The sound on the Statistix's American Dream EP is rough, with echoing, thin, buried drums, and vocals that are often blown out and as a result sometimes have an unpleasant, visceral piercing quality. The bass on the 37-second-long "Punk as F---" is bloated and warped. The volume varies from track to track.

It is, in other words, pure punk, assaulting ears for less than 13 minutes over its eight songs.

None of this is a complaint exactly. The Quad Cities trio is simply conforming to the movement's shabby-DIY template: full-throttle and full volume, with little patience for nuance - with little patience, period.

"I'm not working as much as I've been," said 78-year-old Lonnie Brooks in a recent phone interview. "I had in mind to try to retire, but my boys keep tellin' me, 'Let's go out there.'"

I asked him when he decided he wanted to retire. Without missing a beat or belying the joke, the Louisiana-bred Chicagoan deadpanned: "I was thinking about this about 16 years ago. But I needed money, so I kept on."

Brooks' "retirement" decision coincided with his last studio release of new recordings, 1996's Roadhouse Rules - which in retrospect seems to have ended a two-decade solo run on the Alligator label, including 1979's classic Bayou Lightning. The All Music Guide called him "a Chicago blues giant" with a "unique Louisiana/Chicago blues synthesis unlike anyone else's on the competitive Windy City scene."

For the music career of singer/guitarist Coco Montoya, thank the persistence of John Mayall.

It's not merely that Mayall called Montoya to ask him to join the legendary Bluesbreakers band in the early 1980s. It's that he called back when Montoya - who had quit music as a profession after a stint drumming for Albert Collins in the 1970s - hung up on him.

"I didn't think it was him," Montoya said in a recent phone interview, promoting his Saturday bandshell performance at the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. "I was bartending at a British pub. ... So I thought it was some of the English cats in there teasing me. ... He called back. 'No, this really is John Mayall. ... Do I have to come down there ... ?'"

While listening to Kelley Hunt perform - the singer/songwriter's joyously smoky, soulful blues vocals a perfect match for her funky and fiery piano skills - it's easy to imagine that the Kansas-based musician never lacked for confidence. As she admits during our recent phone interview, though, she actually did. She just didn't tell anyone.

"When I was about 17, I was in a band with my brother's friends, and these were older guys - like 21 or whatever," says Hunt with a laugh. "I wasn't singing at all; I was just playing these keyboards that they had. And one night we were playing for an event at the college in Emporia, where I grew up, and we were being paid, and the gal that was supposed to sing just did not show up. And it was time to start, and the guys looked at me and just said, 'Oh my God, we hope you can sing.'

"I was pretty much horrified," she continues. "I mean, I knew I could, because I was doing it in school, but never in this kind of setting. So at that moment, I just made a conscious decision: 'I'm going to pretend like I'm all about this, and I'm going to pretend like I'm not scared out of my gourd.' And I just slammed it out for a couple hours, and I remember thinking, 'Well, (a) nobody here even knows there's anything different, (b) the singer's fired, and (c) I now get paid twice as much.'"

Laughing, Hunt says, "I just stepped into it brazenly and naïvely, and just assumed that it would all work out."