Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Black Stone Cherry

Since the release of their debut album in July on Roadrunner Records, Kentucky’s Black Stone Cherry has turned quite a few heads with their soulful Southern rock sound. After traveling the country with the likes of Buckcherry, Staind, Saliva and Three Days Grace, guitar god Zakk Wylde has taken these youngsters (all four band members—vocalist/guitarist Chris Robertson, guitarist Ben Wells, bassist Jon Lawhon and drummer John Fred Young—are between the ages of 20 and 23) under his wing for a nationwide tour with his band, Black Label Society. Prior a recent show in at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net hopped on board Black Stone Cherry’s tour bus for a chat with Wells and Lawhon, two men who are proud of their roots and excited about the success their band is achieving.

Jon Lawhon: It’s great.

Ben Wells: It’s awesome, man. The crowds are really welcoming us. At first, we were kinda worried—not so much worried, just kinda wondering how it’s gonna go. Black Label has, like, a really underground cult following. You know what I’m saying? We’ve been out with Buckcherry, Saliva and Staind, and all those people, they really responded well to us. We were so looking forward to this tour, and so far, all of his fans really dig us, man. They really like the sound, and we go out after the show and we talk to everybody. So it’s going really good.

As soon as I heard you guys and heard you were going on tour with them, I thought you would be a really good match for their fans.

Ben: Yeah, it’s going really great. Everybody’s really nice, and this is actually the third night of the tour.

Ben and Jon: Of course.

Ben: Who isn’t, you know? Any musician has gotta appreciate Zakk in one way or another.

Ben: Not yet. We’ve been up in his area here lately. He’s from New Jersey , and the first night we were in New Jersey and then New York the next night. So we’re kinda up in his territory, so he’s been really busy doing some stuff. But we got to hang out with J.D. [John DeServio] and Craig [Nunenmacher], the bass player and drummer, and they were super cool, man.

Ben: It was for the second single, “Hell and High Water,” which we’re really excited about. And we shot it in our hometown of Edmonton , Kentucky . It’s a small, little town. What is the population?

Jon: It’s like 1,487.

Ben: Really small. We did the first video in New Orleans for “Lonely Train.” They came to us with the second one, and we’re like, “We’re down with it, but we want to do it at home.” Our community really supports us, so we want to kinda give back. So we invited everybody out to the video shoot. We did it at Barnlot Theatre, which is a place that we used to play a long time ago before record deals and all that stuff. So it was cool that we got to see all of our family and friends and our longtime fans that have been there five and a half years ago when we first started. They were really excited about being in the video and really cooperative, so it was awesome. It’s gonna be an excellent video.

Jon: It’s a different process than going in the studio or touring. But it’s cool. On stage or whatnot, you’ve got fans and everybody’s staring at you, but when you’re shooting a music video, you have this glass lens right in your face. You’re not supposed to respond to the camera. You’re supposed to respond for the camera.

Ben: The hardest thing probably is when you play live or something like that, you’re free to move whenever you want or do whatever you want. With a video, they gotta get certain angles, so they kinda tell you to be still for certain movements or do this. It’s kinda like, wow, this is awkward when they tell you to be still and it’s like a really energetic part of the song. But they’re fun.

Are you able to get involved in the concept for it and picking the director?

Ben: We had a lot of ideas for this one.

Jon: We wouldn’t have it any other way. You can tell by listening to our record it’s very homegrown us. We recorded the record in Glasgow , Kentucky , which was very cool of Roadrunner to allow us to have the creative freedom to be able to stay in the studio we recorded all our demos and everything else at. And John Fred’s dad [Richard Young] is the rhythm guitar player for the Kentucky Headhunters, and he produced the record, which is the way we’ve done everything. From day one, every time we’ve gone in the studio it’s been with him, David Barrick, the engineer, and us. They allowed us to keep it like that. So we try to keep everything to where we’re very hands on. Nothing really goes on with our band unless we have a say so. We control a lot of it because if you’re not gonna control what’s going on, not gonna know what’s happening at all times, you’re kind of just a vegetable in a pod.

How did you end up on Roadrunner? When you think of Roadrunner, you don’t think of the Southern-type sound.

