“I just got done frying up some bacon and eggs,” Summer Hymns leader Zachary Gresham says with a lazy, Jimmy Carter drawl. “Now I just have to wash the pot.” Cleaning up after breakfast at 2 in the afternoon, Gresham is living the life most would-be rock stars dream about…

Shelley King is onstage at a smoky punk dive on an oppressively humid summer night, hundreds of miles from home, in the middle of the Midwest. It’s close to 100 degrees in the bar, and as she plays guitar and sings, even her knuckles are sweating. Her eclectic country songs…

“I paid for it already,” White Light Motorcade front man Harley Dinardo snaps. He’s fighting with a gas-station clerk about an ice cream sandwich. “I’m trying to tell her that I paid for it already,” he says. After he smooths things out he heads back outside to the van. “The…

On any given night the Mink Lungs spit blood and spin hula hoops, preach hellfire and brimstone and perform death-defying stunts. Oh, yeah, and they’re a band, too. “When you look out and people aren’t getting into the music, sometimes you have to pull out the blood,” Mink Lungs drummer…