I've started occasionally stopping by Smith's Olde Bar on my way home from work on Sunday nights. It's three bands for $5 night, and you get to see new bands who hope to move up the ladder at Smith's and maybe one day play on a real night to a real crowd. This is a great setup for me because I love to watch and analyze bands on stage, and I also like to get a lot for my $5. I've been twice, and both visits provided much material for my stagecraft theories.

A couple of weeks ago the standout of the three bands was a very Drive-by Truckers-ish band from Little Five Points. These guys' songs were well-written and the audience seemed to like them (although I think most of them were personal friends and relatives of the band), but there were a lot of things that needed nailing down. With this band, I developed the theory that three out of four members shouldn't look like they follow diets high in corn syrup and enriched flour. I think I heard the boards creak as they waddled up. More importantly, I learned that if you're going to sing Bruce Springsteen-ish songs about blue collar people on hard times, playing them on a $2,300 Gibson acoustic that's so shiny it looks like you just picked it up at Guitar Center on your way to the show really undermines your message. Their drummer also looked like he combed his hair too much and tucked his shirt in, and that just didn't work with their hardscrabble shtick.

Something that bugged me about all three bands the first night I went was that none of them had a distinctive visual image. They could've all switched places and you wouldn't have known because everybody looked like they had just walked in from the food court at the mall. The first band last night got around that obstacle. The singer had a little Alice Cooper-ish cane that he held the whole time, and they all wore sort of dressy black clothes. They gave me a Tom Waits-ish vibe, which may be why they failed to turn me on, because I can't stand Tom Waits. Also, one of their guitar players plugged and unplugged things and tuned up at stage volume, which is ludicrous. Someone needed to tell him, "You got a live wire in yo' hand, cat!" But anyhow, at least in a photo I would know them from the 9 million other bands on the planet.

Now to the reason for the headline of this piece. After the second band last night sent me back to the worst aspects of 1998 -- a jam band doing 7th and 9th chords with lots of wah -- I went to check out the lame band downstairs, then back upstairs, desperately hoping something would appear to lift me from the musical morass I had sunk into.

Sitting center stage was a silver Casio keyboard. Uh-oh! Stage left was a Crate amplifier. Uh-oh! Stage right was a Line 6 Floorboard. Uh-oh! There was a Dean electric-acoustic. Uh-oh! The guys at the Les Paul Forum sure wouldn't have approved of this setup! The would've been complaining about the "cold, sterile" transistor sounds and the lack of $3,000 old wood guitars before the first note was struck.

Some guys who looked like they must've just graduated from high school started strapping on their guitars, looking a little nervous, and then...FANTASTIC! It was the elusive thing I can never put my finger on, but somehow even though they had the same sound man as the other two bands, their sound was sooo much cleaner and clearer. It was like the other bands had been in mono and somehow these kids were Quadraphonic. It also wasn't so easy to say, "This is Tom Waits," "this is Drive-by Truckers." I did detect a U2 influence and some Coldplay, but it wasn't so blatant. It was funny, after the first song or two the singer said they were from Alabama and this was his first time to Atlanta and he was really excited to be here, which was refreshing from the "Hellloooo, Atlanta!" stadium rock yell the previous Chattanooga band had tried.

The discipline they had was astounding for teenagers. There were two guitar players, and they played parts that complimented each other and never stepped on each other. Their style also required them to change combinations of effects a lot, and they had everything dialed in to perfection. The songs had multiple parts, like Yes, yet flowed logically, and I don't know how they had time to do their homework and mow their lawns and come up with these songs, too. The singer looked like he spent 50% of his time with the band and the other 50% at the gym; he was blond haired and blue-eyed and cut up like Roger Daltrey in 1968, which is important. It's just a fact that if you can get a big stud as singer you're going to go a lot further. Roger Daltrey, David Lee Roth, Bono, none of these guys are ugly.

I told the sound guy and the door guy that if they had any hand in the booking they needed to have those guys back. I told the singer I had been coming down there 15 years and they were definitely one of the better bands I had seen, and he gave me their home-burned EP. The EP is all right but they sound light years better in person.

All of that from Casio, Crate, Dean and Line 6 stuff. Wow.