By Brett Ratner

You see those guys from Little Texas on T.V. alongside their bikini-clad videobabes and think "I bet these guys have never had a rough day in their whole life."

Truth is, before those perfectly coifed hairstyles, Hollywood smiles and finely crafted pop-country tunes ever hit the airwaves, those boys had to pay some dues and wait their turn.

"Patience and perseverance and a big love for ramen noodles," Said bassist Duane Propes, listing off key ingredients to success in music city. "Take your time, maybe not hit it off in six months. Take three years, four years. I was in Nashville three or four years before anything happened. But I was going to college, music business major and that helped. If there's any advice, stick with your guns. And make a lot of friends. There's a good 'ol boys factor."

Propes, who hails from Longview Texas first picked up the bass in 1983 after trying his hand at drums and lead guitar. Propes found that the instrument enabled him to do a little of everything.

"Our high school stage band needed a bass player," Propes said. "The guy that was playing guitar was a senior so I wasn't going to get it there. So I said I'll try bass. It came out to be a wonderful combination of guitar and drums. It felt very natural."

Propes honed his lyrically rhythmic (or is that rhythmically lyric?) bass chops until he felt up to the challenge of moving to Nashville, Tennessee to try his hand at sessions.

"I came to Nashville to do studio work. I like the pressure of it," Propes said. "Honestly I like going in there with a certain amount of time to nail something and having to do it right the first time. I also like the creative side of it when you have to hear what you know is going to have to make the track. The bass player is going to make the track work or he's going to blow it. Everything else you just work around but the foundation between drums and bass has to be there. You're either going to play something that everybody's going to hate. Or you're going to play something that's going to work wonderfully. You try to get something that they're going to love."

Propes' "bassic" instinct to play towards the song fit in perfectly with Little Texas' melodic tunes. In recording and playing, Propes possesses a unique approach to his bass lines. Propes says this approach lends him creative freedom without sacrificing the song.

"What I do is pay a lot of attention to the lyrics," Propes said. "I have studio guys come up to me and say now and then "how do you get away with what you do? It doesn't really conform to Nashville rules." I do some two-handed stuff now and then. Nothing obnoxious. Nothing like Mr. Big, even though I'd love to. But some really tasty things like pulling up chords with the right hand and different things. But I try to concentrate on the lyric, and try to punch the lyric through as much as I can. Instead of looking at a chord chart, I keep the lyric sheet in front of me."

His strategy, combined with that of the other members, has proven very successful and the band has been very busy almost too busy.

"We've been on the road for several years straight," Propes said. "So we're going to take off from now till about September-October '96, take that time to make a new album and really craft a great album instead of being on the road and coming in and running in the studio and going back on the road and rushing things. We really want this to be a landmark record. Besides that, we wanted to take a break for awhile. We're tired."

Tired or not, Propes still enjoys the spoils of his musical success. "The coolest stuff that's happened to me is getting to meet a lot of my heroes," Propes said. "People like Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill, Michael Anthony. Just the guys I grew up idolizing and guys that really shaped what I do. I've gotten to actually meet, and in a couple cases become friends with them. That's a big payoff for me."

So how are Kiss and ZZ Top tunes going to affect a bassist in a country band?

"When you listen to something and like it, it's going to rub off on you especially as a player," Propes said. "The things I've learned from listening to it, and maybe not even consciously applying it, sometimes I listen back and say, man, that's something Dusty did back on El Loco."

Whatever influences Propes is applying in his playing, he's applying it with a Tobias bass. Tobias caught Propes' attention in an interesting way.

"We were on the road with Tim McGraw and Blackhawk last year," Propes said. "John Marcus, their bass player was playing Tobias and they were doing soundcheck one day and I was listening in while they were playing. I grabbed our house engineer and I said "Rusty, man that's the sound I've been looking for. Can you make my bass sound like that?" He said no. I said why. He said it's not the gear or anything like that. That's the way that bass sounds. I called Ron Eubanks the next day and said I want to get involved with Tobias."