To get anywhere in the Southern California music scene, it helps to be a fast-talking self promoter. Not that there's anything wrong with that. With all those other musicians out there competing for attention, it has to be hard to get noticed.
   So when a native of Newport makes his way to the place where a young man can no longer go any farther west, chances are he will quickly make some noise for himself or end up heading home on Interstate 40.
   Bryson Jones is aware that Newport has been home to some memorable musicians, such as Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess, both of whom still live there and make music, but Jones is content to work the Los Angeles scene. During a recent trip home to see his mother, who now lives in Little Rock, and to appear on TV morning show Good Morning Arkansas, Jones gave a quick overview of what he\'92s up to in sunny Southern California.
   His band, The Snake Handlers, will be on the 8 p.m. Monday show of Monster Garage on the Discovery Channel. The show depicts the transformation of cars into exotic, customized creations.
   "We'll be doing our version of the song, "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad," since they're taking a Dodge Hemi station wagon and turning it into a locomotive," Jones laughs. "We put our own twist on the song, we like to think."
   Jones is part of a developing scene in Southern California that was first noticed in Billboard's front-page story on Nov. 2, 2002, headlined "Country Rockers Kickin' Up New Scene in L.A. Clubs," noting singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Tony Gilkyson (former X and Lone Justice guitarist) and North Little Rock-born actress Joey Lauren Adams.
   Adams and her friend, Victoria Vaughn, sister of actor Vince Vaughn, were promoting "Eastbound and Down," a monthly Sunday night show at a Hollywood club, the King King. The house band there has included Waylon Payne, the son of singer Sammi Smith and Willie Nelson's guitarist, Jody Payne.
   A couple of the then up-and-coming acts, Eastmountainsouth and Grey De Lisle have since released major label debuts on DreamWorks and Sug- ar Hill Records, respectively.
   Jessi Colter and late husband Waylon Jennings' son, Shooter Jennings, have also been around at monthly jam fests, dubbed Sweethearts of the Rodeo, at a club - ironically, an Irish pub - named Molly Malone's. Jones has been on hand as the front man of the Sweethearts' house band, which has also featured Mitch Marine, former drummer in Brave Combo.
   "We started doing it about three and a half years ago," Jones recalls. "I was sort of sick of the business. Some people had taken all of the fun out of it, and this night was a way to hang out and play old country songs. It probably came out of my own fear of success: What's more likely to fail than a classic country night in an Irish pub in L.A.? I had a kind of character at the time where I would get on stage, kind of an insult comedian like Don Rickles, and I would cuss the crowd and be nutty, and the crowd would just laugh.
   "There were no rehearsals allowed, and no set lists allowed, but we had great players, some of the guys from Dwight's [Yoakam's] band and Lucinda's [Williams'] band, and Dusty Wakeman, who produced Greg Spradlin." (Spradlin, a Little Rock resident and an old friend of Jones', has his own band and goes by the name the Rev. Greg Spradlin.)
   "It was really low-key, and people started hearing about it and coming out. Slowly but surely, some real bands formed and developed, and a scene formed out of it."

