Southern Culture on the Skids returns to Greenville: Upstate Beat

Most of the songs by Southern Culture on the Skids, one of the finest rock bands ever to come out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, start out with the almighty riff. You’ll hear a lot of those chopped-and-channeled, surf rock-meets-rockabilly punk riffs at the band’s show at the Radio Room Dec. 6.

That’s because singer-songwriter Rick Miller, who has led Southern Culture (or SCOTS, as it is affectionately known) since the band formed in 1983, is one hell of a guitar player. He can go from Dick Dale surf-guitar licks, to punk attitude, to sleazy roadhouse blues in a hot second. His red-hot Danelectro guitar has spun out indelible riffs for songs like “Mojo Box,” “King of the Mountain,” and the immortal “Camel Walk,” perhaps the band’s best-known song.

Miller’s secret to being a top-notch guitar slinger? The AM radio of his youth in Henderson, North Carolina.

“AM radio stations were playing all kinds of music,” Miller says. “They’d play soul music, they’d play rock ’n’ roll. That’s where I heard ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & The MGs, and that’s really what got me. It was their guitarist, Steve Cropper; I just loved that sound.”

Typically, the songs that Miller’s riffs adorn are hilarious sendups of redneck culture — most notably the tune “Dirt Track Date” about an evening at the demolition derby — delivered with the piston-pumping rhythms of drummer Dave Hartman and bassist Mary Huff. Huff also occasionally takes a lead vocal on gorgeous dive-bar ballads like “Just How Lonely” or sassy kiss-offs like “Hittin’ on Nothing.”

Southern Culture on the Skids — Photo provided by Night Train PR

The formula has paid dividends for SCOTS for more than 40 years. Miller says he can’t imagine making this tight-but-loose, smart-but-dumb, Southern-fried rock without Huff and Hartman, who have been with the band since 1987.

“We love making music,” Miller says. “That’s the No. 1 thing. And we all get along. But we also make our own decisions. We have our own record label. We have our own studio. We treat it like a small business.”

SCOTS hasn’t been to Greenville in a while. The band used to frequent Gottrocks and The Handlebar, but those venues are no more. But Miller says the band is thrilled to finally be coming back to a town that has loved it for decades.

“We’ve been playing the Greenville-Spartanburg area since the late ’80s,” he says. “And we’ve always had a great fanbase in the Upstate. And it’s going to be exciting playing a place we’ve never played before.”