Ben: We started off with In De Goot, which is a management company. It’s run by Bill McGathy, and him and a guy named Corey Sheridan are our two main people up there. So we signed on with them as the management, and they sent out a demo to some people. When Roadrunner heard it, they got really excited about it. They thought it was something new and thought it was something they could maybe work out, and they wanted to see a showcase, a private showcase in New York . So we went to New York City , did our showcase at the Montana Studios. We did two different ones that day, one just for Roadrunner and a second one for a bunch of labels. It was a cattle call for anybody. When Roadrunner came in, we didn’t even know they were a label and who was what because they were totally normal people just like you and me, just down-to-earth people, dressing normal, no suits, no ties, just people who really dug music. So they came in, and we played and we hung out. They actually had to bring the other people in, so they were trying to tell Roadrunner that they had to go, and they didn’t want to leave and we didn’t want to them to leave. We were like, “Hey, man, this is awesome.” So we really hit it off good, and our A&R guy, Ron Burman, he signed the band and he really dug the sound. It’s something for Roadrunner—they saw it as something they could branch their label off, because they do have a lot of metal bands and then they got their rock/pop group, Nickelback, Theory of a Deadman. So they saw us as this group from the South that’s hard rock. They saw it as a way to extend their label to a wider audience. So far, it’s going really good. We’re really happy. We got to hang out with some of them last night. We played Times Square , the Nokia Theatre, and it’s awesome. It’s all a big family thing.

Ben: I guess everybody has their inspiration. For me, personally, I’m a huge Elvis fan. So when I saw old videos of Elvis—everybody in my family is in to Elvis, too. So I guess watching him and him being from the South, too, kinda being raised from nothing and using what he had, living his life on it. That and Aerosmith. I love Aerosmith.

Jon: The band’s really rooted as far back as, like, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, stuff like that, and on up to Motown, The Funk Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and all that, and, of course, on to classic rock, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, all that stuff. We listen to so much different, random stuff, I guess that’s why when you listen to our record you’ll hear one song that sounds, like “Lonely Train,” for example, is really heavy, is really rooted in more of an old school, classic rock n’ roll thing with a little bit more of, like, a new school metal thing almost. And then you go to our new single, “Hell and High Water,” that’s got more of a Southern, Motown kind of vibe. And you’ll find that as you go through the record. Everything is akin to each other as the sound because it’s all Black Stone Cherry, but every song has its own little twist of where it came from.

Jon: John Fred and Chris have been together since they were 6, 7 years old.

Ben: Since kindergarten.

Jon: Yeah, they grew up together. I am originally from Florida . I was born in West Palm Beach , grew up in Jacksonville . I moved to Kentucky pretty much by God’s hand in ’98. I was 15 and I met those two guys, and we played off and on and whatnot. And then on June 3, 2001 , we met [Ben] for the first time. Our guitar tech, David Grimsley, actually brought him down to the practice house, and he picked up Chris’ guitar and started playing, and Chris was playing John Fred’s drums, and I was standing out on the porch and I was listening. After you play music with somebody so long, you figure out how they play and what they sound like. I heard somebody playing guitar and I was like, “That ain’t Chris.” So I opened up the door and I walked in, and it was Ben. At the time, Ben was just this pudgy little kid. So we played a little bit and we jammed together and whatnot, and we asked him to come back the next day and bring some of his stuff and see how it went. We wrote the first song the band ever wrote together that day, and we’ve been a band ever since.

Ben: It was a match made in heaven for all of us. It’s awesome.

I’m sure you get this one all the time, but where did the band name come from?

Ben: Well, actually, growing up, being 15 years old, ’cause that’s how old I was, and John Fred and Chris were 16. Jon was, like, 17. Nobody had their license. It was so cool. But there were these cigars called Blackstone Cigars, and they have different flavors of vanilla, coffee, cherry. Well, being the kids we are, we would sneak off and smoke cigars, you know, sit on the front porch of the practice house and John Fred’s front porch late at night. The day after the band formed, we were on the ball. We were like, “All right, we need a band name, we need a web site, we need some T-shirts. Let’s go.” We couldn’t think of a name, and everybody was throwing different names in the pot. I just looked down at the cigar pack and I saw “Blackstone,” which was one word, and the flavor “cherry” real small under it. John Fred and I were like, “Man, what about separating those words and doing, like ‘Black Stone Cherry.’” So we call John and Chris the next morning and we’re like, “Dudes, we got a band name and a web site.”

