Until you've heard Led Zeppelin's hard-rocking, head-thrashing crunchy-blues Black Dog played on a washboard boy, you haven't lived yet.

And the thing is, until you've spent some time with Louisville, Ky.'s natty-cool Juggernaut Jugband as they do their thing, there's no way you could imagine what you've been missing, how utterly empty your life has been without the sweet, cheeky virtuosity the Juggernauts displayed Wednesday night at Lake Worth's Bamboo Room.

The four band members, who go by the goofy stage names Roscoe Goose, the Amazing Mr. Fish, Smiley Habanero and Skip Tracer, are a combination vaudeville act, musical American history lesson and very, very tight band. With the expected jug and washboard, and also snare drum, trumpet and electric guitars, they mined both traditional jug band fare as well as Nat King Cole's Route 66, the silent movie-era Sheik of Araby and a comic brass treatise on The Doors' People Are Strange.

Seriously. It was the coolest.

It's sort of weird to say that they're not what you'd think a jug band would be, because you've probably never given much thought to what a jug band is in the first place, other than some sort of unsophisticated Hee-Haw throwback played by guys in overalls.

But, as the fedora-wearing Roscoe Goose explained to the animated assembled listeners, jug band music was the result of urban ingenuity by musicians toiling in bustling river towns like Louisville and Memphis.

"No one knows exactly how playing the jug started," Goose explained, supposing that some resourceful musician used one from Louisville's then-thriving bottling industry. "I do know you had to empty the thing first."

That kind of well-timed zinger showed up all through the Juggernauts' act, and worked beautifully because of the palpable mood of inspired silliness, as well as an unspoken love and respect for the music and the history of a genre born of creativity, hope and good times.

The band's members have a gorgeous sense of vocal harmony, heard perhaps best on the weird, pretty novelty waltz Lydia, about a tattooed lady. It neatly sums up what the Juggernauts bring to the table a sense of fun, whimsy and an appreciation for the weirder things in our collective past. And it doesn't hurt that they can totally rock out on a washtub bass.