Though hard work and demand has placed The Bottle Rockets - the self-proclaimed "best band on the planet" - in some fancier, seated venues as of late, this Festus, Missouri Americana powerhouse is a true-blue American bar band. But whatever the setting (or its degree of cleanliness) bassist Keith Voegele says the show remains the same.

"We love playing small theaters or music halls," says Voegele. "But we love the bars with their sweaty, rowdy crowds, too. We kind of do what we do at both places and it seems to come off great."

For close to 20 years now, this band - Brian Henneman (guitar and vocals), Mark Ortmann, (drums) John Horton (guitar), and Keith Voegele (bass) - has played dirty, full-bore, slash 'n' twang roots rock with lyrical honesty and depth, as well as a sense of recklessness. It's the very definition of alt-country. And though the band doesn't wave the flag quite as high as say, Lynyrd Skynyrd, you could very easily call The Bottle Rockets a Southern rock outfit as well. As far as Voegele is concerned, it's just a rock 'n' roll band.

"People ask me all the time," he says. "And then they'll say, ‘Well, what kind?' And I almost have to put, ‘With a shade of country going on in it' or something. You have to make 'em understand."

The band even went to No. 27 on the Billboard Rock charts with 1995's "Radar Gun," off of its "The Brooklyn Side" LP. But the band was also a product of its geography.

"The band's from Festus, Missouri," Voegele says. "And the only bands that would come to Festus back then were Hank, Jr. and Aaron Tippin and people like that who were country stars, but who still had an edge. And we grew up on Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers, and all that. And KC95 in St Louis, that's all they would play."

At this point Southern rock and alt-country are boutique genres to a greater or lesser extent, offering solace and sanctuary to music fans trying to get beyond the gloss and glitz that tramples other related genres. And as alt-country progenitors, The Bottle Rockets slid into cult status.

"We're fine with it," Voegele says. "It'd be nice to achieve some other level, but we're pretty happy where we're at. We've got real loyal fans. I don't think anything can happen but good stuff. It's not like we're going to regress at all as long as we're making records like we are."

That would be 10 records to be exact, with an acoustic one as well as a DVD in the hopper. Records full of guitar and attitude, embodied mainly in singer Brian Henneman's nasally bleat. Records that taper the contributions of the whole band into a singular attack.

"It's kind of a natural thing The Bottle Rockets do, because we all write," Voegele says. "It's kind of weird, because we all write in different styles too. But once The Bottle Rockets get a hold of it, it's a Bottle Rockets' song. It's something we can't help. It's just the way we play."

And it's the way the band members think. A band's social and political inclinations are frequently a reaction to what's going on; bad times make for good music, after all. But in America things seem to be looking up lately. What's a band to do?

"I dunno," Voegele says. "We'll see on the next record, because the hard times were on ‘Lean Forward.' And that's pretty much how we write; we write what's happening around each of us at the time. I think the next record will be more upbeat, not that ‘Lean Forward' didn't have some upbeat, positive stuff on it. Even the bad stuff we sing about, it's like ‘hard times, don't worry you'll get through it.' You know?"

The Bottle Rockets

Thursday, June 17

Abilene, 153 Liberty Pole Way

7:45 & 9:45 p.m. | $20 or Club Pass