If Santa Barbara's club scene has been heating up lately with hot acts in the indie rock genre, a different and more mainstream end of the pop music spectrum makes its way into town next Wednesday. On the KRUZ Radio-sponsored bill, in the Canary Hotel Ballroom, will be Green River Ordinance, a solid dispenser of controlled guitar rock power and smartly penned, hook-filled tunes.

Despite the band name, this act hails from Fort Worth, Tex., but has mostly made the road its home in the past year, having logged over 300 dates in support of its major label debut, "Out of My Hands." Part of the band's strategy involves keeping good company in well-placed opening slots, including Cook, Collective Soul, Third Eye Blind, Counting Crows and Kate Voegele.

For this band, forged and formed in high school, the "live thing" is more than an afterthought or a duty. As guitarist Jamie Ice explained, on his cell phone "somewhere between Sacramento and Modesto ...We grew up as a live band. We played in bars all throughout high school and in college. That's kind of what we did. We grew up playing frat parties, sorority parties, anywhere that would let us play. I think that's where our band shines. We're a group of guys that has been playing together for 10 years, even though we're only 24 and 25.

"I'm proud of what we're doing, not to sound cocky. I think we have a certain charisma and chemistry that only comes from playing with your brother and friends who you've been playing with since you were 15."

Said Texans are brothers Geoff and Jamey Ice, singer-guitarist Josh Jenkins, bassist Joshua Wilkerson and drummer Denton Hunker, who have been tight as a unit, but have also all brought in assorted musical inclinations to the project.

"We all kind of have different backgrounds," says Ice. "My brother and I grew up listening to a lot of blues and classic rock. Our dad was a Deadhead in the '70s, and he played blues harmonica. He would take us to blues jams where we'd be playing old-school Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and stuff like that, old classic blues songs. I remember the first time I wanted to play guitar was when I heard 'Led Zeppelin II,' and 'Heartbreaker.'

"Joshua — the other guitar player — his dad was in a pretty decent sized rock band in the '70s. They toured with the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick and Rick Derringer. He grew up around rock 'n' roll. Our singer grew up in a family that sang country. His dad was a country singer, his brother's a country singer and he grew up going to the (Grand Old) Opry when he was little. And then Denton, our drummer, grew up playing in jazz bands and marching bands growing up. He was a total jazz geek. He didn't know any rock music at all. We had to kind of educate him a little bit and get him to hit the drums a bit harder," he laughs.

Working on original music has been a priority from the early days, long before Virgin Records presented a contract and ushered the band into the ranks of the major label deal-blessed. Back in the day, says Ice, "when we would play a lot of fraternity parties, we would play 75 percent original material but then throw in a Tom Petty or Steve Miller song, something like that. We recorded our very first CD when we were 16, in the basement of our church. We've been writing for a long time. It hasn't always been good, but it's something we've been doing the whole way."

Once the band was picked up by Virgin Records, it found itself in an enviable position for a greenhorn outfit in a major label situation, given the chance to pick their own producers and songs. But this is a band that has always had a clear, unpretentious vision of its identity and musical focus.
Ice comments that "one of our favorite bands is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They have a great saying: 'Don't bore us, get to the chorus.' We wanted to make an album that people could sing along to. In so much of today's music, there's no melody and you can't really sing to it. Maybe you can dance to it. So we wanted to make an album that you could sing along to, and also something that would move you emotionally, like U2.

"We wrote maybe 85 songs. We would just meet every day and write. We picked the 10 best out of those and recorded them."

Breaking with the mold of major label bands pampered and cared for by the mothership company, Green River Ordinance's M.O. is highly hands-on, dealing directly with the logistics and the business end of what they do. As Ice notes, "Most bands are like 'Yeah, man, I only care about the music. I don't want to worry about the business.' We've grown up doing this and always been very involved. We try new things in a different way.