Southern Culture on the Skids (SCOTS) has been paying homage to trailer park chic for almost 25 years. With songs that celebrate corn liquor, fried chicken and banana pudding, hillbilly porn, and shotgun weddings, the band has created a retro sound that blends surf rock, vintage soul, and rhythm and blues. One of North Carolina's favorite underground live acts, their shows combine blistering guitar riffs with the seedy side of the Big Dirty. SCOTS-Rick Miller on guitar, Dave Hartman on drums, and Mary Huff on bass-recently released “Countrypolitan Favorites,” an eclectic array of cover tunes that pulls from bands like T-Rex, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Byrds, and The Who. BRO recently caught up with Miller at his home outside Chapel Hill, N.C.

BRO: What does it mean to be “countrypolitan”?

RM: Well, it’s a made up word, but I first heard it from my dad in the 70s when Nashville country began to penetrate the pop charts. Nashville music has been getting the pop treatment for a long time; producers began to tailor country music for pop music fans. It’s about music that came from one place that was meant for someplace else.

BRO: How can readers go about becoming more countrypolitan?

RM: I think a lot of people are countrypolitan whether they know it or not. It is all about cultural overload, mixing the high brow with the low. If you live in Detroit and watch NASCAR on Sunday afternoons, you are countrypolitan. If you go out and buy a trucker hat for your daughter because she saw Paris Hilton wearing one, you are countrypolitan. If you order merlot in a barbecue shack, you are countrypolitan.

BRO: Considering the retro feel of your songs, was an album of covers inevitable?

RM: Yeah, probably. I thought it would be really fun to do a covers record. We always do a couple of covers on our records that originated in the 50s, 60s, or 70s. We were doing a lot of these country songs while we were touring, but we were infecting them with a rock virus. We were really rocking them up a bit. All of the songs on the record are just songs we really like; that was the only criteria. Once we got started it was really, really fun to twist some of these songs around.

BRO: How did you go about putting the SCOTS spin on all of these different tunes?

RM: This was a lot more work than I thought it would be. We recorded the album over the course of a year, and the first version of each tune we would record would be really close to the original. Then there would be a conscious effort by the band to make it different from the original. We started thinking, “What is the most incompatible thing we could force on this song and still make it work?” We wondered what The Who might sound like if they were a bluegrass band from Fancy Gap, North Carolina. We had Mary sing lead on a CCR tune, and then we added bluegrass harmony vocals. I don’t think that has ever been done before. We didn’t want to sound like we were trying to sound like the guys that originally recorded the songs.

MS: What might we find on a SCOTS iPod?

RM: Funny that you should ask that, because I was just listening to my iPod on the way home from Knoxville. I was listening to some Pop Staples of the Staples Family Singers and then an excellent compilation called “Eccentric Soul.” I really like the old gospel soul. I then went into some Solomon Burke and (jazz guitarist) George Barnes. I skipped over some Led Zeppelin-though I was tempted-and listened to some Lovin’ Spoonful.

MS: How many eight-piece boxes have you guys gone through on stage?

RM: I don’t know how many poor chickens have given up their lives for the advancement of our careers. Thousands-and multiply that by eight. Just don’t tell PETA.

-Dave Stallard

Catch SCOTS at the Twilight Alive Concert Series in Kingsport, Tenn., on June 27 and at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, N.C., on June 30.