Like any rock'n'roll band worth its salt, Boston's Mr. Airplane Man have developed their sound through years of bar residencies, self-produced EPs, and increasingly longer and larger albums and tours. Their brief yet powerful back catalog reads like a mini rock history: the first recordings seethe with the intensity of raw delta blues, which was an early influence, while musical mentor Mark Sandman taught them how to fuse that moanin'-at-midnight cool with a more urgent garage-meets-punk sound.

Guitarist/vocalist Margaret Garrett began taking lessons from Sandman in 1994, shortly after her first band, Blow, combusted; after getting a handle on a handful of improvisational blues chords, she headed to Arizona to hook up with her childhood friend Tara McManus. The two holed up in an apartment and made up songs, Garrett cranking out her trademark distortion-tinged grooves while McManus kept the beat on a secondhand drum kit.

On a sojourn to San Francisco, none other than the Bassholes' drummer Bim introduced Garrett and McManus to the foot stomps and field hollers of Fat Possum blues; nonplussed, they took notes on the ragged stylings of such musicians as Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and T-Model Ford, and kept on practicing.

Back in Boston, Mr. Airplane Man named, of course, for the Howlin' Wolf song honed their craft busking on city streets by day, then playing on the local bar circuit at night. Other influences began to creep in the Mississippi hill country blues of Fred McDowell and Jessie Mae Hemphill, along with the organ-fueled sounds of the Lyres and Memphis bands like the Compulsive Gamblers and '68 Comeback. On tour with Sandman's group Morphine at the end of the decade, Mr. Airplane Man continued to develop their signature sound, and, in '99, the alt-news weekly Boston Phoenix voted them "Best New Local Act."