Jon: It was really interesting how that all happened because we were all down at the practice house, and we were like, “Let’s get some cigars.” And none of us had our license at the time. A friend of ours was down there, and I was the only one old enough to buy tobacco. So he ran me up to Jr. Foods in Edmonton , ’cause where the practice house is is right between Edmonton and Glasgow . We went to Edmonton , and I was looking at the cigars and I saw Blackstone cherry cigars. My grandfather, before he passed away, used to smoke them all the time. So the smell always brought back memories of my grandpa, so I was like, “Cool.”

Ben: It is a wonderful smell.

Jon: So I grabbed them. That night, Ben went to John Fred’s house and spent the night, and Chris went to my house. We had a couple songs we were working on, so we kinda, like, picked a song to work on and collaborate on it later and whatnot. We woke up the next morning, me and Chris finish one tune and then we get a call from them, “We got a band name and a web site.” We were like, “Well, we have a song.”

Ben: It’s cool, though, now when we look at that. Man, we wanted something really kinda powerful, big, something people could remember. Now, when we think about that name, it really ties into the personality of the band because we’re really roots oriented. Like Jon was saying earlier, we’re influenced by the blues a lot, and the roots of this band are really deep and that’s what keeps it going. It’s what keeps us growing. So now that we look at that name, it really portrays who we are, what we want our music to be, Black being the roots, the Stone being the growth of the band and the power, and the Cherry, of course, for the chicks.

When you’re writing songs, are there one or two people who take the lead or is it a collaboration?

Ben: It’s always a group thing.

Jon: It’s a collaboration kind of deal. One guy will come in—it doesn’t matter who—one guy will come in and say, “Man, I got this piece for the song.” If one guy writes an entire song and comes in with it, it ain’t the same when it’s done. We tear it apart and it becomes Black Stone Cherry.

Ben: That’s what we expect from each other, too. Somebody will always come in with what they think in their head is an entire song. We know when we bring that in that it’s going to be ripped apart, put back together and it’s gonna be wonderful. That’s just the way we do things. It’s cool ’cause we’ll be sitting at the practice house with absolutely nothing on our mind with an acoustic guitar and start from scratch. A lot of the times, that’s when a good thing happens. That’s how “Hell and High Water” was done. It was just done off the cuff and it was awesome.

Ben: It’s kinda just felt out, man. We run on a lot of feeling. That’s what fuels us is feeling. Whoever jumps in there first and takes the lead, man, it’s just the way it is. That’s the way Chris and I like to do things. People ask us, “Who plays lead?” Well, Chris plays the majority, but it’s cool because Chris doesn’t like to consider himself the lead guitar player of the band, ’cause he sometimes does a lot of different stuff. So we kinda swap it off, kinda trying to bring back that whole vibe of Thin Lizzy and Lynyrd Skynyrd, where everybody just kinda has their part, knows what to do and they do it well.

You mentioned Lynyrd Skynyrd. What was it like to share the stage with them?

Ben: Awesome. We did it twice, man.

Jon: It was crazy. Absolutely.

Ben: First time was in the heat of Skullbone , Tennessee . You will not believe this town. It’s incredible. Small town. It looks like if you can imagine that movie where you’re driving through the desert and you see that—I guess it would be a horror movie—where you see that one gas station on the side of the road, and you’re wary about stopping there. That’s this little store in Skullbone , Tennessee . And there’s this amphitheater out in the middle of the woods. It’s totally awesome, man. That’s the first time we played with Lynyrd Skynyrd and it was really cool.

Jon: That was long before we had a record deal or anything.

Ben: We were young, short hair.

Jon: We were just a bunch of kids just hoofing it, trying to get it done.

Ben: It was awesome, and they came by and some of the guys checked out the set that night, and they came up and shook our hands. That meant a lot. And the second time we played with them was in Indiana , and Chris had on one of the original Muscle Shoals T-shirts, which is where they used to record all the cool Motown stuff. He wore it that night, and Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s brother, of course, walked up to Chris after our set and said, “I love that shirt, man.” Chris was just like, “Whoa, it’s incredible that he said that.” It’s cool getting to play with Lynyrd Skynyrd. The name alone, to be on the same poster is pretty honorable.

