its honesty and sincerity and sense of urgency,” says Mark Rubin, 27, the Bad Livers’ bassist and tuba player.

“But there just came a point when punk-rock stuff started turning to (expletive). . . . Rather than become overly cynical, it dawned on me that there was some great traditional bluegrass, country blues, hillbilly and honky-tonk out there. What I heard in that was the very same things that drew me to punk-rock in the first place.”

Killbilly drummer Mike Schwedler describes what makes bluegrass fit so well with punk.

“It’s that manic energy,” he says from the band’s home base in Dallas. “That freight-train speed and intensity. Then we take that and even speed it up more, like it’s on steroids.”

It’s not new for punk bands to draw on country music--X, for one, cited George Jones as a big influence. But ‘80s “cowpunk” bands such as Los Angeles’ Blood on the Saddle drew more from folk and Nashville-style country than the pre-electric, back-porch twang of America’s outback. Current hillbilly bands weaned on punk zero in on the less-polished sounds of bluegrass, blues and old-time gospel.

Mule’s hillbilly-meets-grunge is far from the Bad Livers’ pure, well-tuned sound. The Detroit trio’s distorted music flails around in delirious melees while P.W. Long wheezes and huffs the lyrics as if he’s gone cabin crazy. The band, whose members were in the punk bands the Laughing Hyenas and Wig, play scary, dirge-like music that would have been perfect for the more warped scenes in “Deliverance.”

Long, who talks with the same husky tones of his singing voice, reckons his demented approach is partly the influence of country heretic Johnny Cash. “If you listen to the strain in his lyrics and vocals, there is psychosis in there somewhere. The lyrics are delivered real flat and psychotically aggressive. I’m sure I got a lot of my twistedness from him.”

And the influences go even further back. Says Rubin (who was in Killbilly before the Bad Livers formed four years ago), “One of the most twisted things I’ve ever heard is the banjo-playing of Dock Boggs, or the guitar-playing of Blind Willie Johnson. To me, those guys are more downright spooky and scary than Bauhaus ever was.”

The attraction to the old styles is also rooted in a back-to-basics feel and, ironically, a sense of discovering something new that has the edgy elements required by the post-punk generation.

“I keep finding seminal recordings that profoundly affect me,” says Rubin. “I find that more and more when I dig into the recorded past than I do when I turn on the radio.”

Adds Long: “There’s a lot of cool stories in those old songs. Some of them started out as field hollers; then a blues guy put a tune to it; then some country dude would record it. It’s kept the same story going for 100 years.

“On our first single, we took some words that had been passed down, and put our music to it. That used to be the way to preserve songs. I guess that’s kinda what we’re doing--keeping it alive.”