By Duncan Scott Davidson

A FRIEND AND his wife recently took a vacation in the South. When they returned to San Francisco, anyone they mentioned their trip to immediately asked, "Do you have relatives there?" As though it was somehow unacceptable to travel to the American South for any reason other than visiting blood relations unlucky enough not to have escaped to greener pastures. One person asked if they went there to register voters.

I tell this to Chet "El Cheetah" Weise, one half of the Auburn, Ala., duo the Immortal Lee County Killers II. I want to know what it's like to be in a touring band from a region with such a volatile history, one that is still much maligned by those thinking they've cornered the market on enlightened liberalism.

"There's definitely a fascination with the South," the guitarist says on the phone. He's met European Civil War buffs who know more about the place than he does, though he's spent his entire life – 33 years – there. Then there's the flip side: "I actually had someone ask me where Hazzard County was. They also asked me if they still hanged people in the South."

The region's history is "one of extremes, of extreme evil or extreme good," he continues. "Yes, lynchings occurred in the South, but Martin Luther King's first church was in Montgomery, Alabama ... basically where the organized civil rights movement started. There has been oppression in the South, but there's also been revolt where people have risen up against oppression and freed themselves." He recites a laundry list of cultural landmarks originating below the Mason-Dixon line (apparently I'm not the only person who's taken this line of questioning): "Blues music, Stax, rock 'n' roll, civil rights, all kinds of things. No one ever talks about William Faulkner being from Oxford, Mississippi – it's always Mississippi Burning."

New partner in crime

Extremes suit Weise just fine. The Killers – the other bluesy guitar-drums duo beside the White Stripes and the Black Keys – recently went through a drastic change when original drummer Doug Sherrard left and Weise reunited with J.R.R. Token, his former bandmate in the Quadrajets, for the group's second album, Love Is a Charm of Powerful Trouble (Estrus). To denote the change, which involved 50 percent of the personnel, they added the Roman numeral II to the band name, putting it in contention for the longest band name going, with the exception of ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

The music also shifted dramatically, from the blues bludgeoning of what Weise calls their "transitional" 2000 debut, The Essential Fucked Up Blues (Estrus), to the more pensive, heartfelt – I'm trying hard not to say mellow – feel of Love. In addition to Willie Dixon and R.L. Burnside covers, Weise dusts off the acoustic guitar for a few songs.

Weise is reticent to go into the details of the romantic turmoil that occurred between the two records, possibly contributing to the change in tone. "It's not anything that anybody else hasn't gone through," he says. He obliquely refers to two sequential relationships in which "things blew apart" as the impetus for the album's title: "Love can charm you or it can make you feel the worst you've ever felt in your life. Sure, yeah, man – heartbreak all over the place."

The most dramatic and daring track on the album, though, is his take on the Otis Redding standard "That's How Strong My Love Is," a stretch both in terms of tempo, sentiment, and vocal range. "I was scared to death of doing that one," he says. "And completely intimidated by trying to sing Otis fucking Redding. One of the criticisms that the band gets is my singing, my vocal ability. So I decided on this record we're going to take a song that's by one of the greatest singers of all time, that is very much based on lyric and vocal performance, and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it as a singer who doesn't get by very well with notes, but gets away based only on willpower."

Will to power

Weise is used to pouring 120 percent into his rock. "The type of music that we do and the way things work – we have to bring it to the people," he says. "They won't come to us; we have to go to them." The Killers' debut upped the ante on Jon Spencer/Pussy Galore-style blues deconstruction. With songs like "Let's Get Killed" and "Go to Hell on Judgment Day," the record burned with the nihilistic fury of a dusted punker swinging a straight razor in the mosh pit.

Auburn, while a college town, has not proven to be the most hospitable place for a band of such intensity. "As far as rock 'n' roll goes," Weise says, "it's not the place to be." The clubs cater to what he calls "picnic rock" by Grateful Dead retread jam bands like Widespread Panic – music for sandal-clad dervishes to nonchalantly twirl to after burning a few doobies. Despite the Southern backdrop, it hasn't been easy for a band like the Killers, who take their name and spiritual direction from Jerry Lee Lewis, a man not known for "taking it easy," in music or in life. "There is that element of struggle here," he says. "Not only the regular struggle in life, but the struggle just to have a party."

Nonetheless, the house party scene has been a boon for the Killers when they're not on the road. The four-year-old band played their first notes in Weise's kitchen, and their first show on someone's back porch. "There's no bullshit," he says. "We don't have to deal with promoters or club owners. We call up a friend of ours, put a vocal P.A. in the living room, and they move out the furniture. We have a friend take money at the door, everyone brings booze if they want, and we have a genuine throw down. It's roots – it gives it a very special feel."

As far as special, rootsy feelings are concerned, much has been made in the band's press release of the condemned shack next to the railroad tracks where their first album was recorded. The shack was actually the band's practice space, not an effort to scare up the ghosts of any bygone, rail-riding blues hobos. The Killers have had a succession of studios and practice spaces bulldozed and flooded out, and, if you listen closely to Love Is a Charm of Powerful Trouble, you can hear a train roar past their latest trackside rehearsal space after "Weak Brain, Narrow Mind," the Willie Dixon song.