Submitted photoOld Crow Medicine Show

Way back before the turn of the millennium, when Ketch Secor was still a teen, the fledgling songwriter took a bootlegged fragment of a Bob Dylan tune and fleshed it out into not just a song, but a cultural phenomenon.

In Secor’s hands, “Rock Me, Mama,” as Dylan completists had known that nugget from the sessions for 1973’s “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” soundtrack, became a song called “Wagon Wheel.” Secor may have been a prep school kid who attended prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, but the completed song had the aromatic air of a barrel-aged banjo-and-fiddle classic wafting from it.

Even if you don’t know the back story, you likely know “Wagon Wheel.” It’s kind of hard to miss. Besides the attention, success and credibility the song brought to Old Crow Medicine Show, it spawned a No. 1 hit for country star Darius Rucker last year.

Just say no

Due to the song’s ubiquity, some music venues have instituted bans on covering it.

One such place: Volcanic Theatre Pub, which abuts the Century Center courtyard where Old Crow Medicine Show will play Tuesday night (see “If you go”). Derek Sitter, owner and operator of VTP, has a sign posted in the popular club’s green room that shows an image of an old-time wagon wheel emblazoned with a classic circle and slash to indicate the ban.

“I posted it because it got to be so damn ridiculous that every band, regardless of genre, would massacre that great song,” Sitter said.

“I posted it mostly because I was insulted that they actually thought they were covering Darius Rucker (who actually won a f—ing Grammy for his cover) and knew little about (Old Crow’s) version.”

Moreover, some offending acts “didn’t realize it was originally an unfinished Bob Dylan song,” Sitter added. “It’s a great song and OCMS is a great band, but watching some silly rock band turn it into some stupid anthem was just too much for me. I would go into seizures as soon as they began. I would actually allow ‘Freebird’ before I allowed ‘Wagon Wheel.’”

There you have it.

Interestingly enough, VTP will host an after-party and meet-and-greet with Old Crow Medicine Show Tuesday night, at which the local bands Grit and Grizzle and TumbleWeed Peepshow are slated to perform.

Should either act launch into “Wagon Wheel,” Sitter said, his policy will be enforced.

Under pressure

Nashville-based Secor may have turned another Dylan snippet into a song, if not yet a full-fledged cultural artifact. Neat work if you can get it, and clearly, Secor can: Dylan sent him another partial tune from the “Pat Garrett” sessions. The resultant “Sweet Amarillo” can be heard on “Remedy,” Old Crow’s latest studio album, released in July.

“It’s kind of similar to (‘Wagon Wheel’) in that I had an unfinished Bob Dylan song from 1973 to finish. The difference between this go-’round and ‘Rock Me, Mama’ was that I had Bob’s permission and Bob’s request that I finish the song,” Secor said. “He actually sent it to me this time around.”

Receiving it was “a wonderful delight,” he said. Of course, it also came with a certain amount of pressure.

“When we made the work tape, the pressure was about the fact that Dylan was going to hear us all. He was going to hear us play. I think it made our banjo player stiff, it made our drummer stiff. We were worried about that work tape,” Secor said. “I ended up singing it a lot, like, in my Bob Dylan voice. So we listened to it a dozen times to figure out whether we thought it sounded too much like him.”

After they sent the rough recording to Dylan, the feedback was kind — and instructive.

“He wrote back saying he liked it, and that he thought it should have fiddle and (that) the chorus needed to come in on the 16th bar and not the 32nd.”

They did the things Dylan requested, “and he was pleased with the result. I think he’s really into it, as much as I can tell, seeing as I’ve never met him,” Secor said. “He’s a real Gatsby.”

The state of country

As for Rucker’s highly successful cover?

“I guess he’s sort of the opposite. Real accessible, you know, not enigmatic. Spirited and fun and accessible,” Secor said. “That’s been a good formula for success in country music today, accessibility.”

For Secor, the current state of mainstream country — particularly its cookie-cutter songs about trucks and beers and skipping rocks with dad at the lake, etc. — is a point of concern. The ability to enjoy such maudlin, repetitious themes is “like getting off on a Hallmark card. You have to be a certain kind of person to think a Hallmark card is the funniest thing you read all day,” he said.

Secor would be at peace with all of this if country music didn’t mean something to him.

“It’d be a lot easier if I just didn’t give a s–t about it and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just do it the way I want to do it,’” he said. “But I actually do care about country music, and I really want it to … survive. And I don’t think it will like this. The stuff that they put on the radio, that’s just not it.”

He continued: “Country music, yeah, it’s supposed to be catchy, but it’s also supposed to have content, meaning and power behind that. The power to lift, to transcend, to change. These things are missing from almost every station, every band on the dial: content and meaning.”

Soap for sale

But things have changed. The music industry has changed. And Secor doesn’t blame the suits on Nashville’s Music Row for that.

“Nashville’s just trying to sell soap, so you can’t really blame them for wanting a good jingle,” he said. Changing the current paradigm is possible, he added, but “I think it’s up to artists to do it, to say, ‘OK, I see that big pile of money, but I’m going to do it this way.’”

Old Crow Medicine Show keeps the faith on “Remedy,” which includes a moving Secor composition called “Dearly Departed Friend.” The low-key, pretty tune is about the funeral of someone killed overseas “in some place like Fallujah or Jalalabad or the outskirts of Islamabad or Kandahar. That kind of guy,” said Secor.

The record represents a couple of years of work and a recharged OCMS, Secor said.

“It’s amazing how, after 16 years, you can feel like you’re just getting into it,” he said. “The live show is high energy, rock ’n’ roll, old-time music. What do you want to call it? Everyone’s been calling it ‘Americana’ for the past five or six years.”

Old Crow Medicine Show formed in 1998 and got its big break while busking on a street corner. Recalling those days, Secor said, “It’s almost like the curb has come with us. It just hasn’t changed that much. We’re still standing around in a semi-circle, trying to call everybody in.”

Well, Old Crow Medicine Show does have lights and a decent sound system now. Otherwise, “It’s still just our instruments, and we’re playing them as crudely as we ever did. It’s not like we developed finesse over 16 years,” he said, laughing.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com