It’s a warm, bright Monday afternoon at The Swiss. The place is mostly empty. The doors are wide open, and a soft breeze shuffles in. Big trucks and Harleys rumble by outside.

As a rule, if I can get Oly on tap, I do — so I do. I tell the bartender I’m there to meet “The Reverend” Nathan Kirby of Ten Miles of Bad Road, a Swiss employee. She says he’s always late. She’ll send him my way if she sees him.

I find a quiet booth and sit down. There’s something about drinking Oly, or anything, in the afternoon. Especially a warm, bright, sleepy afternoon. Makes you think. Inspires reverie. Lets the mind go places it can’t in the workday rush.

My mind goes back, back beyond Tacoma, across the Cascades to dusty roads in Idaho and Montana, to dusty bars, to other, older Oly afternoons — the long, weird journey here.

Finally Kirby arrives, along with the rest of the band. We head outside for a smoke. With the exception of lead guitarist Jakob Jess, all the band members work at the bar, and their eyes seem unaccustomed to the sun. Kirby wears big smoky lenses and brothers Alex (bass) and Justin (drums/harmonica) Hosea squint and blink like they just woke up, which they more or less did. Basically, the band looks like they sound: wild, weary and well-traveled. They look like 10 miles of bad road.

Finished smoking, we sit at a big round table in the open bay doors by the empty phone and photo booths. The conversation quickly goes where my mind was going earlier — back. This is partly because I’m asking about their history. It’s also because of the mood. But mostly it’s because of the music. The outlaw-country rock of Bad Road makes you turn to face the continent and the past.

It’s the stories. Inspired by great musical raconteurs like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, they sing ’em and they’ve got ’em.

The story of the band’s birth, for example, was made for country music. As Kirby tells it, “I said, ‘Hey, let’s start a country band,’ then Mama Loves Daddy (Alex Hosea’s former band) broke up the next day.”

“We talked about it and got together a few times, then I got in a head-on collision and was on OxyContin for two and a half months,” adds Justin Hosea.

While it’s not exactly the line “I was drunk the day my momma got out of prison,” as another one of their heroes, David Allan Coe, once sang, you have to admit that’s pretty good.

The story of how they got hooked on these heroes and this music is somewhat more complicated, however. For Kirby, who grew up in Louisiana, country was the status quo, something to rebel against.

And then he moved north.

“I had this van that only had an AM radio,” he explains. “So I either listened to country, or I listened to Rush Limbaugh.” Driving around T-town, far from home, somehow the twang seemed cool. He was hooked.

For the brothers Hosea, the opposite was true. Tacoma kids, they discovered country down south in Orlando, Fla. Justin, who was hitchhiking and hobo-ing around the country competing in poetry slams, traveled there to visit Alex when a woman in Tempe, Ariz., took pity on him and bought him a pizza and a Greyhound ticket. Country seemed to fall from the sky in Orlando, and soon they were converting Justin’s slam verses to honky tonk.

Like I said, stories.

As for Jess, well, he’s still working on the country thing. Or not.

“I don’t want him to just do that Nashville chicken pickin’,” says Kirby.

He doesn’t. He rocks, perfectly complimenting Kirby’s leathery but powerful vocals. They all rock. And that’s the thing. They’re not a country band. They’re a rock band playing country songs.

“We started off playing old country covers and being true to them, and then we stopped being really true to them,” says Kirby, who told me the band will record a full-length later this summer.

Instead, they’re true to themselves and their name. Rocking, rolling, partying hard, and living to tell about it — one bad mile at a time.

[Bob’s Java Jive, with Brotherhood of the Black Squirrel and Johnson County, Saturday, June 6, 8 p.m., $5, 2102 S. Tacoma Way, Tacoma, 253.475.9843]