Music

Fifteen things you might not know about the Bottle Rockets, on their fifteenth birthday

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5. Biggest regret as a band. Firing their original manager, Bob Andrews. "This was around 1995, 'Radar Gun' was doing good," Henneman explains, "and we thought we needed something bigger than Bob Andrews [who has since been rehired]. Right at the moment when we shouldn't have made a change, we changed managers and booking agents, and it shut the shit down for a decade. We're only now crawling out. On the ascent we decided to jettison the engines, and see what would happen. We all crashed like Skynyrd and some of us survived."

4. They had a beret period. Or at least Henneman did. "That was the Richard Thompson influence. I couldn't get it on the guitar so I got it that way."

3. Henneman originally wanted to be a bass player. "When I was just getting serious," Henneman explains, "the bass at the guitar store cost as much as the used guitar and amplifier. So economics made me a guitar player. Also, I was absolutely in love with Thin Lizzy. I wanted to have an Afro and a mustache. And even today, I still don't want to be a singer. I want to be Mike Campbell in the Heartbreakers. But there was no one else to do it. I kinda wanted to be a songwriter, so I got that right. But I wonder what kind of songs I'd have written on the bass!"

2. The legendary street brawl in Austin was a draw. After a show at SXSW 2002, Henneman and longtime comrade and guitarist Tom Parr went toe to drunken toe in the street. Parr was immediately fired. "Maybe I won that fight because I'm still in the band," Henneman laughs. "Or maybe that makes me the loser. He's probably making more money than I am. But I did come out with my glasses intact."

1. They are not the "world's greatest bar band." "It's funny watching time erode this shit," Henneman says. "Nobody knows what a bar band is anymore. If you want to get anything out of our music, you have to pay attention to it. And that's the opposite of a bar band."

9 p.m. Saturday, May 3. Blueberry Hill's Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Boulevard, University City. Sold out.

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