The Daily O’Collegian

The room seemed smaller than it looked from the outside. Rows and stacks of vinyl records and CDs, the piano, the amplifiers, the drums, the walls plastered with posters of Hendrix and Floyd gave it that quality.

The members of Wily Brothers began to trickle in. It was the last rehearsal before their next gig at 10 p.m. at Willie’s on the Strip. Admission was free but restricted to those of drinking age. After a quick setup peppered with small talk, the amp buzzed, then erupted. The jam was powerful. Bobble heads on the piano bounced to the beat, but beneath the pounding drums and bass the flourishing, straightforward guitar riffs echoed classic southern rock.

The band has fire in its belly, a hunger to change what it sees as a gap in the Stillwater music scene, said Mark Vaughan, singer and guitarist of Wily Brothers.

“Stillwater needs a good, straight-up rock band,” he said. “I think we are that band.”

But Wily Brothers is more than a generic rock band. If Red Dirt doesn’t define the local scene, it at least dominates it, Vaughan said. And though Wily Brothers cannot be forced into the Red Dirt mold, it has felt that influence.

“We’ve definitely got Red Dirt roots,” he said. “I got lots of inspiration from some of them, Medicine Show in particular.”

Some Wily Brothers songs, like “Reflections” or “Boo Radley,” stray far from the powerful bass and energetic drums typical of hard rock. The relaxed harmonies and twangy bridges sound outright country. Pinning a genre to Wily Brothers is difficult, and the band members say that’s fine with them.

“Coming from such different walks of life, to meet in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 2006, and to be producing the quality of music we are is spectacular,” drummer Larry Hyde said.

Vaughan added: “We want the dynamic that Zeppelin used. You couldn’t pigeonhole them, and that’s what I’m after. More than anything we want to make a new niche.”

What distinguishes Wily Brothers from the hordes of genre-bending acts is its eclectic sound that’s a genuine reflection of rock’s evolution across four decades.

“There’s a lot of history, my own musical history, in those tracks,” Vaughan said.

He wrote most of the band’s songs during the past 12 years.

“I work hard at song writing,” he said. “I’m not prolific. I don’t write 10 songs a week; I write 10 songs a decade.”

Wily Brothers took those songs as a core and interwove its members’ individual styles to bring new life to the lyrics.

“They’ve [the songs have] gone beyond what I thought they could be,” Vaughan said. “It just comes down to getting with the right people. We’re on such a balanced plane musically.”

The result is a familiar sound that is entertaining with its creativity and innovation.

“I want people of all ages to re-evaluate the type of music they’re listening to,” Hyde said. “Judge it relative to what’s been produced in the past and use that new perspective to check us out.”

For more information about Wily Brothers, visit its Web site at http://www.wilybrothers.com.