If you're Robby Baier and Nicolai Lieven and the band is Pearls At Swine you pack up and head for America, taking your American sound with you. After enduring vaguely appropriate comparisons to the Black Crowes, Aerosmith, and the American cum London r&b of the Rolling Stones for so long, it's only wise to go for the greener pastures of the very country whose appetite for such ragged rock ebbs and flows in five year cycles, but never, never goes away.

With their self-produced album and their six years in the trenches together as Pearls In Swine (never mind the years dating back to their kindergarten days), Baier and Lieven set up shop in the US and proceeded to send the CD to every label they can think of. The gritty, roots-ragged rock and roll is well received all around and after showcasing across the country and touring incessantly, Pearls At Swine sign on with a New York management firm. A contract from Atlantic Records is tendered, read, considered, signed and returned to the label, only to be met by the feet-dragging hesitance of fat bellied, shortsighted, soul-sucking power - lunchers. The deal is ultimately scrapped and the band returns to Berlin to nurse their wounds, ruminate on the leeching fields of America's rock and roll machinery, and consider the next move.

With Lieven in Berlin and Baier in the States, a cross-Atlantic commute begins, with either member joining the other for periods of time, during which shows are played and more albums are recorded. There would be four in all.

In '96 the band would finally sign with German label BMG Ariola and record the final Pearls At Swine record. A tour ensues and the band returns to the States, playing at the ASCAP New Music Seminar/Artist Showcase and stopping at CBGB's, as well as playing a string of dates with the reformed two-thirds of Creedence (Creedence Clearwater Revisited). The band continues to receive fantastic press in both Germany and the States, yet despite these positive developments, the often feared does happen: Their A&R guy suddenly departs from BMG, leaving the band with no mouthpiece at the offices, and no one at the label with any particular stake or interest in the continued development of Pearls At Swine.

So what do you do if you've just spent ten years flirting with the fickle mistress of success, only to find yourself standing pants down with just the breeze to tickle your ego, as her beautiful backside becomes a belly tugging, shrinking figure on the horizon? If you're Robby Baier, you quickly remember the words of some unsung, anonymous genius: "no matter how hot she is, someone, somewhere, is sick of her shit." And you go to America.

With the release of SoulTube, Robby Baier has made a clean break with the past and set off on the next chapter in his life-long story of following his considerable muse and making music that cuts to the heart of rock and roll's malleable façade. Returning to the Berkshires, where his family moved in 1981, and where he has lived in fits and starts when not touring and hustling the highways of life in a well-traveled, hungry rock band, Baier has set up shop in a recently purchased railroad station and completed an album of singular vision and wrenching honesty. "I was at a point where I thought, OK fuck it. I've been making the same kind of music for over ten years, with the same guy - it's time for me to break off and do my own thing. That's when I decided to do this album."

Recorded with his collection of analog tracking equipment, Baier engineered and produced the project and played all the instruments: guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, sitar, blues harp, keys, percussion, slide guitar, and saw blade. The result is an extraordinary collection of deeply moving aural canvases; playful, somber, earthy, hypnotic, and loaded to the gills with potential crossover fare. (Crossing over the staid radio boundaries of MTV commercial soundtrack-sounding youth drivel, that is.)

After recording the final Pearls At Swine album with the odd, record company choice of Falco (remember "Der Kommisar"?) and not too pleased with the rather '80s sounding result, (everything was done in the specter of the producer's much beloved Synclavier), Baier took a 180 degree turn with SoulTube.

Sitting on an outdoor patio in the shadow of Tower Records, the ceaseless dull hum of the Mass Pike swelling up from the pavement beneath his words, Robby Baier is considering the intangibles of great rock and roll.

"The more guts you have to fuck up, the more original you end up. I'd rather listen to a guy who plays two crappy chords but pours his soul out than some guy who's playing perfect scales. Your mistakes are what make you interesting. Anybody can play something like anybody else, perfect, you know? There's nothing special about it. Basically I think there's two kinds of musician - like Kolja (Nicolai Lieven) he's one of those guys that studies something to the max. I was always the other way, I just dug around in myself... it doesn't make sense to me to look at something outside yourself and then try to make it your own."

The words speak a truth supported by the sounds of SoulTube. Not that the work is sloppy or wantonly ragged; quite the opposite. Baier's playing is first class and expressive; it's the attitude that can't be mistaken. Influences be damned. Technique, go to hell. The sound of the soul is a devastatingly personal lure, and the great ones spring from the soil of the past with nary a debt owed, hardly a clump of dirt to shake. "I never made the connection that the stuff I listen to is what I should play."

Of the making of SoulTube Baier offers, "I'm really happy with it. It's hard working with a band - being the main writer, you bring something in and it gets tweaked and re-arranged. You gotta get into that mindset, you know, it's cool, everybody works on it and everybody has to be happy with it. But I always thought maybe I can do it better." Two of the songs on SoulTube, "Weeping Eyes" and "Dead End", were commissioned for the soundtrack to German filmmaker Wolfgang Wimmer's release Dead End. The other ten tracks were mostly bits and pieces collected over the last five years on a portable Dictaphone; riffs and fragments that accumulated during the last years of Pearls At Swine.

