Over the years, rock musicians have looked in all sorts of unexpected places for inspiration. The Led Zeppelin songs “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Ramble On” are filled with Robert Plant’s references to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books, while Bob Dylan revealed, in his Chronicles: Volume One, that a lot of his early work was based on information he learned about the American Civil War in the New York Public Library.

Recently, a handful of indie bands have tipped their hats to another unlikely influence: Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer. Though he has scored more films and television productions than any other individual, Morricone is known primarily for his soundtracks to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. In the films The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and For a Few Dollars More, the composer’s music—which oftentimes features a clean, low guitar line that recalls surf rock—is as iconic as the squint of the movies’ star, Clint Eastwood.

While the most popular of the Morricone-influenced bands would have to be Tucson’s stellar Calexico, there are a couple other acts coming to Monterey County this week that incorporate the composer’s trademark sound into their music in varying degrees.

One is the Lubbock, Texas based group the Thrift Store Cowboys, which plays Monterey Live this Thursday. The band’s great “Understudy” features the crisp, slow-burning guitar work that recalls Morricone, while vocalist/violinist Amanda Shires sings about a “bright, shining shield.” But the group’s third CD, titled Lay Low While Crawling or Creeping, heads out in other directions. Vocalist Daniel Fluitt sounds like Ryan Adams, and Shires’ violin, in “Beneath the Shoes,” recalls the alt country group Whiskeytown, which Adams formerly fronted. Meanwhile, “Sidewalk Song” is as languid and hypnotizing as anything that Mazzy Star did.

Fluitt simply sees the Thrift Store Cowboys’ music as a product of his hometown, which sits smack dab in the middle of the Texas South Plains. “The sound we have has an open, desolate feel,” he says.

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Another band that more wholeheartedly embraces Morricone is Los Angeles’ Spindrift, which performs with Dead Meadow and Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound at Big Sur’s Fernwood on Saturday. Led by Kirpatrick Thomas, and featuring former and current members of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Spindrift’s songs meld the classic Western sound with ‘60s psychedelic rock.

On the group’s mostly instrumental “Speak to the Wind,” the guitar comes in shimmering waves like a mirage on a hot highway. Meanwhile, “Celebration of the Human Body” would feel equally at home on the soundtrack to a classic Western or a ‘60s surf movie like The Endless Summer.

Spindrift bassist and baritone guitarist Henry Evans says there are many reasons why his band is drawn to Morricone’s soundtracks. “Part of it is that it’s good music,” he says. “But, it’s also really dramatic, and it’s music that’s telling a story. It’s just a celebration of things that are great about America and individualism.”

The members of Spindrift are so into the classic Western mystique that they just recently finished up work on their own feature-length cowboy movie, titled The Legend of God’s Gun. Evans says the film, shot in the California desert, is about a gunfighter who seeks revenge on the bandits who killed his girl. Before that goal is accomplished, he says, the main protagonist has a “psychedelic freak out” and reforms a small town, after more blood is shed. “In the end, pretty much everyone dies,” Evans says.

All of the musicians in Spindrift play a character in The Legend of God’s Gun. “Basically, it’s all deadbeat musicians and no actual actors,” Evans says.

In addition to the movie, Spindrift pays homage to Western culture by making sure to perform at Pioneertown’s saloon, Pappy & Harriet’s, twice a year. Pioneertown, which is located in southern California, is a former Western movie set transformed into an eclectic desert community.

When asked how Spindrift would react if Carmel resident Clint Eastwood attended their Big Sur show, Evans becomes noticeably excited. “We’d all pass out,” he says. “That would be wonderful. We’d ask him if he would want to be in God’s Gun Two.”

THE THRIFT STORE COWBOYS play Monterey Live, 414 Alvarado St. in Monterey, Thursday, March 29, at 9:30pm. $5/students w/ ID; $7/general admission. 877-548-3237.

SPINDRIFT, DEAD MEADOW and ASSEMBLE HEAD IN SUNBURST SOUND play Fernwood, 24 miles south of Carmel on Highway 1 in Big Sur, Saturday, March 31, at 9pm. $12. 667-2422.