As watering holes go, the Latch String is among the more unassuming you’re likely to find. Squatting in the middle of the Northrop/Coldwater Road diversion, the place looks like it blew in on the tail of a tornado, basement and all. Or maybe it just grew there, like a mushroom. There is scarcely a change in elevation from the parking lot to the center of the dance floor. The signs announcing its existence are hand-lettered. So are the matchbooks available at the bar. One of the urinals has the added benefits of duct tape and a padlock.

Despite its humble appearance, the Latch String is legendary for the raucous live music it features with regularity. And it doesn’t get any more raucous than on Tuesday nights when Kenny Taylor and Patrick Borton, as Deuce, fill the air with rockabilly, that pristine rock n’ roll progenitor. Deuce recently celebrated their first year at the Latch String on a night that saw the crowd swell steadily till way past midnight. Just an electric guitar and upright bass, two vocal mics and a whole lot of sound. And $2 imports. It’s a hell of a great way to spend a Tuesday night.

For one thing, you never know who you’re going to run into. Taylor tends to draw people from all over when he plays. At 45, after playing in some of the great bands Fort Wayne has produced - The Feel, Red Belly Boys, Blue Moon Boys, not to mention his ongoing round of solo gigs and a busy schedule with the exceptional Chris Shaffer Band - Taylor seems to know everyone. People seek him out. “Old friends come into town and find out where I’m playing,” he says, more with fascination than braggadocio. “I see people from Texas, Denver, all over.”

A few years ago Taylor and the Blue Moon Boys, which at that time saw Borton handling upright bass duties, hosted Sunday night rockabilly at the doomed Ernie’s in Riviera Plaza. (Ernie’s burned down in July 2004.) The Blue Moon Boys usually opened the night and were followed by kick-ass bands from all over the country that Taylor and the boys met while on the road themselves. Between sets he’d pull up a chair, crack a PBR and launch into a story about how one of the guys he had lined up knew his father, a fiddle player from Virginia with family ties to the Carter family. Yeah, that Carter family. “I got relatives buried next to A.P. Carter,” Taylor says.

Taylor got his first guitar at age nine and soon after took lessons - four lessons, to be exact. His teacher told his parents he’d never learn to play. Which may explain why Taylor tends to look surprised by some of the things his fingers do while he’s playing. It’s as though his hands belong to someone else and his brain is desperately trying to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s a condition he’s well aware of. “I’ll learn a riff or chord progression from a particular song, but it won’t show up when we play that song,” he says. “I’ll play it in other songs. Then all of a sudden I’ll play it during the right song, the song I learned it for originally. Sometimes it’s years later. I can’t figure it out.”

Neither can Borton. Despite touring briefly with the Blue Moon Boys, including about a year at the Ernie’s gigs, and another year at the Latch String in Deuce, the inner workings of Taylor’s brain remain a mystery. “His brain is different than anybody I’ve known,” Borton says. “He’s ahead of himself. He’s in the future.”

Borton first met Taylor through original Blue Moon Boys bassist Keith Brewer. Taylor and Brewer were in the Feel together, and when Brewer answered a newspaper ad seeking players for a rockabilly band, an ad placed by the incomparable Nic Roulette, late of Nashville-based Hillbilly Casino, he brought Taylor along. But Brewer got sick and passed away in 1998, just as the Blue Moon Boys began taking off on a run that would take them across the country and through Europe. Before Brewer passed away, he willed Borton his bass. “He said, ‘I want you to have this when I go,’” Borton says. Borton is putting it to good use.

At 28, Borton has been playing for just eight years. But Taylor says he’s world class on the instrument. That’s a tough point to argue against. When Taylor and Borton get rolling at the Latch String, their individual output more than doubles. It sounds like there’s about five guys on stage. Borton assaults his bass with a slapping technique so percussive a drum kit would be superfluous. Taylor works overtime to subdue his 1964 Guild, which he says has neck problems, occasionally breaking into an exaggerated hillbilly hop, a look of amazement on his face, while Borton hammers away at the bass wedged sideways between his legs, rolls his eyes and slides into the persona of aslightly deranged aw-shucks country boy. The effect is spot on.

“I definitely mock the hillbilly origins,” Borton says, “but the show wouldn’t be as fun without a bit of humor. I have an affection for the honky-tonk and rockabilly music. It’s like an old friend you can get away with making fun of and he won’t kick your ass for saying it.”

Borton’s got his own band as well, the Ton-Up Boys, with Jon Hartman on drums and Joshua Wade on guitar. They’re playing more frequently and recently opened for Hillbilly Casino. The project lets Borton try his hand at being a band leader.

With Deuce, such formalities are moot. It’s pure anarchy from the get-go. “This is happy time for Kenny,” Borton says of Deuce’s Tuesday night gigs. “This is his release.” And what a release it is. Instead of playing meticulous slide behind Chris Shaffer’s sometimes heart-wrenching lyrics and always soulful vocals, Taylor in Deuce gets to unwind with songs like George Jones’ “White Lightning,” and his own songs, some co-written with Nic Roulette, of which “Meet Mr. Fist,” is sure to become a classic.

“It’s the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” Taylor says, without a hint of irony. Deuce bounce through a playlist that includes Johnny Cash, Eddie Rabbit, Golden Earring, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blue Oyster Cult, The Beatles, Steve Earle, Doc Watson, Carl Perkins and on and on. It would be easy to name the covers of Chili Peppers and BOC songs, but it’s much more fun to figure out what they are as they unfold in Deuce’s quirky rockabilly arrangements.