Let’s talk about some of your songs. Was “Lonely Train” inspired by a specific person?

Jon: Back where we’re from, man, when you graduate high school, you really only got a few choices, either you go to work in a factory, you work some kind of, like, fast food kinda deal and that doesn’t last very long—

Jon: Or the Army. And a lot of our friends when we graduated high school, that’s what they did. They’d either go to the National Guard, Marines, Army, Air Force, whatever. Some of them didn’t come back. That was kind of our way of expressing our feelings about our friends leaving us and some of them passing away and I guess, for the ones that did pass away, kind of a way for them to live on. After we wrote it, man, we’ve had so many comments and messages through MySpace or people coming up to us at shows talking to us about it, about how that song, what it meant to them, how it helped them through a breakup with an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, or, for example, we had this woman send us a message on MySpace about maybe a month ago. She had lost her 4-year-old daughter, and she said that “Lonely Train” was the only thing that got her through that. We all kind of sat around the bus in devastation for probably half an hour thinking about it. It’s crazy, man. That’s ultimately the biggest payback that you can get for doing what we do. Yeah, you get to tour and all that, but, man, when you hear the salt-of-the-earth people telling you what your song did for them and how it changed their lives or helped them through something—

Ben: That’s what it’s all about. That’s who we play the music for. If you’re making it for yourself all along, then you might as well not deliver it to people.

Ben: “Backwoods Gold” is about running moonshine because that is a hobby in Kentucky . People look at that as a sport. Moonshine, which is pure grain alcohol, is totally illegal where we’re from, ’cause we’re in a dry county anyway. Back in the day on the square in Edmonton , there used to be a dry goods store. It was a cleaners, too. And there used to be a guy there and he would run moonshine in the basement of his store. It was illegal, but it was kinda like that unwritten law where it was illegal, nobody talked about it, but everybody knew it was going on. The police were in on it, and the all the high-uppity people in town knew. But here’s how he would do it. If he had moonshine in his basement that day, he would come out with a little card in his hat. That way the people, like, during their lunch hour would sit around the square and tell stories and whatnot. He would come out and if they saw he had a card in his hat, they would know after work to go by Bill Wilson’s store and get their case of moonshine. If he came outside and didn’t have a card in his hat, they weren’t gonna go by there. And that’s how it worked. And backwoods gold, that’s kinda like the nickname for it there. It’s kinda like hill tea, backwoods gold. People bootleg it to this day, man, and that’s how NASCAR got started, too. It was people bootlegging moonshine seeing who could get across the county lines the fastest.

Jon: Yeah, ’cause you had to have the fast cars to get away from the cops. So you had all these guys with beefed up engines.

Ben: That’s a true story. And now, that store he ran moonshine out of is now the police station. So there you go. But we wrote that ’cause we love telling stories. That’s half our album, just stories, man. Just fairy tales and true stories.

Jon: Actually, that’s a true event. Richard, a long time ago, was sitting out on the porch with a longtime friend who’s passed away now and they saw this guy walking up over the hill and he was wearing this, like, wizard hat, cloak and everything. And he had a divining rod and a crystal ball, and he was talking into this crystal ball and walking down the street with this divining rod. They were like, “Man, what is that?” This guy walks off into the distance and disappears, and they were like, “Man, we’re gonna go check this out and see who he is, what’s going on.” They went up there and he was gone. They didn’t know what had happened to him.

Ben: Yeah, once you get up over that hill, too, it’s a totally flat field. You could see if he cut off the road or whatever.

Jon: There’s nothing there. There’s nowhere to go. And he told us about that. And first of all, in Kentucky , telling stories and keeping history and everything of the community and all that, that’s a hardcore pastime. That’s what everybody does. If you’re from Kentucky , you have stories to tell.

Ben: There’s plenty of folklore books on Kentucky . It’s really interesting.

Jon: When we heard that, we were intrigued by it, so we wanted to write a song about it. We researched it a little bit, and we found out that there’s actually these people that call themselves rain wizards, that when a town is experiencing a drought or whatnot, they’ll do their thing, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s almost like an Indian doing a rain dance or something like that. When a town is experiencing a drought, a rain wizard will come in. They live in caves and whatnot, and they’ll bring about rain to help the community. So we thought that was really strange. It’s Kentucky folklore. We’ve said it probably 40 times now, but we’re really based out of Kentucky . We’re very proud of that, and our community is everything to us. So everything on our record, including “Rain Wizard,” comes from home.

