GARDNER —Nashville-based country musician Tim LaRoche recounted his early life while seated on the porch outside of the “Rusty Truck Saloon.” 

The aptly named building – complete with an old bar – is the property of Sufferin’ Bastards bassist Ronnie Cormier and the primary practice location for the band. LaRoche, who’s known The Bastards for years, joined them for a practice session on Sunday, July 25, while visiting his mother-in-law who lives in Carlisle.

“I was born into it,” said LaRoche. “It was probably like second or third grade before I realized other families didn’t play music. I was like ‘what you don’t play music?’”

LaRoche was raised in the Gardner area by a family with innate musical talent. His uncle was “one of those,” he said, a child prodigy who became a New England Conservatory classical pianist.

“Never been married, never had a driver’s license, never had kids, he just dedicated his life to music,” LaRoche said of his uncle. “But he was also a prodigy, you know those kids, six, seven years old playing Mozart, [Maurice] Ravel?”

LaRoche, who also had a knack for classical piano, taught himself to play the guitar by transposing classical piano to the instrument.

He played country, folk, and rockabilly music growing up because that’s what his parents listened to, stars like: Emmy Lou Harris, Jonathan Edwards, Merle Haggard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers and the like. 

But he didn’t start out performing country music. By the time LaRoche was a student at Athol High School in the 80s, he learned how to play rock and metal so he could join the local music scene.

“Getting into junior high and high school, if you wanted to be in a band around here, it was Ozzy and Metallica,” explained LaRoche, adding that adapting his style of play to hard rock wasn’t too complicated.

“Because of the blue grass years and the classical years, it’s just not much different as far as your hand mechanics go,” he said. “The playing is the same, the rapid notes and the runs and stuff, but all you are doing is treating the notes differently. So, it was a no brainer getting into the rock and roll, the heavy metal side of things around here in junior high and high school.”

By the time he was 15, LaRoche joined “Sudden Impact,” a rock band based in the Gardner-Athol area that performed traditional 80s rock, “with big lead solos, the whole bit,” LaRoche explained.

He said, “…[it] was with a bunch of old guys, I mean, these guys were all like 20, 21, you know, so we were playing places like The Channel, Narcissus, T.T the Bear’s Place.”

When LaRoche graduated high school, he moved to New York City to pursue his musical aspirations because there wasn’t much of a music industry in the Boston area.

“You’ve got all the best schools in the world here, but there was no music business here, there weren’t a lot of bands getting signed out of the Boston area,” said LaRoche. 

LaRoche said that when he graduated, he siphoned all his neighbors’ gas and drove his ’71 Nova to New York City. Living out of his car, he went to audition after audition until he landed a gig with a band named Siloam that had a deal with Epic Records and was managed by Doug Thaler, who also managed some wildly successful bands at the time, White Snake and Mötley Crüe.

The band recorded an album in Ottawa, Canada, which sold about a million records to date, and toured internationally.

“The thing was, I looked the part, I played the part, so I got the part, but I didn’t know sh*t about business,” LaRoche said. “That’s when I realized, this is a business also, so I ended my contract …and Doug Thaler wanted me to put a group together of my own and I ended up connecting with a lot of guys down in Nashville on that project, so there was a lot of back and forth with New York, Nashville and Boston at that time.”

LaRoche had difficulty pulling a band together for his manager and the project dissolved before it ever began. 

“Doug ended up losing interest and it just kind of all faded into the past,” said LaRoche. 

After his band project didn’t pan out, he returned home to Athol – this was when he was around 21- or 22-years-old – and lived off what he earned in New York for a year while staying with his grandmother. 

“One day I woke up at my grandmother’s house and I’m like, ‘I’m the biggest loser in the world!’ I’m 22, I have money from the records and stuff, but that doesn’t count. I live with my grandmother, I don’t have a car, I don’t have a job. I look like a complete loser’ and I felt like one,” said LaRoche. 

Then he started playing with local folk musician Kellie Girouard at a time when there weren’t a lot of acoustic acts in the area.

“A lot of the rooms we were doing, we had to create it,” said LaRoche. “We had to just go in there and have them give us a shot and all of a sudden it turned into a scene and I had all these connections in Nashville and I was like ‘Kellie we need to go to Nashville,’ but she was married at the time and had her life.”

So, that’s when LaRoche decided to head to Nashville, at around 24-years-old. 

LaRoche settled down in Nashville, doing a lot of session work as a studio guitar player. His session work included some big names like Travis Tritt and Kid Rock.

But after “getting a call,” he took a hiatus from Nashville for a couple years, coming back to Gardner to take care of his mother who was dying of ovarian cancer.

After his mother’s death, LaRoche returned to Tennessee, and started a family on a small horse farm north of Nashville – living a somewhat normal life.

Then one day, while LaRoche was sitting on his couch in a pair of overalls covered in dirt watching TV with his daughter, Janna, he saw an ad that would change his life forever.

“I had coveralls on, we were a mess, we hadn’t showered in like three days. There was a big party blowout at the farm,” LaRoche said. “That day we were cleaning up and we sat down to eat lunch and we were watching TV and the TV says ‘auditions for Nashville Star, last day, they go until two o’clock down at the Wildhorse [Saloon].’”

On a whim, LaRoche decided to try out for the now-defunct show, which he described as “American Idol’s redneck cousin.”

And in his dirty overalls, he grabbed his young daughter, a guitar and jumped into his “junk bucket” pickup truck and drove to the Wildhorse Saloon, grabbing a parking space right out front. 

“One of my super powers is parking,” he quipped. “You can go to an event and nobody can find parking and I can pull up and ‘bam’ there’s a spot. I can find parking anywhere and for free.”

After LaRoche put his daughter in a stroller and headed to the back of the line, which circled the saloon, a camera crew descended upon them.

“I get her out of the car and put her in her stroller looking as cute as can be and people are just staring at us,” said LaRoche. “All of a sudden this film crew is just ‘boom’ on top of us and people were like, ‘what was that about?’ ‘Who is this guy?’”

LaRoche said the film crew came back about 10 minutes later, moved them halfway through the line and asked him to start a jam session, which he did. Then a half hour later, the crew returned and brought him to the front of the line. 

Once LaRoche got into the saloon, he was asked to do an acapella audition by the judges. One of the judges interjected saying “thank God you can sing.” She explained that every judge has one “freebie” contestant that they let through regardless of what the other judges say. LaRoche said the judge added, “as long as you can remotely sing you are mine, with the cute kid and the old truck.”

“I was like ‘oh, they are grooming us for the show,’” recalled LaRoche. “It was an image thing, but it was how we were.” 

He added, “So, getting on Nashville Star had absolutely nothing to do with talent, it had nothing to do with me and it had nothing to do with good planning or anything.”

LaRoche placed in the top 10 out of thousands of auditions, this was in 2007, when he was 36 years old and “already over the hill for Nashville.”

After his appearance on Nashville Star, LaRoche says he was immediately picked up by Oswald Entertainment Group, which manages Kenny Chesney, and went on the road as an opening act for Charlie Daniels and Gretchen Wilson. 

But after the economy crashed in 2008, he was dropped by Oswald Entertainment and started producing his career independently, playing all over the country and selling CDs.

“In a lot of ways that was more lucrative, but the big deal is still the best deal in town,” LaRoche said. “But at that point I just started doing fun stuff, kind of getting out of the rat race and doing fun gigs.”

Fun stuff, like playing with his old friends The Sufferin’ Bastards one Sunday afternoon in a dimly lit old saloon in Gardner.