Homo on the Range

STRAIGHT TALKIN’ Devin gets his inspiration from country greats like Parton and Cash.

On a Tuesday night in Boystown, the entertainment pickings are slim. Cocktail has strippers (but doesn’t it always?), the Dragrace at Roscoe’s is forgettable, and Sidetrack is more or less a ghost town. But the Town Hall Pub, the lone straight bar on Halsted, is trumping them all with live music the first and third Tuesdays of the month by Devin and the Straights, who bill themselves as “the gayest country in the city.”

Don’t cover your techno-loving ears just yet. They’re one of the best live acts to emerge in Chicago last year, and if you don’t think you can take a night off from strippers and drag queens to kick it with a little country music, you have yet to see Devin Preitauer howling out a number by his hero Dolly Parton.

Preitauer grew up in rural Nebraska, three miles south of 188 people and in the middle of nowhere, as he likes to say. He was one of 11 children (some half and step siblings), with a busy mom who found relaxation in the guitar.

“My mom and her siblings would get together once or twice a week and just all play country music like old bluegrass and Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton…The only way she could bear giving us baths when we were little was playing the guitar. She put [my brother and I] in the bathtub and then would sit there in the bathroom so we wouldn’t drown and play the guitar and sing.”

Like most kids, Preitauer shifted away from his parents’ tastes and eventually moved to California to be a raver. He returned home in his early twenties with a guitar he’d purchased and asked his mother to teach him how to play.

“I sat there and she taught me the chords [to “Apple Jack”] and then we sang together and all of a sudden I was playing…I’m not any better than I was the day I first learned how to play. It just seemed to all happen at once, and that’s how I learned to play the guitar and that’s all there is.”

Taking square-dancing lessons with his mom got him excited to pursue modern dance in Lincoln, Nebraska, which led him to a six-week program in Chicago. “A week and a half after I got here I was like, Oh my God, there’s gay boys everywhere. This is fun and dance school is good here, so I’m just going to stay.”

Still, he rarely played the guitar outside his bathroom (where the acoustics are good) until a drunken night out found him onstage at the Town Hall’s open mike. “I was like, Shit, I play the guitar, so I got up there and ended up playing like seven songs…I was like, This is kind of exciting.”

In January 2005, he staged a solo show at Links Hall titled “Songs in the Key of D-Pressed,” to expunge himself of hurt feelings over a bad breakup, and the gig persuaded the Town Hall to book him semiregularly. Shortly thereafter, he found the Straights.

Since that time, Preitauer has turned “Songs in the Key of D-Pressed” into an EP featuring songs which are available on his MySpace page (www.myspace.com/devinandthestraights). He’s also busy songwriting and prepping for gigs beyond Chicago.

“I would definitely like to start playing other places and getting something recorded just to see what could happen…As of now, it’s progressed so naturally, I’m not really worried about rushing anything,” he says.

Meanwhile, Preitauer has his eye on the long-term goal. “Eventually I want to be Dolly Parton…She’s just so down to earth.”

Devin and the Straights shake the Town Hall Pub Tuesday 16.