Rival Sons and the importance of the slow rise
It’s already been a full week since my buddy, Eli, and I withstood the rock ’n’ roll hurricane that is Rival Sons at House of Blues Chicago.
Pity that time machines don’t exist (yet!) as that gig certainly deserves a revisit.
The show, with superb support from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada-natives The Sheepdogs, was a tour de force of rock majesty.
Two bands, both climbing the ranks, playing with fire and passion before a sold out crowd in America’s third-largest city.
Supporting their newest album, Feral Roots, the Long Beach-native/Nashville-transplants in Rival Sons have found rising success through the classic method of album/tour/album/tour…lather, rinse, repeat.
Their latest album features their first-ever number one rock radio single, “Do Your Worst”, and is such a strong and vibrant release that people are beginning to show up in droves all across America on this headlining tour. It’s an easy front-runner for album of the year.
Roughly two-thirds of this jaunt across the states is sold out, and with only three shows left before a summer tour across Europe, the band has already announced a 12-date co-headlining American tour with Stone Temple Pilots, set to start in September, seemingly striking while the iron is hot.
The tour will feature both bands putting on full sets and headlining historic venues such as Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom and Philadelphia’s The Met Theatre, and playing in larger venues such as Revention Music Center in Houston and Comerica Theatre in Phoenix.
Sell outs in these venues will certainly necessitate an even further jump up in both venue size and demand.
For Rival Sons, their climb, particularly in the U.S., has been a slow simmer spanning the band’s inception in 2009 to this very moment.
It’s tough to know, precisely, how to make it in this business as a rock ’n’ roll band in 2019.
If this was 1976, Rival Sons would already be a stadium headlining act with legions of followers and hits lining the charts. They’d enter every show the way they did their 2015 gig in Holmfirth, England.
The way forward was clearer back then too.
Bands with potential would typically sign something called a ‘development deal’, which could call for anywhere from 2–5 albums. That would give bands the time to find their sound and hone their skills with the hope being that the end result would be Led Zeppelin-like popularity.
They’d open for larger bands, jumping around the circuit year-round, playing anywhere between 150–200 shows a year just in America. That’s a lot of shows in Iowa, man.
If the shows paid off and the masses demanded more, they’d become a headline act and the fame game starts.
Money galore for the record company and a few shekels thrown the band’s way (because if this were 1976, they’d also be signed to a rotten deal where the company got everything and the artists themselves got robbed fucking blind, which would lead to lawsuits and great songs about those lawsuits).
But Rival Sons aren’t operating in 1976, or by the rules in place at that time. Rock ’n’ roll, and rock music in general, is not the prevailing popular music of our time.
By no means is rock “dead”, or any other absurd notion like that. But it is operating in the shadows at the moment as hip-hop, in its many forms, reigns supreme. That’s alright. It’s just another wave of artists speaking their truth. So be it.
The question for a band such as Rival Sons is — “how do we rise up in an era where the money isn’t what it used to be, the crowds and attention aren’t what they used to be, and even success is defined differently?”
Any band of any measurable success will tell you that the secret to that success is as much about decision-making as it is about the music.
Rival Sons, unlike some of their contemporaries, have not rested on their laurels and released the same album over and over, nor have they stunted their growth by radically changing the creative formula when things maybe felt stagnant in terms of their growth.
Any changes have been organic and natural to the band as a whole, and every album has shown a measure of songwriting growth.
Their 2009 debut, Before The Fire, sounds almost nothing like Feral Roots, though both are undoubtedly Rival Sons.
Granted, that first album was recorded with a different singer under a different band name, but still. Even their second full-length album, Pressure & Time, has little to nothing in common with Feral Roots minus the fact that both fucking rock.
Their sound has advanced in a ‘marathon-not-a-race’ type of method, drawing from their own real life experiences, surroundings, and times. This is reflected not just lyrically, but musically.
Feral Roots, recorded both at Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio A and at the equally as legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, has a distinct taste of soul, gospel, and folk along with large doses of the authentic brand of rock ’n’ roll that the Sons have championed their entire career.
