By Jennifer Litz
Editor
April 4, 2008 The Charlie Shafter Band Web site takes a while to load. But the payoff is in its better-than-average layout, superimposing the four mildly attractive band members atop a pop-arty scheme of green shades and random swirly shapes. The music on the player isn’t bad, either—folksy, but too well mastered to sound like rough-around-the-edge Texas country. The riffs are catchy and country, but the guitar contained; The Goo Goo Dolls without the late-90s stigma and gay hair.

Perhaps they sound different because they are. Shafter hails from Illinois. “That’s why we can’t really claim we play Texas country, because people might get offended,” he says.

Drummer Joel Dreistadt met Shafter when the two were teenagers in Decatur, Central Illinois. They started playing there, and Dreistadt followed Shafter when the latter moved to Levelland outside Lubbock to study music theory at South Plains College. “I got into Bluegrass music,” Shafter says of the move. “Not that I play any. But I appreciate it more.”

That influence indeed shows up in numbers like “California,” with its bluesy electric organ interlude. It’s reminiscent of The Wallflowers’ “Sixth Avenue Heartache” (there’s that’s late 90s again).

Speaking of Dylans (Bob’s son Jacob was The Wallflowers’ frontman), the band mixes its own originals with Bob Dylan and the like when playing on the road. “We play mainly original music, but we switch it out with Dylan and The Beatles,” says bassist/vocalist Clayton Freeman.

Catch the lineup later this month when Shafter and his band play The Steel Penny April 19. You want to be able to say you saw them before radio homed their very pretty boy, well-produced sound.