A hip, lowdown hoedown

It’s a drizzly Thursday night in Glendale, and the bar at the Scene is crawling with the patrons you’d expect at a club that describes itself as “a lowdown, dirty rock bar.” The pool table is busy, the video trivia game is in use and there are more tattoos than there are people. Manager Carl Lofgren tends to the small bar along with another worker, while a member of the mostly twentysomething crowd orders up another round.

Onstage is a group of musicians also in their 20s, playing fast, stomp-happy music. But they’re not playing punk, or metal, or emo, or any variation of thrashy rock that would make sense for the locale. No, the instruments are unplugged, the song is by Woody Guthrie and the kids are playing instruments including banjo and mandolin as if their lives depended on it.

Over the course of the night, the music ranges from the lovelorn, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons twang of Fur Dixon and Steve Werner to the kick-up-the-heels stomp-grass of the Barren Foothill Breakdown. In between, there is old-time yee-haw, country-blues breakdowns and the almost-indie political indictments of Guy Fousche.

Welcome to the Old Time Ruckus Revue, the hoedown the Scene has hosted on the second Thursday of every month for more than a year. Originally an occasional attempt to find support acts for national bands such as the Hackensaw Boys and the Old Crowe Medicine Show, the Ruckus has become a vehicle for a diverse group of musicians to explore music far away from the alt-rock of Hollywood.

Call it what you will -- bluegrass, mountain music or Americana -- but on Ruckus nights, most of it is fast, all of it is empowered and, somehow, it seems new despite its deep roots.

Though it may seem odd that these punk rockers have embraced such an old style of music, the fact of the matter is that the two genres aren’t so far off. Originally, the bands that regularly play the Ruckus were playing folk festivals. But, Lofgren says, “They’d get in trouble with the festivals because they were playing too fast and too loud.”

Scott McDougall, the singer for Barren Foothill Breakdown and the organizer of each month’s Ruckus, backs him up. He’s a longtime punk rocker and also a mountain music man -- and he says they’re not so far apart.

“When you bring it down and look at it, they’re both based around three chords, and most of it’s pretty fast, and there’s a lot of hollering,” he says. Mention that bluegrass seems a bit more intricate and technical than punk rock, and McDougall responds: “Not everybody’s doing intricate solos. Most people are playing three chords all the time.”

It works wonders for the jams in the Ruckus, especially when members of the participating bands cram onto the stage for a 1-2-3-4 bash-and-burn. There are no set lists and no rules: Someone yells out a song, sometimes reminds everyone else of the chords, and they’re off and running, either coming together in something resembling structure or crashing into something resembling white noise. It’s usually more the former than the latter -- which has attracted fans on a monthly basis to see what will happen next.

One of those fans is Jeremy “Frog” Price, who’s come out to see his friends Ruckus almost every month since the night began. “It’s not the mainstream crap you hear on the radio every day,” he says. “It’s something different.”

First-timers also agree -- though they’re not always as involved as Price. This is Martina Troiano’s first Ruckus, and she’s impressed. “It’s not the kind of folk music my dad would listen to, like Joni Mitchell,” she says. “It’s a new thing.” Though she’s not going to go out of her way to find more music like the Ruckus Revue, she’s open to finding out more about traditional American music -- a heady admission for someone whose taste leans more toward Nelly than Nickel Creek.

Not that the participants in the Ruckus care. Each musician interviewed compares the show not to a showcase or a performance, but to an unplanned afternoon jam. “When you sit around a house and play, you don’t plan set lists,” McDougall says, “so why would you do it here?”

And so, as the night winds down and the bar clears out, that explains why there are still 10 or so musicians on stage, bashing out the kind of music their grandparents listened to, still energized, and, of course, still whoopin’ and hollerin’.

The cynical could claim they’re just waiting for the rain to die down. But the elated look on McDougall’s face indicates otherwise. Tonight, the Scene has no room for cynics. Punks and mountain men, however, are more than welcome.

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Jeff Miller can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Old Time Ruckus Revue

Where: The Scene, 806 E. Colorado Blvd., Glendale

When: Second Thursday of every month, 9:30 p.m. to closing

Price: $5

Info: (818) 241-7029