On the road to somewhere with the Stifftones in their hearse Tania

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – You want to talk about “meet cute?”

Rachel Stief met her hubby, Shaun, when he was playing at a bar in East St. Louis, Ill. She was divorced, not looking for another man, and he was playing during an open mic event.

“I figure, ‘This guy’s cute, but he’s probably going to go up there and play a song about a stripper and it will suck,” Rachel Stief said. “But the song wasn’t about a stripper; I felt like it was about me. I thought to myself, ‘Anyone who can write a song like that can’t be a total a$$hole.’”

The Stiefs have been a couple ever since, living a rock and roll lifestyle – a “devival,” if you will – that would make Alice Cooperor the members of Slipknot step back and say “What?!” admiringly.

For the past five years, Rachel and Shaun Stief – the Stifftones … more about that later – have been traveling the country in their ‘96 Cadillac Hearse Tania – more on that, too – playing wherever they can find a place to play, counting off the miles between shows in a manner that Rachel calls “humbling and uplifting.”

The Stifftones – and Tania – will make their way into Albany this weekend for their third show at the Oglethorpe Lounge.

“Hey, it’s a sh–hole dive bar, but that’s the kind of place we love to play,” Rachel said. “Like most places we play, though, there are some really great people there.”

The Stifftones will be celebrating Shaun’s 47th birthday at the O, introducing fans old and new to the songs on their latest album, “Existentialism on Main St. Folie a Deux.” They, tongue in cheekly, describe the LP as “the intersection of where our sepia-toned lives went full Technicolor. It is a self-produced masterpiece recorded in unique spaces across the country.”

Shaun fell in love with the music of alternative rockers Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker when he took up music seriously in his 20s, but Rachel avoided rock and roll for fear that she might “disappoint Jesus.”

“I sang in church, and one day my mom saw Annie Lennox (of the Eurythmics) on MTV and declared, ‘There will be no rock and roll in this house; I’m raising pure girls,” Rachel said. “But once I discovered REM, that was the end of that.”

When the couple started a group together – “Stifftones” is a play on Shaun’s surname, which led everyone to joke about playing with a “Stiffy” – they surreptitiously ran into Cracker frontman Johnny Hickman. They boldly told the singer they would one day open for him.

When the Stifftones got the chance, at a show in California … let’s just say it didn’t go well.

“Basically, we sh– the bed,” Rachel said.

Licking their wounds, the couple came back East, spending the funds they made selling merchandise and ended up spending a winter in New York in a non-insulated trailer. While heading to a visiting nursing gig (Rachel’s early profession), they came upon a used hearse and decided they had to have it.

“We didn’t have the money, so I called my dad and told him we’d found the hearse and wanted to buy it,” Shaun said. “I told him we’d pay him back, and he sent me the money. The guy wanted $3,500 for the hearse, but I told him we only had $2,500. He said he couldn’t sell it to us for that.

“He asked what we were doing, and we told him we were a band and planned to drive to our shows in the hearse. He finally relented and said he’d sell it to us for $2,500 if we promised to stay in contact with him. Of course, we did. We found out later he’d done the same thing for another band: 3 Doors Down.”

About the hearse’s name …

“Everybody named their hearse ‘Patty’ because of Patty Hearst,” Shaun said. “Of course, Patty changed her name to ‘Tania,’ so … Plus Camper Van Beethoven had a song called ‘Tania,’ so there you go.”

The Stiefs are aware that their lifestyle is a bit bizarre, but Rachel proudly points out that their kids, who were originally mortified by their parents’ life choices, now think what they do is pretty cool.

“Hey, when we started this, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Rachel said. “If we did, we wouldn’t have done it. But we’ve been doing it five years now, and so many times along the way, we’ve had our faith restored.”

But would the Stifftones have preferred to maybe do things a little differently, a little more mainstream in search of their elusive musical dream?

“Oh, no,” Shaun says. “Even if we’d been able to make a lot of money along the way, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Now that’s the words of a couple that’s at home driving 200,000 miles back and forth across the country in a hearse named Tania.