“He eats there every week,” Reuille says. “I don’t see how he affords it.”

“It’s very expensive, though, man — ‘cause it’s from Arby’s,” Bair coolly explains. “You rob a bank.”

Robbing banks is probably an easier way to make a living than performing in a rock band, but the guys of Stygma have decided to play it straight. They’ve shifted the odds of success to their favor by perfecting a set-list full of familiar songs borrowed from popular hard-rock artists.

“Old Metallica, Dream Theatre, old Megadeth,” says guitarist James Henn.

“We go from heavy-heavy to some chill stuff. You get a taste of everything,” says Bair. “There are a lot of heavy bands, but it’s mostly the death-metal bands, then you’ve got the rap-rock bands. But there really aren’t a whole lot of bands that are doing heavy old-school, like old Metallica. Old school. ‘Disposable Heroes.’ It really grabs people.”

“A few years ago when James and I got together, he and I started talking about what kind of stuff that we wished we could go to a bar to see but we both agreed instantly that nobody plays the kind of stuff that we grew up listening to,” says drummer Scott Earley. “And we all still love it, we all still listen to it and we all love to play it.”

Depending on whom you ask, Stygma has been together for six months, eight months or two years. “So basically we don’t know,” Henn says.

“When I got in the band, our first gig was at Buster McNasties in February with Strapt,” Bair claims. “So I think I didn’t get into the band until January.”

The preceding tale may be the loosest rock-group origin story ever told, this music journalist suggests.

“We’re just retarded,” Bair observes.

So why Stygma? Is there a stigma attached to Stygma?

Earley offers an explanation. “It just seems that ... “

“No no no! There is no stigma!” Henn says, interrupting big time. “I know what you’re gonna say and it’s not true. I know what he’s gonna say.”

Despite Henn’s harried attempt at censorship, Earley continues: “It just seems like while getting this thing off the ground, we went through so many singers who said ‘Oh yeah. I’m serious and this is what I want to do’ and they’d come down and wouldn’t say a word in the microphone and then say ‘Hey, that’s cool. Give me a call back and I’ll learn whatever you’re gonna do and we’ll get something going.’ Then they’d never show up again. Same way with the bass players for a while. The singers were by far worse off.

“Once we got things together, we juggled around a few names for a while. James came downstairs with the idea one time. James said you’re gonna love this one. It’s a good thing you guys are sitting down. It’s Stygma. It just kind of stuck after that.”

“I read that in an interview with Steve Vai,” Henn explains. “He was saying something about how his stigma is that he’s Steve Vai and he writes instrumental music and that gets no publicity whatsoever.

“But you didn’t say what I thought you were gonna say so, that’s okay,” Henn says to Earley.

What did you think he was gonna say, I ask.

“Nothing,” Henn suspiciously responds.

“You thought I was gonna say you had a purdy mouth,” Earley says.

After a few minutes of behaving more mysteriously than the Batman, Henn relents: “The stigma (I thought) he was gonna say is that we don’t want to be stigmatized as being a cover band. We want to have originals, but right now we’re a cover band. I don’t want anybody to think that we’re gonna stay just a cover band.”

“We don’t have original songs yet,” Reuille admits. “We’re working on them, but it’s a slow process.”

The members of Stygma realize that playing covers affords them more lucrative club dates than the average “original” band. Relying on large and thirsty crowds for revenue, many local nightclubs offering live music tend to book acts specializing in the performance of instantly recognizable material; i.e., covers. Besides better paying gigs, cover bands tend to get more gigs.

“I wanted to go out and play,” says Reuille. “I was Jonesing to get back out. I spent a year out with JFX playing and playing and playing and playing. From that I went down to nothing.”

Reuille also gets the occasional live fix with his other current band, Tempest. With his other band, Little Green Men, taking some time off, Bair came to appreciate Stygma’s live viability in the marketplace.

With ages ranging from 23 to 30, the men of Stygma should be able to look forward to many years of viability in the music scene. Even as the youngest member of the outfit, though, Bair ought to spend some of that Arby’s money on getting his hard-rock hearing checked. In a nightclub setting, a rocker needs more than little green ears.

“Our last gig at Checkers, I had someone come up on stage and sing. It was like our second to last song, this Pantera tune,” Bair says. “Anyway, it was one of Scott’s friends. His name is Juan. While the band was doing a solo section, I went down off-stage and I could barely hear anything because it was so loud. I’d never met him before so I asked him his name. I could have sworn he said Rod. So I went up on stage and I said ‘We got Rod coming to rock. Come on up here, Rod. Help me out.’ He gets on stage, does the song with me then I say ‘Everybody give it up for Rod.’

“At the end of the night, John and Scott come up to me and tell me his name’s not Rod, it’s Juan. Then Juan comes up to me and says, ‘By the way, my name is Juan.