GRAM'S SONS AND DAUGHTER
   
Jones leads his band, The Snake Handlers, which is working on finding fame on its own terms. On one of their "demo" CDs, the band performs a raucous version of Gram Parsons' song, "Sin City," from the days when Parsons was in The Flying Burrito Brothers.
   The late Parsons - whose life story is depicted in a forthcoming movie, Grand Theft Parsons - has been an inspiration to many of the new wave of country-oriented rock 'n rollers that Jones knows. Things got even more inspirational when Jones became acquainted with Polly Parsons, the daughter of, well, guess who?
   "I had met Polly in '89," Jones says. "But I didn't know her last name then. After a couple of years, she told me her last name, and I said "'Oh, you mean like Gram Parsons?' And she said 'You know my dad?' Like nobody knew her dad. It was the height of the hard rock thing, and I played her a David Allan Coe song that mentioned her dad, and she was blown away. We'd stayed friends over the years."
   It was the hard-rock scene that first lured Jones away from Arkansas - he had left Hendrix College after a year and a half - and to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Happiness eluded him, so he quit music for a time, working first as a bartender, then in video and computers. As he talked to Spradlin, back in Arkansas, the two musicians realized they were both listening, in their own separate worlds, to music that was "progressively" older and older music.
   "I had gotten a record deal with Warner Bros., and I came home and ran into Greg at the White Water [Tavern]," Jones says. "He was playing in a band there, and we both realized we like roots music, blues and country, but I don't think either of us knew what to do with it yet. He was a great part of me being kept rooted to the funky side of that. And we had grown up 30 miles apart and didn't know it."
   Growing up in a farm family, with a dad who was also a rodeo bull rider, Jones remembers listening to trucker radio and later had to correct musicians when they said they wanted to perform The Flying Burrito Brothers song, "Six Days on the Road."
   "'That was Dave Dudley,' I'd say," Jones laughs. "I had heard all the original versions of those songs, as a kid lying in the back of the family car on the way to rodeos."
   Spradlin briefly sampled the scene in Los Angeles, and it was during this time that Jones met Spradlin's producer, Dusty Wakeman. Wakeman had his own band, Sawtooth, that played in the desert at Joshua Tree National Park in California. He heard Jones singing with Spradlin and invited Jones to attend.
   "It was just for fun, and he made it so easy, with this beautiful studio to play in. And we only played at Joshua Tree, Calif. I started hanging out there, and it was almost like being back in Arkansas. People liked music and hung out in the bars and would come watch you play and were appreciative. In L.A., people were so jaded sometimes."
   Wakeman started a celebration called "Gramfest" in honor of the late Parsons, who died in a motel in Joshua Tree and has become an icon to musicians of a similar musical persuasion, including Keith Richards and Emmylou Harris, whose career was jump-started when she sang on Parsons' first two solo albums.
   Since Wakeman's group, Sawtooth, would headline Gramfest, Jones found himself having to learn Gram's music.
   "Out in the desert, playing his music, it started to make sense to me," Jones says. "Growing up a Southern kid, your parents like country music and gospel, and you get older and rebel and get into rock 'n roll, and I realized, Gram Parsons made all that make sense to me. And Greg and I talked about how we could never find our balance in the early days, playing rock 'n roll and being from where we were, and being authentic with that.
   "Gram said you can like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and combine these two worlds, and he might not have been the first, or the best at it, but spiritually was the leader of it, and he had such a great vision, and that's what he passed on. So that's what inspired all of us."
   

A LOUD COUNTRY BAND
   
After a couple of years of doing Gramfests, Polly Parsons showed up at one of the events, which further inspired Jones and his cohorts. The songwriting began again, as did The Snake Handlers, and things began to make sense for him.
   "The thing I'm proudest of is we've all hung together," he says. "There's very little ego. We've played as the Sin City All-Stars, that band from the Sweethearts scene, and we did a Gram tribute in London and we play every year in Nashville for the Americana Music Association show. It's all sort of similar, I suppose, to the outlaw movement of the early '70s."
   He provides updates on his life and times at Bryson Jones.com.
   Jones hopes to bring his band back to Arkansas in September for a show or two and hopefully bring along Polly Parsons and her godmother, Pamela DesBarres, one of the earliest groupies on the rock scene. Parsons recently decided to concentrate on preserving and protecting her father's legacy.
   And though Jones and The Snake Handlers are trying to be the world's loudest country band, Jones suspects they have more in common with The White Stripes. Jones doesn't think he can stay true to his history - listening to country music, singing in a Baptist church, and playing rock 'n roll - and still have his own identity.
   "There's no cultural identity anymore," Jones says. "So I realize now I need to honor that and that my life has not been an accident. I have had the beautiful, freeing experience of losing my dream when my first attempt at music didn't work. So now, I'm a singer and an acoustic guitarist and have this band, The Snake Handlers, and I've discovered more about Arkansas musical history from people in England and L.A. My publishing company is Highway 67 Music. People don't realize how much music was created at those juke joints on Highway 67, like the Silver Moon in Newport. My musical identity is being from Arkansas, and I wear it completely as a badge of honor."
   Polly Parsons has organized "Return to Sin City," two days of tribute concerts in California to her late father July 9-10; the first night is at the Santa Barbara Bowl and the second is at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.
   Performers will include Norah Jones, Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Kathleen Edwards, Jay Farrar and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Bryson Jones and the Sin City All-Stars will also participate.
   The money will go to the Musicians' Assistance Program, which helps musicians with addiction problems.
   See gramparsonstribute.com

This story was published Sunday, June 27, 2004