Pappas — the bass player in Superdrag and member of a number of other East Tennessee-to-Nashville bands — and two other Superdrag alums (John Davis and Sam Powers, along with drummer Joey Sanchez) put together Warthog for a Nashville benefit show, and the chance to play musical band positions, as well as the opportunity to ape the legendary punk band, has provided plenty of grins for Pappas and company.

“If you think about it, everybody reversed their position from the Superdrag lineup — Sam, who took my place on bass, switched to guitar for Warthog, and John, who sings and plays guitar in Superdrag, is playing bass in Warthog,” Pappas told us last week. “There’s a singer named Tommy — me — and a drummer named Joey. So it’s like The Ramones, but backwards.”

Warthog was a spur-of-the-moment project to help out a friend who’s also a Nashville club promoter. The guy put together a benefit concert for the prevention of lymphoma cancer, the same kind that killed Joey Ramone, and Pappas, Davis, Powers and Sanchez quickly rehearsed six songs to play that night.

“I just had a severe spinal injury at the time but was able to do it, and it wasn’t too bad,” Pappas said. “We just kind of left it for a while, and then we talked about it being a cover band for other punk rock covers. We tried that but decided to (forget) it and just be a Ramones tribute band.”

On the surface, it may seem like a stretch linking the two — four New Yorkers playing fast-and-furious punk in jeans and leather jackets vs. a group of East Tennessee natives who channeled Brit-pop and power-pop to make a splash in the 1990s on MTV and commercial radio — but it’s not as big of one as you might imagine, Pappas pointed out.

“Basically, all the Ramones stuff is is doo-wop and music from the ’50s, and all of the music I’ve ever written you can trace to early 1950s music, which means you can trace it back up to The Ramones,” he said. “It’s all the same stuff, but louder.”

The project has caused quite a bit of stir among the Superdrag faithful, as well as grizzled old punks who enjoy seeing how much energy and attitude Pappas and co. inject into songs like “Commando” and “Teenage Lobotomy.”

“We’ve only really played two shows, and they’ve both gone over great — a lot of humor and stuff,” he said. “This last one was a free show at The Basement here in (Nashville), and I’ve never played The Basement when it was more packed. People were taking all of these black-and-white photos; it reminded me of (legendary NYC punk club) CBGB’s.”

In addition to Warthog, Pappas is working on finalizing plans for the release of a new album by Flesh Vehicle, the side project he started in 1996. The current lineup includes Pappas on guitar/vocals, Steve Latination (of Agent Orange) on drums and Mark Robertson (of Th’ Legendary Shack*Shakers) on bass; according to Pappas, the album — tentatively titled “Racket” — has been in the can for five years.

“The recording process started in November 2004, and I’ve kept meaning to put it out for years, but I just started listening to it again and realized how good it is,” Pappas said. “It’s a pretty unique-sounding record. We did all kinds of things — we set up a speaker and reverse-wired it to be a microphone, so that I was singing into a six-inch Radio Shack speaker on the bulk of the songs.

“I played a lot of acoustic guitar and had the guitar and vocals going into the same mic, and we used all small amplifiers — but you can’t really tell though, because it’s got a big sound to it. We also took an acoustic bass — not a stand-up — put a microphone on it and ran two signals, one directly to the board and the other going to a small Marshall guitar amp, and then we took the two signals and mixed them together.”

He plans on doing a limited run of pressings and hopes to put together some Flesh Vehicle shows, but right now, he said, he’s concentrating on Warthog.

Incidentally, there’s a strange connection between The Used — the emo/punk outfit performing Tuesday night, Feb. 23, at The Valarium in Knoxville — and The Used To Be, another Pappas project.

The Used To Be was originally an alternative (and, in some ways, a forebear) to Superdrag and was called simply The Used; eventually, Superdrag took precedent and The Used fell by the wayside. In 2002, Pappas put The Used back together, but by then, the Utah-based band hitting Knoxville this week had already claimed the name. (In an even bigger twist of irony, that band was once called simply Used but had to add “The” to the moniker after nomenclature conflicts with a Boston band.) So Pappas called his resurrected project The Used To Be.

Got all that? No big deal; just interesting.

“We had to change our name when I heard there was another band called The Used through the grapevine,” Pappas said. “I was a little bit bummed, but I’d left that band by the wayside when we had broken up in 1993 or 1994. I could have done something to trademark the name — paid $600 or something like that. Before The Used To Be even re-emerged, somebody had told me about this other band called The Used.

“At the time, I just didn’t give a shit. I had Flesh Vehicle, and I thought was a cooler name anyway.”

Some websites for your perusal:

Superdrag online

Flesh Vehicle on Myspace

The Used To Be on Myspace

Friday night’s show starts at 10 p.m.; Barley’s is located at 200 E. Jackson Ave. in Knoxville’s Old City. Admission is $5, and The Dirty Johns open the show.