Better Than Ezra has come a long way since those early days when the band was based in Reston, La. That's the same hometown as the Habitual Sex Offenders, one of those struggling regional acts that used to show up at Tulsa's now-defunct Xenophon every other month.

Better Than Ezra never played Tulsa -- it's only visits to Oklahoma have been two sparsely attended shows in Stillwater -- but the band has known that life of endless clubs like the Xenophon.

``Those kind of bars are so much fun,'' said BTE lead singer Kevin Griffin in an interview last week. ``They all have a life span of about two years, and they're the bread and butter -- the lifeblood -- of touring acts in the South. That's where we cut our teeth. There are so many funny stories about those days.''

Oh, do tell.

``Well, one that always comes to mind . . . we were in Huntsville, Ala., and we didn't have anyplace to sleep. These three girls at the show said, `Hey! Stay with us!' Of course, we went home with them, but we noticed at one point that they all had these big bracelets on, these things that looked like something Dick Tracy would wear. They were big and bulky with this transmitter on the top where a watch face would be. It turns out these girls -- each like 19 or 20 years old -- were some kind of delinquents on in-house arrest. One of them was a drunk driver, one had shoplifted and the other had assaulted somebody. Everywhere they went, they had to hold this bracelet thing up to a phone receiver and it would somehow let their parole officers know where they were. It was like something out of `Logan's Run.' I ended up sleeping in the van because I was too creeped out.''

Not long after that edgy evening, Griffin's days of lodging with felons were quickly ended. Nearly two years after it had been recorded in 1993, ``Deluxe'' was picked up by Elektra, which began pressing it and servicing the copies to radio before a contract had even been signed. Seven weeks after the ink was dry, the single ``Good'' was No. 1.

Bassist Tom Drummond frames the event this way: ``It took us seven years to get signed, and seven weeks after we sign, we have a No. 1 song.''

``Suddenly, we got turbo-charged,'' Griffin said. ``After playing all those (crummy) bars all over the country, suddenly we were perceived -- and that's all there is in this business is perception -- as the hot band. If we had been a new band when we hit that big, I think we would have had trouble with the success and the second album, but we were ready for it. We'd been together a long time, and we managed to maintain some kind of control. Everything happened in a really perfect way.''

The second and current album, ``Friction, Baby,'' beats the sophomore slump. The songs are more complex, and the hooks are more subtle. Griffin said he thinks those subtleties help the album wear better over time, and it also gives the work guts.

The band's Louisiana roots also seep through some of the seams on the second disc, particularly the closer, ``At Ch. Degaulle, Etc.,'' an instrumental featuring musicians from the band's current home town of New Orleans. Griffin said the band has tried to avoid being stereotyped as a Southern band, but he admits certain influences.

``In general, when we're not playing the rock songs, with the slower stuff, there are those folky influences that are best captured by Southern bands,'' he said.

``Maybe it's because of the pace of life. It's surely no coincidence that country music comes from the South where the pace is slower and certain things are more or less important than other places. And it's not just music -- Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor show it, too. It's almost a color, an orangy-brown perspective on the world, like the light you see just as the sun is setting. It permeates all the literature and music here.''

The origin of the name, Better Than Ezra, is a closely guarded secret. The members insist it's nothing extraordinary, but they refuse to explain it. Fans have devised incredibly creative theories on its origin. The most credible story cites a passage from Hemingway's ``A Moveable Feast'' which reads, ``Anything was better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon . . .'' No dice, Griffin said.

``I couldn't believe the Hemingway thing when I saw it on our web site,'' he said. ``I wish it was something that well thought out, but the real story is such a letdown that we refuse to tell anyone. Now it's built up so much because of our refusal to tell it, so now we can really never tell it. It's our only gimmick.''