Honky Tonk From the Home of the Hippies

The California roots-country flavor of Red Meat’s music recalls the style of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, or even the sounds of the Maddox Brothers and Sister Rose.

But this brand of West Coast honky-tonk emanates not from those artists’ respective hometowns of Bakersfield or Modesto, but from an unlikely place: San Francisco.

It surprises some fans to learn that this group of transplanted Midwesterners, which plays Sunday at the Cinema Bar in Culver City, was formed seven years ago in a Mission District garage.

“People have said they thought it was strange that we didn’t move to Nashville or Texas, but we kind of like it here,” said singer Smelley Kelley, 43. “I’ve lived here for 20 years now, and it’s home. It’s an open place, one that’s accepting of weirdos. . . . And you’re definitely a weirdo if you’re a hillbilly living in San Francisco.

“But when you move to a larger city, you can lose some of your identity. Sometimes you even become something that isn’t quite as good as what you came from . . . and in my case, I had to get back in touch with who I was. Forming Red Meat was the perfect way for me to do that.”

Raw but promising, the group’s 1997 debut, “Meet Red Meat,” reached No. 18 on Gavin’s Americana chart and launched the sextet on its first national tour.

The album also caught the ear of roots music guru Dave Alvin, who agreed to produce Red Meat’s sophomore effort, “13,” in 1998. The group earned praise while opening for Owens, Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, the Derailers, Asleep at the Wheel and the Blasters, among other roots-music notables.

With Alvin returning to the production chair, Red Meat’s “Alameda County Line,” which came out this week on Ranchero Records, not only fine-tunes the band’s classic country sound, but also adds a new wrinkle or two.

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Singer-guitarist Scott Young has emerged as the main songwriter among four in the band, and often sprinkles color and humor in with unusual rhyming schemes, as in “Nashville Fantasy”: “I want to walk down the street where Hank Williams staggered / Maybe I’ll even get to meet Merle Haggard.”

“What struck me the most at first about the band was Scott Young,” Alvin said. “I thought, ‘Here’s a guy who’s a great songwriter, but he doesn’t even know it yet.’ I rarely made any suggestions, but when I felt a song could be better if we had a different verse, Scott--whether it was his song or another band member’s--would leave the studio and return five minutes later with an amazing new verse.”

With the exception of Steve Cornell--the band’s pedal steel guitarist from New York--each member’s roots touch small-town America. Kelley (born David Kelley) and Young come from Keokuk, Iowa, bassist Jill Olson is from nearby Ottumwa, electric guitarist Michael Montalto is from Ohio, and drummer Les James is an Oklahoma native.

They all grew up immersed in classic country music. Olson, Kelley and Young made separate treks to San Francisco in search of adventure, and in the early ‘90s, Young and Kelley were singing in an a cappella group while Olson and Montalto were members of a folk-pop band.

The two acts occasionally shared the same bill, and when each simultaneously split up--and with the four principals looking to return to their musical roots--the nucleus of Red Meat was born.

What are the group’s chances in a pop-dominated country-music climate?

“All I know is that the most familiar scene after a Red Meat show is hearing someone who’s been dragged to the show by a friend say, ‘I didn’t realize this is country music,’ ” Kelley said. “So I tell them, ‘The next time somebody plays something awful for you and calls it country, you have my permission to tell them, ‘No it ain’t.’ ”

Alvin is convinced that classic honky-tonk will always have an audience.

“Like the Chicago blues, it’s a style that will go in and out of vogue, but the Ray Price kind of shuffle, or the Buck Owens-Merle Haggard thing, will never go away,” he said. “Whenever you go into a country bar, on the jukebox between Shania and Faith, you’re gonna hear one of those songs--sooner or later.”

* Red Meat plays Sunday at the Cinema Bar, 3967 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City, 8 p.m. Free. (310) 390-1328.