Aaron Loesch Vies to Become the Guitar Center King of the Blues

"I first met him when we were in Bloodfart together," says Brad Moore, co-owner of the new Pearl Bar and a former musician and Rudyard's bartender. "Back then he had a Styx mullet and he was a metal dude. But he was so confident. We would cover Pat Benatar songs and he would pull out a banjo and just bust on it."

Moore also well remembers Jug O' Lightnin's long Sunday-night run at Rudz around the turn of the century. According to the GraceNotes database, Jug's genre is "unclassifiable," and for once that's accurate. Their music blended old-time/bluegrass, country, blues, classic rock, Danny Elfman-style modern classical and metal, while never sounding anything less than unique. Loesch once called it "AM radio with some Björk mixed in." So Moore has an easier time describing what they weren't. "They were refreshing, because they weren't four guys in Sub Pop T-shirts jumping around onstage trying to sound like whoever it was that copied Mudhoney and got famous," he says. "They were not post-Nirvana, and they were not post-Rage Against the Machine."

For Loesch, there's more than just a flashy prize package and a much-needed career boost on the line. There's also validation for the entire scene that produced him, the 1990s roots-rock milieu that whirled around Carolyn Wonderland, Horseshoe, Jesse Dayton and a host of other bands. Wonderland and Dayton have since gone to Austin, while those who stayed behind — people like Skinny G, Chris King, Eric Dane, and Teri Greene — have either left the scene completely or now toil on the fringes in front of sparse crowds, far from the Montrose haunts they once ruled.

"Skinny G drives a truck now," Loesch says. "Eric Dane's an electrician in Austin, Texas. Chris King is a father and works at a plant of some kind and he likes his job. But there really was something about Houston 12 or 15 years ago where it was really our scene, and now so many people have moved into Houston and bought all those condos in Montrose and Midtown and started complaining when the bands are too loud at the Alabama Ice House...It's just not the same Houston it was. Eric played a gig with me a couple of weeks ago, and he's still a fiery guitar player. Every once in a while, you see Teri Greene or Screamin' Kenny and they're still doing their thing. But still I sometimes wonder, where is everybody right now? Did we get lost in this big bowl of chili?"

Loesch remembers how these people helped him: "I've known them since I was a teenager," the 34-year-old remembers. "I was still into Randy Rhoads and shit when I met them." Now, he hopes he can win this contest and return the favor. "The winner of this contest is gonna go somewhere, and I'm gonna go as far as I can," he says. "So if Eric and Skinny G and others who are marginally interested in having a music life want to go, I want them to go with me. Because those are the guys that taught me, number one, and two, there's nothing I can't do musically with those guys."

Loesch always has a few irons in the fire, and now is no exception. He says he has a ton of unreleased studio material waiting to be fleshed out. He says this material was too commercial for Jug O' Lightnin', "more radio-friendly, marketable yet still rootsy country/blues songwriting."

"Southern songwriting," he calls it. "I'm never gonna be able to deny being a Southerner," he says. "It's funny, the other day I was trying to play classical, and somebody told me, ‘Hey, you're chicken-pickin' classical!' I can't help it — I swing. I swing everything, even my 64th note diminished runs with backing bass lines and stuff like that, all that Paganini stuff that I figured out how to do on guitar a few years ago, it doesn't matter. To this day, I still sound like a chicken-picker. So I realized I would just have to be a chicken-picker who knows a little bit of classical. But the new country stuff explores a little bit of that, a lot of arpeggios mixing classical with blues and all of that."

And even if he does accede to the King of the Blues's throne, don't expect that crown to rest easy on his head. "I'm not a blues player," he says. "I've never had to wake up at 5 a.m. and work hard all day. I'm not one of those people that was born 100 years ago and didn't have privileges. But I did learn the music. People have been asking me a lot lately about what the blues are, and I tell them, ‘The blues is something I don't want.'"