John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives with Cassavettes

John Paul Keith’s music projects always start out well. He’s just not had much luck with making them last. When he was just 19, Keith was one of the original members of Knoxville’s Viceroys; he left that band before they changed their name to The V-Roys and put out two nationally acclaimed albums. In the late ’90s Keith moved to Nashville and put together the Nevers, a British Invasion-inspired power pop group with former Knoxvillians Rick Tiller, Dave Jenkins, and Paul Noe. The Nevers were signed to Sire Records before they recorded a note, but a dispute with the label kept them from ever releasing an album. Then Keith moved to Birmingham and fronted the rootsier Stateside. His luck hadn’t changed.

So he moved up to Memphis, with no intention of playing music. He worked temp jobs for a while, but within a few months he was filling in as a sideman for Beale Street bar bands. “I was having fun, and got into guitar again,” he says. “There are so many good guitar players here that it inspired me to start playing again.”

Then he met bassist Mark Stuart and drummer John Argroves, the rhythm section for The Pawtuckets, at a music store. They only had one rehearsal together before their first gig, a two-hour set of old country, R&B, blues, and rock ’n’ roll at a Memphis bar in 2006. Stuart and Argroves brought guitarist Kevin Cubbins and pedal steel player John Whittemore to join them on stage that night, and the lineup for what’s become John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives (the name comes from the classic I-IV-V blues chord progression) was set.

Spills and Thrills is Keith’s most sustained work, and the one that sounds closest to a complete realization of his broad, democratic vision of roots music. The songs range from hard Bakersfield country (“Smoke in a Bottle,” “Otherwise”) to rollicking R&B (“Pure Cane Sugar”), classic rock ’n’ roll (“She’ll Dance to Anything”), and dirty rockabilly (“Let’s Get Gone”). The instrumental “Cookie Bones” is a long, organ-drenched jam in the Memphis style of Booker T and the MGs. The addition of pedal steel, piano, and organ give Spills and Thrills the fullest sound of any of Keith’s recordings, and his voice is just as smooth at 33 as it was at 19, and a little more polished. It sounds like the record he’s been trying to make for more than 10 years. (Matthew Everett)