courtesy photo

[Editor's note: This story previews Willy Citro and the Dusters' concert at The Bourbon tonight as they open for The Mustache Bandits. The show starts at 10 p.m. RSVP here.]

Stubs had one piece of advice for Austin Howard: “Never let anybody fuck with you.”

It wasn’t an out-of-character line for Stubs, a coarse, old war veteran. After all, the story of how he joined the army was just one jagged edge of his rough-hewn personality. The story, in short, was that Stubs killed someone in self-defense, and his verdict demanded that he either fight for his country or go to prison. He chose the former.

But that’s another story.

Back to the moment when Stubs offered up his piece of advice: Howard had just been telling his friends at a bar about his relationship troubles. Stubs, well, he had just the fix.

“He said if I need anyone taken care of for any reason, just give this phone number a call and say that Stubs sent me,” Howard remembers. “I had known this guy for some amount of time, and I had accepted a lot of his stories and our interactions as embellishments. It wasn’t until that moment when I was sitting down at a bar and realized I had just been solicited hitman services that this gentleman was a little bit more of a real deal than I had ever given him credit for.”

And so, Howard reassessed Stubs. He thought of Stubs’ stories about his veteran’s gang, the one that worked to sell cocaine and meth around Kearney, Nebraska. He thought about what Stubs said about the gang “taking care of competition” by drowning people in the sand pits outside of the city. With that phone number in hand, Howard found it a bit easier to believe.

It’s a similar suspension of disbelief that Howard hopes concertgoers will experience tonight at The Bourbon, as Stubs informs the song “I’m An Outlaw, Motherfucker” by Willy Citro and the Dusters. The young Lincoln band, featuring three-fourths of Freakabout!, will open for The Moustache Bandits.

Willy Citro, the in-song character who borrows from Stubs' stories, takes his cues from real life, but he exists in another era, a vague Western era. Howard and fellow Willy Citro cofounder, Aaron Galvan — along with bandmates Alex Drvol (bass) and Zachary Zoellner (drums) — have been patching together Citro’s DNA for a little more than four months now. Through songs such as “The Birth of Willy Citro” and “The Death of Willy Citro,” the native Texan, and his almost supernatural, drug-filled misadventures come to life, and then they die. Maybe.

“We don’t want to limit ourselves to Willy Citro no longer existing, so we leave it open-ended,” Howard says. “We think he’s dead, but to this day, we don’t really know, so we can build off that and have more stories, more sightings to continue the legend.”

Howard says the band will continue to fill in the gaps in Citro’s life, too, with new songs. Having played in a handful of Nebraska bands, the members of Willy Citro and the Dusters intend to bring together what they see as the most entertaining pieces of live music. They’ve all seen it from the other side, too, having worked at The Bourbon in one way or another.

And if anything, says Howard, the crowd is the most important part.

“We wanted it to have theatrics, stage characters and presence that people can get drawn into: not just a couple of guys playing their guitars, looking down and not getting the audience involved. We want to more or less put on an outlaw opera.”

Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. He would make for a pretty lousy dueler. “Why don’t we just hug this one out, man?” Reach him at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.