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June 7, 2006
May 1, 2006

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July-Aug 2006
June 10, 2006

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TEN CITY RUN

Hans Frank: vocals, bass, keyboards
Casper Rawls: guitar
Luckey McClain: drums, backing vocals

It's not easy to be the best band in Texas.

Think about it. There's plenty of competition. Old-timers are skeptical about anyone under thirty with a guitar slung around his neck. It's kind of like being introduced as the top lobbyist in Washington or the rudest waiter in New York: Before anybody gives you credence, you'd better be able to prove yourself.

That's just what 10 City Run did. The odds were long: There's only three of them. One of them isn't even from Texas. And they didn't get their start playing honky-tonks – no, their first gig was in an experimental theater production. That's three strikes right there.

Still, it's official: As of September 2005, after winning Texas Country Reporter's Texas Country Star competition, they've worn the crown as the number one band in the Lone Star State. Not only that: They've signed with Universal South, whose roster includes Shooter Jennings, Erika Jo, Lee Roy Parnell, and the Louvin Brothers. Their debut album for the label, Somethin' Else, drops nationally on April 25, right behind their first single, the swaggering, menacing, and ultimately irresistible “City of Angels.”

You can't miss the Texas in their twang, from the conjunto reverie in their cover (and update) of Doug Sahm's “Juan Mendoza” to the garage lament “Memories,” the cry-in-my-beer heartbreaker “Congratulations,” and the oddly compelling portrait of a “mama's boy” left to fend for himself on “Mama Died.” But there's room within these hallowed subgenres for originality, and 10 City Run has got enough of that to spread over every dance floor they pack, with enough left over for their opening act to borrow.

This all leads us back to the ultimate promotional bio question: Who are these guys?

You've already seen the short answer, at the top of this page. In fact, you probably already know at least one of them – Casper Rawls, already notorious around Texas for his escapades with the LeRoi Brothers. And if you've spent some time in Dallas or Austin, you've probably heard Luckey McClain driving one or another band on drums or, perhaps, in that big honkin' truck he's been known to pilot from gig to gig.

Then there's Hans Frank. Raised in the Appalachian foothills, he wandered the same scrubby woods and hardscrabble hills that Bobby Bare crawled out of fifty years ago. He also learned to appreciate the finer arts. “My dad was a sculptor and a painter,” he remembers. “My mother played piano and guitar and sang. So I grew up knowing that I would do something creative; it was just a question of what medium I'd pursue.”

This combination of the rough and refined pretty much defined how Frank came to express himself. He knew his way around the library; he also felt Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog” as a kind of gut-level reveille. (“Rhinestone Cowboy” was the other pivotal song in his youth, but that one's a little harder to explain.) Inspired by the western songs and stories he heard from his mother, he wrote his first poem around second grade, about a cowboy who ends a gunfight by shooting a lamp off its post and onto the skull of his adversary, thus avoiding the moral question of whether to blow the guy's brains out.

Throughout high school, Frank kept writing poems, screenplays, stage plays, and songs. He made it through college at the University of Ohio, went on to earn a graduate degree in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and started thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. Short trips to L.A. and New York convinced him to seek his fortune somewhere between the two megalopolises.

That's when Texas beckoned. “Austin was a happy compromise,” he says. “I grew up watching Austin City Limits, and I knew the music scene was more or less in my ballpark. And I just felt I could do the three things I wanted to do there without having to spend all my time just trying to survive.”

Those things were music, writing for the stage, and doing screenplays. Frank came to town in 2002, with all three balls in play. He made his first impact through the theater, when he got word that FronteraFest, the annual city-wide celebration of new works for the stage, was looking for someone to fill a gap in their “Short Fringe” program. Frank happened to have something that fit the bill: a one-man, interactive, unpredictable piece called Lonely Highway: A Transcendental Minstrel. This mélange of tarot card readings, bad magic tricks, dance contests, efforts to channel the spirit of Louis Armstrong, and other oddities went over so well that Ken Webster, artistic director at the Hyde Park Theater, booked it for repeat performances. The run stretched into two years before Frank brought it to a close.

By that point he had other priorities. As crowds flocked to the show, Frank began rehearsing on the side with Casper and Luckey in hopes of playing band gigs on the side. They drew much of their material from original tunes that Frank was using in the show, including “City of Angels” and “Mama Died,” though the trio veered from the neo-lounge feel cultivated on Lonely Highway toward a harder, house-rockin' sound. Eventually, Frank says, “when I started to feel that I'd gone as far as I could with the show, I realized the time had come to get serious about us as a band.”

As they started doing band-like gigs, word spread quickly up and down I35. They earned a spot opening for Webb Wilder, which Hans still considers one of his three most memorable musical experiences since coming to Texas. The second one involved meeting Ronnie Leatherman, from 13th Floor Elevators, and playing through his amp.

The third? No surprise here: the Texas Star Competition. They entered more or less on a whim, made it through the semifinal round at the Executive Surf Club in Corpus Christi, went on to the finals in Waxahachie, and got the word that all of a sudden they were the best band in Texas.

“It was actually anticlimactic, which was fine with me,” Frank remembers. “They announced the winner, and we got sort of confused, and somebody said, 'You can exit the stage now,' so we left. Then somebody else gave me a piece of paper on the way out and said, 'Call this number on Monday.' It turned out to be the number for Tim DuBois, president of Universal South.”

Shortly after that, they holed up at the Keith Harter Music studio near San Antonio and cut Somethin' Else. The band was thrilled to work with producer John Beland, whose credentials stretch back to his years with the Flying Burrito Brothers. By the end of the session, the feeling had become mutual, and Beland was happy to tell the world, on 10cityrun.com, that “that little San Antonio band cooks!”

That takes us right to that magical place that the luckiest bands can visit only once, on the threshold of success, poised like Olympic divers ready to jackknife toward the water. Their younger fans know that 10 City Run is on its way up, and those who've been around a while longer are coming around to admit that maybe these young pups are onto something after all.

“When I came to San Antonio and got acquainted with Doug Sahm's later stuff,” Frank sums up. “I wish I'd heard him twenty years ago, so I wouldn't have had to wonder for so long about whether you could get away from segregating music into different styles. That's what 10 City Run does now: We're all about taking the roughness of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and all those guys, and moving it up to a more modern level. That makes us different from what you hear on 'the scene,' whatever that is, these days.”

You could say it makes them... Somethin' Else.

For information, www.universal-south.com/www.10cityrun.com

Media Contact: Jill McGuckin, McGuckin Entertainment PR, 512.217.9404; jill@mcguckinpr.com

Management: Ben Ewing, 615.847.3702; envoy@comcast.net

Booking Agent: The Bobby Roberts Company, 615.859.8899; www.bobbyroberts.com