Southern rockers Cadillac Three and Black Stone Cherry ride into Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg on Sept. 14
From a press release:
Nashville’s The Cadillac Three and Kentucky’s Black Stone Cherry will bring Southern rock to the Northeast when they play at the Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg on Friday, Sept. 14 at 8 p.m.
Tickets, which are $20 in advance or $23 the day of the show, are on sale now and available through the Sherman Theater box office (524 Main St., Stroudsburg) and online at shermantheater.com and ticketfly.com. VIP boxes and sky boxes are available for this show and include eight tickets (VIP box) or 12 tickets (sky box) and waitstaff. To purchase box seats, call the theater at 570-420-2808.
It may be a ballsy move for The Cadillac Three to name their new album “Legacy,” but if any country band has the shared history to lay claim to such a weighty title, it’s the long-haired trio of Nashville natives.
Singer/guitarist Jaren Johnston, drummer Neil Mason, and lap-steel player Kelby Ray have known one another since they were teens and have been sharing stages together for nearly 15 years. This summer, they’ll headline their hometown’s most famous venue, the Ryman Auditorium, just a few blocks from where Johnston and Ray sat in high school math class daydreaming about one day playing the legendary hall. Johnston’s connection to the Ryman goes back even further; his father has been a drummer at the Grand Ole Opry since Jaren was a child. And now he has a son of his own who, like his old man, will be well-versed in all the sounds that make up both Music City and The Cadillac Three, from country and blues to rock ‘n’ roll.
So, yeah, “legacy” looks good on this band.
“We’re trying to build something and do it our way, which is always harder,” says Johnston. “If you’re going to leave something that people are actually going to remember, you can’t take the easy way. So we took all of our history, mixed it with the energy of The Cadillac Three, and put it into a record that makes sense of where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
After nearly a full year on the road in support of 2016’s “Bury Me in My Boots,” their first full-length album recorded for Big Machine Records, the group returns with a more mature perspective. Johnston, Mason, and Ray have experienced a lot on tour, whether opening arenas across the country on Florida Georgia Line’s Dig Your Roots Tour or headlining their own consistently sold-out string of sweaty club and theater shows in the U.K. and Europe. As they prepare to head back in November for another big run, for The Cadillac Three, the old saying really is true – this band is huge overseas.
“Europe showed us that we should bet on ourselves. It was a big gamble the first time we went over there,” says Mason, “but the shows and the fans have continued to grow.”
“And going overseas reinforced that we wanted to get more music out more quickly,” adds Ray. “They go through singles really quickly over there. They want more, more, more, and that encouraged us to go into the studio, knock this album out, and keep going.”
All that travel, from city to state, country to continent, could decimate a lesser band, but it only served to creatively inspire the mighty TC3. They wrote many of the 11 songs that make up “Legacy” on the road, cut the tracks on rare days off in Nashville, and then recorded all of Johnston’s vocals – one of the most “country” voices in the genre – in the back lounge of their bus in between shows, adding a crackling sense of vitality to “Legacy.” They also produced the album themselves.
“We knew what we wanted to do with this record. Instead of putting it together in bits and pieces, we started with a batch of songs and then picked a single,” Johnston says. “That’s how this shit should be done.”
That back-to-basics approach to making music yielded the band’s most infectious single to date – the woozy sing-along “Dang If We Didn’t.” Written, as is most of the album, by Johnston and Mason (here, with Jonathan Singleton, and other times with songwriters like Laura Veltz and Angelo Petraglia), “Dang If We Didn’t” teases fans with its ambiguous title before revealing what the guys actually did in the chorus – get drunk last night.
“When you’re a songwriter, you can be critical of song titles,” says Johnston. “But with ‘Dang If We Didn’t,’ I thought it was a little bit mysterious. It makes you wonder, ‘Dang if we didn’t do what?'”
“Eat pizza last night,” quips Mason. “It could be anything.”
“American Slang” rivals “Dang If We Didn’t” in its grandeur. It’s a huge song, akin to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” or The Cadillac Three’s own “Graffiti,” off “Bury Me in My Boots.” Lori McKenna (Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”) began writing the tune with the intention of having The Cadillac Three finish it. “We are vampires on Hollywood Boulevard / angels and sinners of our hometown streets,” go the lyrics, painting a picture of life’s rebels before a massive country-radio chorus kicks in: “We are the back roads, dirty water shore banks… we are born and raised on American slang.”
The constant throughout “Legacy,” however, lies in the players. As on all three of The Cadillac Three’s albums, only Johnston, Mason, and Ray are the musicians. There’s no guest keyboard player, no second percussionist, and certainly no bassist. Ray holds down the low end on his lap steel.
Especially on the standout “Legacy” track “Take Me to the Bottom,” which features Johnston reaching high for a breathtaking falsetto. “‘Take Me to the Bottom’ has the best bass sound of anything I’ve ever done,” says Ray, who also keeps things greasy on the intense “Tennessee.” A thrashing love song, it evokes the stomp of ZZ Top – a favorite of TC3 – and features a lyrical shout-out to progressive country hero Sturgill Simpson, a kindred spirit of the band.
