A guitar Dave Boyer bought for just 150 bucks took him around the world. A vintage, Swedish-made electric guitar called a Hagstrom Swede. Boyer picked up the Hagstrom around the time his band The Neckbones formed in 1993 in Oxford, Mississippi, while he was going to college at Ole Miss. He bought the guitar from the band’s original bass player.

Boyer had been playing a Fender Stratocaster, but didn’t love it for the raw rock The Neckbones were making. Once he gave the Hagstrom a try though, he found his talisman.

“It just immediately was like, oh my god this thing sounds amazing,” Boyer recalls now. “It’s got a unique sound, to me just a little bit thicker sounding than a Les Paul,” the classic Gibson popularized by the likes of ZZ Top‘s Billy Gibbons and Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page, two of Boyer’s guitar heroes.

Back when he was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, Boyer went through a shredder phase, learning fast heavy songs by musicians like Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads. In high school he was in a band with the very metal name of Bastille.

But later in Oxford, Boyer says because his Hagstrom “is not a very easy guitar to play, not fast and smooth,” that was another reason he liked it. “It slowed me down, and it made me really have to dig in and just become more tasteful and listen to what I was playing more.”

With Boyer on guitar and vocals, Tyler Keith lead vocals and guitar, Forrest Hewes drums and vocals, and bassist Robbie Alexander, The Neckbones drew from punk legends like New York Dolls and Iggy Pop as well as country, blues and rock pioneers. The Replacements’ irreverent tunefulness was also an inspiration. Boyer says, “We always had a good sense of humor, and never took ourselves seriously at all. I mean, we weren’t ever trying to be anything. We just loved playing music.”

The Neckbones became the first rock band signed to Fat Possum Records, the label that in the ‘90s brought the beautifully primitive music of elderly Mississippi bluesmen like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough to twenty-something indie-rock fans.

Standout songs on The Neckbones ‘1997 Fat Possum debut album “Souls on Fire” include the twangy angst of “Dead End Kids,” a simmering title track, and headbanging “Hit Me.”

“Souls on Fire” won over the likes of legendary rock critic Robert Christgau. “He gave us a great review,” Boyer recalls. Christgau’s reviews conclude with him giving an album a grade, and he gave The Neckbones album an A-. “Right next to our review he gave Pearl Jam a B,” Boyer says, “so I was always kind of proud of that.”

Not bad for an album recorded in just a few blurry nights at a rinky-dink studio in the Mississippi countryside next to a karate dojo. Boyer worked a day-job washing dishes at a local Greek restaurant. “After the end of my shift,” he says, “I went out to the studio and then we would, you know, party and record until like three or four in the morning. And then I’d sleep three hours and get up the next day and go do it again.”

Early on, The Neckbones’ musical chemistry grew from playing live at Oxford pub Ireland’s. The band’s first gig together though was at a local dive bar called Forrester’s, where their drummer Hewes worked. The Forrester’s gig required them to play all night long and two sets.

The Neckbones had worked on original material since they formed, but this first show required them to also learn hours of cover songs, to appease the bar’s early evening, just getting off work, blue-collar crowd. “They would yell at you and want to fight you and s— if you didn’t play stuff that they knew,” Boyer says with an easy laugh.

The band crammed for three nights before learning classic rock and Elvis Presley covers. They ended up having a blast. The Neckbones won over the Forrester’s early-night blue-collars, many of whom stuck around for the second set, when the band’s friends would file in, and the band could play their originals.

Beyond rocking well together, Boyer says in Keith, Hewes and Anderson he’d found bandmates “that weren’t trying to follow the bandwagon. In Oxford at the time, it was very jam-band heavy. You know, Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic. That was largely what people were doing and into and following. And we were not wanting to do that.”

After The Neckbones got some local gigs under their belt and self-released a cassette-only album called “Painting in Trash,” they began hitting the road on weekends. They played shows in Meridian and Starkville. Soon they were going further out into the Southeast, to venues like Atlanta’s Star Bar in Atlanta and Birmingham’s The Nick . In 1995, The Neckbones self-released their first LP, “Pay the Rent.” Opening track “Help Slip Not” evokes a collision of Velvet Underground and Joy Division.

On nights off at home in Oxford, Boyer and his bandmates would often go to Junior Kimbrough’s Chulahoma juke joint, called Junior’s Place, to hear performances by Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside.

“I was smitten right away,” Boyer says. “Still my favorite music and musical experiences are of being in Junior’s, and listening to them play, Being out of your mind and dancing, and just the eccentric nature of the different group of people in there co-mingling. It was the coolest, most soulful, most punk rock thing I’ve ever been around.”

From there and that, The Neckbones connected with Fat Possum Records. After “Souls on Fire” touring, the label released the band’s 1999 album “The Lights are Getting Dim.” The follow-up LP was a click more sonically polished. The band still brought their white heat though, as heard on essential cuts like “Cardiac Suture” and “Nobody Gets Me Down.”