Ben: It’s interesting, man. You oughta check it out.

Ben: Yeah. We’re very fortunate. The first single, “Lonely Train,” which is still doing pretty good, Sirius Radio and XM Radio picked it up and they embraced it, and so many different radio stations took the song and just took it full speed ahead. It was No. 1 on iTunes, and when we heard that, we were like, “Man, that’s just a song that we used to play at the practice house for friends.” And there’s been so many different versions of that song, so it’s weird how that works out. We’re still tripping out over stuff. And “Hell and High Water,” it’s doing really good at radio right now. It was just released last week and it was No. 1 most added to active rock radio. When we hear stuff like that, it totally flips us out because we just still see ourselves as four brothers from Edmonton, Kentucky, and Glasgow who just went down to the practice house and wrote songs. So when other people, especially when we walk around here today and people from Philadelphia are like, “I love y’all’s band. I got y’all’s album,” that’s still a huge payback.

Jon: It trips us out. When we first started, June 4, 2001, six days a week every week for that entire time, from three o’clock in the afternoon ’til 10 o’clock at night, practicing, writing songs, doing everything it takes to get to where we are now, and being where we are now, seeing a little bit of that payback, people talking to you knowing who you are and loving your album, radio embracing it the way it has—it’s trippy, man. It’s awesome, ’cause a lot of bands will be together nine, 10 years and they’ll just be getting to the point where we’re at right now. Ben’s 20, Chris and John Fred are 21, and I’m 23. We’re a very, very young band, we’ve worked really hard and we’re very fortunate to be where we’re at, and we’re just excited and thrilled to be here.

Ben: I think it would actually be even if you’re not selling 10 or 20,000 or millions of records, I think it would be rude to say that you’re not happy with how your album’s going. It’s kinda like the same saying as if you play just the same in front of five people or 500. If we’re selling 10 albums a week, there’s 10 albums that somebody spent their money on, 17 bucks that they could have spent somewhere else or on another band’s CD. The fact that they pick ours is awesome.

Is there something you really want to do in your music career that if you did it, you could say, “I can die happy now”?

Jon: That’s a really good question.

Ben: We were in New York and we went to go play for the distribution branch of Universal Music Group. We just got up there, and right when we got in there we just introduced ourselves. We didn’t know anything about the people there. Live, we do a Bo Diddley/Muddy Waters blues cover, like a little medley ’cause being influenced by the blues, we love playing blues.

Jon: It’s “I’m a Man” and “Hoochie Coochie Man. ”

Ben: So we’re sitting there and we’re doing the blues song acoustic, and people dig it. And after everybody gets up and gets something to eat and leaves, there’s this black chick that comes over to us, and she goes, “I just want to say that I’m really glad that you talked about the blues and played the blues. It really means a lot to me.” We’re like, “Well, thank you very much.” She goes, “Because my grandfather was Muddy Waters.” And we’re like, “Are you kidding me?”

Jon: Everybody started swelling up in tears, man, freaking out.

Ben: It was totally insane. It took everybody off guard, the fact that his granddaughter would come up to us and say she appreciated us playing the blues. And we didn’t even know she was in the room. And the fact that the odds were that we’d play that song in front of his granddaughter is just amazing, man. So that’s one thing that we’ll definitely write down in our little book. And I guess before we go, it would be awesome to play with Aerosmith or the Stones. That’s two of the remaining bands that we look up to, ’cause Led Zeppelin and The Beatles aren’t around anymore. I guess meeting the remaining Beatles, meeting Ringo and Paul would be pretty groovy.

Jon: Yeah, I would love to meet Paul McCartney. I’d probably vomit on myself, but I’d love to meet Paul McCartney.

Ben: I just hope everybody digs the album, and if you haven’t got it, go check it out if you’re into good old pure rock n’ roll.

Jon: Every song on the record is original except for one track. It’s a cover by the Yardbirds called “Shapes of Things,” and it’s a little bit of a different twist to take on it ’cause anytime we do any kind of cover we try to make it our own where it’s different from the original, where it’s something new and interesting to listen to. So I hope everybody digs that, too.