No matter the influence, though, the trio stays faithful to their own unique sound throughout “Legacy.” “Hank & Jesus” glides along with Tennessee twang, “Demolition Man” is distinguished by the space between the notes, and the swaggering “Cadillacin'” is a band anthem. “We don’t put anything on our albums that we can’t recreate live,” says Mason. “If there is a TC3 rule, it’s that – keep it honest.”
Honesty, or authenticity, is a favorite buzzword around Nashville. But few artists come to it as naturally as The Cadillac Three. These guys couldn’t fake it if they tried. In the album’s title track, they offer a heart-on-the-sleeve testimony to what’s really important at the end of one’s days – love and a family tree.
When Mason and Ray heard “Legacy,” co-written by Johnston, they flipped and pushed for it to be the title of the record. “We’re far enough along in our careers where doing an album called ‘Legacy’ doesn’t feel presumptuous to me,” says Mason.
Not when you run through The Cadillac Three’s milestones. It’s all there, from boundary-pushing albums, Grammy-nominated No. 1 songwriting across genres and fan-favorite singles, to sold-out club shows and massive festival gigs alongside Aerosmith.
“With this album, we’re continuing to build this thing we’ve created. We’re touring nonstop, headlining shows in the U.K., playing the Ryman, and putting out a new record,” says Johnston. “Shit, that’s a pretty good legacy so far.”
Family comes first – you can never forget who was there with you from the start. The Kentucky-based rock ‘n’ roll quartet Black Stone Cherry was raised on musical forefathers such as Cream, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and the Faces, among other 1970s staples, and now, with its sixth album, “Family Tree,” BSC salutes its classic rock heritage and honors its legacy with a beast of a Southern rock ‘n’ roll album.
“We caught divine intervention with this one,” guitarist Ben Wells says with a good chuckle. “We hit a creative spark and tapped into a spirit and a fire we hadn’t before.” Drummer John Fred Young adds, “‘Family Tree’ showcases all of our collective musical influences and how we have taken those to create something that is truly our own unique Southern American rock ‘n’ roll sound.”
For 17 years, Black Stone Cherry has put forth a new vicious breed of Southern rock, injecting youthful vitality and a myriad of fresh new influences into the beloved American rock tradition. To date, the band has released five critically acclaimed albums and one well-received blues EP. Black Stone Cherry has also rocked 12,000-cap arena shows, topped the U.K. charts, and shared the stage with a diverse roster of superstars, including Def Leppard, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bad Company, Motörhead, and ZZ Top.
Black Stone Cherry came together in 2001 in Edmonton, Kentucky, eventually coalescing around the lineup of Chris Robertson (vocals and guitar), Ben Wells (guitar and vocals), Jon Lawhon (bass and vocals), and John Fred Young (drums). Young’s dad Richard and his Uncle Fred are two members of the iconic country-fried rock ‘n’ roots band The Kentucky HeadHunters, and the high school-aged boys came up honing their craft in the group’s Practice House, a 1940s bungalow.
“We grew up in the Kentucky Headhunters’ rehearsal space, looking up at posters of Cream, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, the Stones, Montrose, and the Faces. We were like kids someone took in a time capsule and put in the woods,” says drummer John Fred Young.
Like the band’s previous album and EP, Black Stone Cherry opted to self-produce and track “Family Tree” at David Barrick’s Barrick Recording, the same studio where BSC recorded its self-titled debut and “Kentucky” albums. BSC also opted to not over-rehearse in advance of the album, instead preferring the immediacy and spontaneity of in the-moment takes.
“There was a lot of laughter in the studio this time, and an air of comfort because we had self-produced the last few releases. It helped us get down to the nitty gritty bones of our music,” says Lawhon. The band also entrusted Robertson to mix the album. This homespun approach perfectly suited the loose but epiphanic creative sessions that birthed “Family Tree.”
“Family Tree” boasts BSC’s tried-and-true lucky number with its 13 songs and, like all BSC releases, features songwriting contributions from each member. The result is a modern and meaty blues-based rock album, with unexpected sonic twists like punchy horn sections, barrelhouse pianos, Southern gospel organ, atmospheric synthesizer passages, and forays into funk and country.
Two special guests bring “Family Tree” full circle, one being Robertson’s 5-year-old son singing backup on the brawny swaggering “You Got the Blues,” and the other being jam band icon Warren Haynes’ vocal and guitar cameo on the delta stomp of “Dancing in the Rain.” The band first met Warren 17 years ago when they first came to New York to showcase for their new label. “I remember coming to New York when we first were signed and hearing Warren’s voice behind me the minute my feet hit the street,” recalls bassist Jon Lawhon. “Hearing him play on this track all these years later gave me chills.”
Having Warren guest on the album was a wonderful gesture of “you’re in the family now.” It was truly a validation of all the miles the band has clocked on tour and the dues the guys have paid being away from home. “It’s amazing to me how four good old boys from nowhere Kentucky can still be around 17 years later,” Robertson says. Wells concludes, “I don’t remember how life was outside of Black Stone Cherry. The four of us are family.”