Baier talks of the growth process that led to the changes in his approach to recording. "It took me until this album to realize like, OK, what sound do I want and what sounds do I like... [everybody] was always talking about 'their sound' and I was like, what the fuck is that?" Coming as he does from the self-taught/self-obsessed school of making music your own way, Baier's words are telling. When blessed with the singular pursuit of ones own vision, where words and music spring naturally and nurturing their growth is an all consuming, unconscious process, things like amps, knobs, effects, and 'sound' remain mere disturbances on the periphery of sight. "A real turning point was when I suddenly realized that I had to decide what my amp sounds like. I've always been like, that's an acoustic guitar, it sounds that way, it's not an option. I mean some of my amps at home are tag sale stuff with one knob, or maybe two."

Built in the 1850s, the Housatonic Railroad Station has sat unused for as long as anyone can remember. The small wood shingled building sits quietly, aging gracefully and hosting memories of its long gone serviceable days when passengers and freight swarmed through the area, a byproduct of the burgeoning textile industry that once flourished in the shadows of the Berkshires' rolling hills.

Inside, octagonal ticket booths sit silently, dust collecting on their well-worn counters, underneath a vast ceiling criss-crossed with long wooden Victorian arches. Outside, just behind the building, trains still run; they just don't stop anymore. Robby Baier has bought the building and it's here that he is in the process of setting up his own small project studio. The renovation of the building and installation of all the recording equipment is scheduled to be finished early in October. He plans to use the studio for he and Lieven's work, but also to begin to record and produce some of the talent that he sees and hears in Western MA. Since SoulTube's release on May 8th, outside of a few solo shows, Baier's time has been occupied by the project, leaving the question of what to do with the album on a back burner. "I haven't shopped it myself. Part of me is like,... OK, what can I do on the Internet, what can I do on my own?' I'm not really interested in selling billions of records. Since I can do it all at home. The album cost me 5,000 bucks or something so, to recoup that and live off it somewhat, I have to sell under 10,000 CDs to make it worth it. I'd like to start making connections in Boston, find a small record label here and just deliver them the stuff. That would be great.

"I had a bad experience with BMG - it's not really that cool to be on a big label, I didn't really like it, [but] if someone said 'this is the greatest thing, here's a couple of hundred thousand dollar advance,' that would be the proof for me. You know, OK these guys are serious about it, and even if they're not, that's enough money for me to make great music for the next twenty years. But I'd rather have them come to me. I'd rather go to a small label now."

Robby Baier is discussing the upcoming task of assembling a band to take SoulTube on the road; at least to Boston, for he knows the fine album will languish without the live performances and the recognition they will bring. Languishing and not performing are not options for Baier. His penetrating gaze defers to a warm conspiratorial grin as he speaks of his earliest experiences with the intoxicating response of a crowd. "When I was about 8 or 9 this American contemporary folk artist moved in downstairs from us and we became friends. He used to teach me stuff and I used to play with him. One night he took me to one of his gigs and I knew one song (that) I had written on the ukulele. So I got up and played it. People couldn't get enough and I sang it over and over." Going back even further, as if eight isn't young enough to spot a budding performer, Baier tells of going to the circus in Berlin at the age of four with his family. As the clowns entered the center ring to warm and entertain the crowd and set the stage for the beasts and freaks and daredevils a curious thing happened. A young Robby began to sense and understand that the vast percolating crowd was cheering and stomping for the strange people on the hockey rink floor. Locking onto this revelation and succumbing to the warm dizzying rush of serotonin as it consummates its courtship with a nubile receptor, the small portion of crowd in near proximity to the Baier clan bore witness the rest of the evening to one jubilant, boisterous small child miming and gesturing with his back to the show. And when the crowd roared for the spectacle behind him, the child bowed and accepted the applause with his best puppet-show bows and sweeping of his young arms.

Much of SoulTube, constructed as it is from random pieces of inspiration, is performed on all manners of instrument and in all manner of odd tuning. The process is described like this: tune the chosen instrument on a whim, fiddle until a riff catches the attention, improvise words (ear untrainably tuned to the magical convergence of syllable and sound), settle in on a groove, build up from there. As a result there are many things to be considered in preparation for his working band. "First of all my songs are pretty much in weird tunings so [live] I have to work with a guitar roadie, get a different guitar for every song. For most of the parts, the bass guitar is all tuned to different things. And then there are a lot of funky instruments. I'd like to find people who play more than one instrument... and they've got to sing."

With this in mind and the completion of the train station recording studio days away, Robby Baier is heading into Boston, and New York, and Los Angeles, and anywhere else the road and SoulTube and his own magical drive will take him. From the suburbs of Stuttgart to the red lights of Berlin to the beer and puke sticky stage of CBGB's to the green blue hills of the Berkshires.

"I had a buddy when I moved to the states. I mean we had no neighbors, our driveway was like a half mile long. We were like six. He was gonna be a mercenary soldier and have his own army. He had a tank for a belt buckle. I used to go over to his house and he had a room in the basement and the walls were just... all guns, all kinds of guns." For a moment the grin on Robby's face battles with comprehending and considering the long gone adventures of childhood on the western frontier. What did you do? In an instant the grin wins out. "We used to blow shit up." Welcome to America.