Touring expanded to legendary venues like Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club, The Crocodile in Seattle, Lounge Axe in Chicago, Spaceland in Los Angeles, Mercury Lounge in New York, Maxwell’s in New Jersey, and Grog Shop in Cleveland.

“Name a rock club or dive bar and we played there,” Boyer says. The band also did a couple extensive European tours, to Germany, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Austria, Slovenia and Sweden.

The Neckbones played exactly one show in Boyer’s hometown. Unfortunately, that show, at now defunct Huntsville club Lanny’s Downtown, was shambolic. “It was one of the worst shows we ever played. It was terrible,” Boyer says. “We couldn’t hear anything, and we might have been overserved. I just remember being really embarrassed because it was the only time some of my high school friends and Mom had ever seen us, and it was a really off show.”

Another time, The Neckbones were booked to play iconic Huntsville dive Tip Top Café. Alas, when the band got there – this was before widespread cellphone usage — there was a hand-written sign on the door that Tip Top had shutdown. This was especially a bummer for Boyer. As a teenager, he’d seen bands like Man or Astro-man? and White Animals blow the roof off Tip Top.

During his childhood, Boyer’s mom Elizabeth had a piano in the family home. Listening to her play at night as he fell asleep drew him to music early on. “She wasn’t a concert level pianist,” he says, “but she played with such emotion it always moved me.”

After his parents split up, the record collection his dad left behind was also crucial. “It wasn’t a huge collection,” Boyer says, “but it contained a lot of things I really loved: Willie Nelson, Elvis, Queen, James Gang, Eagles, Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, and of course The Beatles. I also have a distinct memory of hearing Kool & The Gang on my sister’s Snoopy radio and just loving it.”

In middle school, during a spring break Florida vacation Boyer met some older dudes who listened to hard-rock bands like Zeppelin and Aerosmith. That, he says, “really hooked me on the sound of an electric guitar.” Later, a friend loaned him a cassette of Jimi Hendrix hits like “Purple Haze,” “Stone Free” and “Crosstown Traffic.” Boyer says Hendrix, “is what inspired me to want to play the guitar. I remember struggling trying to figure out, how do you make the guitar sound like that?” His first rock concert was the band Heart, known for hits like “Barracuda” and “Magic Man, at Huntsville’s Von Braun Center arena. “They were pretty kick ass live,” Boyer recalls. “Some pretty phenomenal guitar playing, for sure.

After graduating from Huntsville High School in 1990, most of Boyer’s friends group went to college at the University of Alabama or Auburn University. It wasn’t a huge leap for him to attend Ole Miss instead. His family had roots in Oxford. But importantly, Boyer says, “It was the beginning of me really trying to break away from preconceived notions of who I was. And kind of starting to evolve and forge my own path.”

His hometown figured into this mindset. “I think the eclectic nature of Huntsville being fairly cosmopolitan,” Boyer says, “because of the space program and big engineering industry pulling people from all over the country and world, really stuck with me. And inspired me to want to travel. And being in a band was a really great way to do that.”

In addition to playing in The Neckbones, Boyer worked as a tour manager for Fat Possum Records blues artists like Paul “Wine” Jones. “I have a pretty wild story,” Boyer says, “about taking him [Jones] and his drummer ‘Pickle’ over to play a festival in the Netherlands. We barely made it. At one point he [Jones] tried to cut me with a rusty razor blade, and I had to take him down. He broke a string on his first song, and I had to change it for him because he was so drunk. I had to tune it for him in front of a packed house. But then he put on one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever seen.”

Boyer also did a few tours, including to Japan, with R.L. Burnside, who Boyer not only played guitar, but tour managed, did most of the driving and sold merch.

“First time I ever played with him,” Boyer says, “was at a show on stage in Atlanta at Smith’s Olde Bar. No rehearsal at all. I had really never played slide guitar to speak of, so it was a crash course. That first show was terrifying. But R.L. told me I did ‘pretty good.’ I got better real quick, and then he started telling me I did ‘real good,’ and he really liked playing with me.”

Boyer says Burnside, who died in 2005 at age 78 and is the grandfather of Grammy-winning blues artist Cendric Burnside, had a great sense of humor. “He used to call my hotel room in a faux woman’s voice and say, ‘Hey, what you doin’ over there? Come on over here if you want.’ I’d go hang in his room, and we’d sip moonshine and watch Urkel [a character on the sitcom ‘Family Matters’]. He’d laugh his ass off. He loved that show. But then he’d also get talking about his past and the music that inspired him, and that was super cool. At night, we used to drink something he called a bloody mother—er. It was scotch and tomato juice”

Music allowed Boyer to meet some his own heroes. Ramones frontman Joey Ramone came to a Neckbones show in New York. David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, was at one of Burnside’s New York shows Boyer played guitar on.

