It's quite passible that if it weren't for Oscar the Grouch and plumber's butt, Cowboy Mouth's Fred LeBlanc wouldn't be the drummmer he is today. If that throws you into a head-scratching frenzy, just hold on a second. It turns out that LeBlanc's first groove experience came when he was mimicking his hero Oscar after his parents bought him a large metal green garbage can for Christmas.

The plumber's butt? Along with the rest of Cowboy Mouth, LeBlanc plays in front-line position to avoid the sights he has seen. "I got tired of looking at guitar player's asses all these years," Fred says with a laugh. "I was playing in a rockabilly cover band and the singer used to do this thing where he'd jump on my riser and bend over. Unfortunately, he would do it every night and when he'd bend over, his pants would kind of come down because he was a little heavy."

All joking aside, LeBlanc's playing style is decidedly minimalist. From his simple four-piece kit to his sense of song, it's a lesson he learned from listening. "My playing is very basic,"he says, "because it's just rock 'n roll, and rock 'n roll music is supposed to have drums that basically support the song -whether it's 'God Save the Queen' or 'That'll Be the Day' or 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.' For me drums should never get in the way of a good song." From his early days as an angry punk rocker to the more country rock vibe of Cowboy Mouth's latest offering, Mercyland, LeBlanc has evolved as a player through a philosophy he originally heard from Bo Diddley. "Keep it simple and think of church, and you'll be alright. If you apply that philosophy to a lot of things in life, you'll usually come out the right end."

THE FIRST CHURCH OF FRED LEBLANC is loud and sweaty and overflowing with beer. Leader LeBlanc screams at the top of his lungs and sweats profusely. "You'll go home hoarse," LeBlanc thunders. "You'll go home horny. You'll go home hung over... but you'll go home happy! Are you with me?" Tonight the church of the Louisiana -bred Cowboy Mouth is quite literally Paradise, a small club on the outskirts of Boston. The religion practiced here, of course, is rock 'n' roll.

"People ask me what we sound like," says LeBlanc, the lead singer of the band, who also has the pleasure of beating on his druns, he explains, like he just walked on in them in bed with his girlfriend. "I tell them, 'Like a New Orleans rock 'n' roll orgasm.'"

The foursome climax some 250 tomes a year to the masses who word-of-mouthed the band's 1996 breakthrough album, Are You With Me?, to success. Night after night, the band belts out it's signature brand of indefatigable optimism, live-for-today stuff that somehow managed to avoid the sort of lame feel-goodism that pollutes most self-help cheerleading. "Cowboy Mouth," LeBlanc bellows, "is about the joy of being alive." A cross between Sam Kinison and Jerry Lee Lewis (with just enough Tony Robbins to make you a little uneasy), LeBlanc turns every gig into an exercise in sonic ecstsy, an experience that creates zealous followers and makes everyone else's live act seem limp and withered by comparison. The bands lyrics and arrangements may be straightforward; country-fried rock, earnest ballads, girlfriend kiss-offs, but the presentation is sweat-soakingly sublime.

Ecstatic group frenzy follows as the band rips into another percusive rock explosion: strangers hug, beer spills, chaos erupts. Cowboy Mouth converts packed onto a tiny club quickly morph onto one writhing, giddy organism. "on a bad night," wrote Michael Lach for Cake magazine, "they'll tear the roof off. On a good night, they'll save your soul." Amen.