The Neckbones released their (to date) last album “Gentleman,” on Tennessee indie Misprint Records. The band went on hiatus around 2000, as the musicians’ family lives and day-job careers grew. Along the many miles put in together, The Neckbones endured typical internal rock and roll bruises and mayhem. But there was never truly an I-hate-you breakup, Boyer says.

In a way, The Neckbones were a precursor to the early-aughts garage-rock revival that hit the mainstream with bands like The White Stripes, Hives and Strokes. The Hives even requested Boyer and Hewes’ next band, called The Cool Jerks and included underground rock icon Jack Oblivian, open for them at Texas’ South By Southwest festival. This was right when The Hives were blowing up.

Boyer recalls, “Their manager was kind of pissy about it. ‘Who are these nobodies?’ But The Hives were fans of our band and got us on the bill. I thought that was really cool of them. They were great.” Of those garage revivalists, he’s also a fan of The White Stripes, whose singer/guitarist Jack White is now a solo star. It’s not a stretch to say White’s early-Stripes blues-punk guitaring echoes Boyer’s Neckbones work.

At Ole Miss, Boyer got his degree in accounting. At the turn of the century, he got into business management for musicians in Nashville, where he and his family still reside. His tour managing, as well as the experience and perspective from having been in a legit band, make him perfect for it.

For our video call interview, Boyer beams in from the office of Flood Bumstead McCready & McCarthy. He’s risen up the ranks of that venerable entertainment business management company to become an owner and vice-president.

Now in his early 50s, Boyer’s still fit. His hair’s closely cropped and gray now and he’s wearing glasses. Besides family, music and work, his interests include road-course car-racing his 760-horsepower Ford Shelby GT500.

Boyer avoids name-dropping clients. But a little googling reveals FBMM’s clients have included stars like Taylor Swift, The Black Keys, Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts, as well as up-and-comers across genres.

He says being a business manager is his way of giving back. “Helping young artists get a fair shake and not get taken advantage of and understand the business and the industry — that’s kind of what I’ve focused and dedicated my life to for the last 25 years. And it’s been really rewarding. I love music and I love musicians. And it’s great to be able to help other musicians have as good a shot at it as they can and hopefully have something to show for it and be able to raise the family and have a good life playing music.”

Back when being in bands was still his focus, Boyer learned the guitarist for one of his alt-rock bands had recently sold his car and moved back in with his parents. “That was eye opening,” Boyer says, “Kind of realizing, oh that that’s a tough road to go, so maybe you don’t want to keep going down that path. And it’s why now I’m sitting in an office.”

The Neckbones have reunited intermittently over the years. For the last 10 years or so, Boyer, Keith and Hughes have been joined on bass by Van Thompson, who joined after Anderson no-showed on a gig, Boyer says.

In summer 2024, The Neckbones played a handful of shows, their first since around 2018, including Milwaukee and Green Bay stops. At Nashville dive Betty’s Grill, the band showed they still had it. Keith’s wildcat howl, Boyer’s succinct stings and Hewes’ Rod-Stewart-and-the-Faces-influenced swing, all intact. Thompson’s bass punched and slithered. Like he’d been there right from the start. Boyer says, “I think the energy and joy’s still there because it was always so real. It was never artificial, never manufactured.”

The Neckbones’ recent performances kicked up sparks. There are previously recorded tracks to release, and the band’s also talked about cutting a new, live-in-the-studio album. Boyer’s also working on releasing the previously vinyl-only Neckbones album “Gentleman” for a digital release.

“The thing that I love the most is playing music live,” Boyer says. “And second to that, I love being in the studio, recording music and writing music, making it. It’s the most fun that I think I’ve ever had. And probably will be until the day I die.”

Tonight, May 3, The Neckbones play a 7 p.m. set at Memphis music festival RiverBeat, the same timeslot as big acts like alternative band Cage the Elephant and rapper Flo Milli will be on the festival’s other stages. Sleek rockers The Killers headline the night, which also features rap gods Public Enemy.

Boyer says playing music live with The Neckbones now actually feels better than in their heyday. “We’ve nothing to prove, you know? We never really felt like we did, but even more so now. There’s no reason we’re doing this other than we love it, and I wish that was the only reason anybody did it. It should be.”

He still has that old Hagstrom Swede electric guitar, too. The only other musician of note he’s seen play that same model is Pat Smear from The Germs and later Nirvana. That said, Boyer eagerly point out in Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback TV special, Presley plays another type of Hagstrom electric, called a Viking.

In the last couple decades, Boyer’s picked up another couple vintage Hagstroms as backups for his original, which he still plays onstage. “I’ve played it so much and so hard,” he says, “I was literally worried this thing’s gonna disintegrate in my hands one day, and I’m going to be without my favorite guitar.”