The album was written, largely, in a shack in Northern Tennessee by singer Jay Buchanan and guitarist Scott Holiday, and it fucking sounds like it.
Unlike bands like Greta Van Fleet and Royal Blood — that is, bands who experienced near-instant success and radio play — Rival Sons have crafted album after album of music that is both easily accessible, but also comes across as the real deal — not just a band built upon old rock tropes, but a band of its own identity and its own unique swagger.
I thought the band would break it big when they released Great Western Valkyrie in 2014.
It was, and is, such a titanic album of potential hits, grooving rhythms and scorching vocals and guitar work that it felt criminal that it could possibly miss out on sweeping the nation.
Hell, that album won me awards!
(One award, actually. It was a 2015 Illinois Community College Journalism award for “Art’s Review”. First place, bitch.)
Alas, despite their best efforts, the album didn’t quite break them in America. However, the band did discover that they were achieving blossoming success in Europe.
Remember that whole decision-making deal? Came in handy here.
For the next two years, Rival Sons largely ignored the American market, returning every so often for short tours as an opening act or headlining small clubs, but focused largely on their burgeoning popularity in Europe.
They would play to massive festival crowds, headline historic venues, and serve as opening act to the legendary Deep Purple to close out 2015.
Then came 2016, the release of Hollow Bones, and their biggest worldwide break yet — the sole opening slot on Black Sabbath’s year long farewell tour.
The honor of opening for Sabbath’s massive worldwide tour was a result of simple happenstance.
In late 2014, with the band already in full-on touring mode in support of Great Western Valkyrie, they played a two-song set at the 2014 Classic Rock Roll of Honour show, which was broadcast on AXS TV.
Classic Rock Magazine had long been a major supporter of the band, making them cover artists on their September 2014 issue, declaring that the “future of rock is theirs.” They had played the show before, so it was viewed as nothing more than another fun, but otherwise consequence-free gig.
The band played to a largely industry crowd, with rock royalty filling the room — everyone from Sammy Hagar, Jimmy Page, Glenn Hughes, Aerosmith, Dave Mustaine, Roger Daltrey — as well as Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.
Their rendition of then-new song, “Secret”, was an absolute burner and likely scared a few of those legendary dyed hairs in the audience back to their natural grey.
A YouTube video shot after the gig shows Ozzy and Sharon leaving before stopping for photographs and then running into Rival Sons touring keyboardist, Todd Ögren-Brooks.
Ozzy’s overwhelming love of what he had seen during the band’s short set was enough to send him and Sharon into a frenzy. The idea of the band opening for Sabbath was hatched in that very moment.
For the next 13 months, Rival Sons would serve as the only warm-up to Black Sabbath. My first Rival Sons live experience was on the very second date of that tour, in January 2016 at the United Center in Chicago.
Minds were opened up that night. I’d hear people prior to the show say things like, “who the hell is Rival Sons? I’ve never heard of em.”
Those same people, 45 minutes later, once Rival Sons had come out and played their seven song set, would be saying, “shit, those guys were awesome!”
I imagine many people expressing those same sentiments all through that tour.
That tour got them their first major label deal with Atlantic Records/Low Country Sound. After spending the entirety of their career on European indie label, Earache, the band would finally obtain major backing from a legendary major label. This was the big leagues.
That tour is also what propelled them to getting their first number one single, and a near-total sell out tour of America.
When the band returns to Europe this summer, they’ll do so behind an album that’s charting well worldwide.
While the album peaked at #139 on the U.S. Billboard Top 200, it peaked at #4 in Scotland, Sweden, and Norway, at #7 in Switzerland and at #8 in Germany.
That is a strong, and wide, bloc of support in countries which host numerous large-scale rock festivals and shows on an annual basis. It’s a market Rival Sons will continue to tap as their momentum builds in America.
Rival Sons have released six full-lenth albums and one EP as of today. Each release has propelled them further into the realm of major rock acts.
They’ve played the late night TV circuit in America — everything but the Tonight Show and SNL, really — and they’ve had their stuff featured in TV commercials and movie soundtracks.
How high can they go? It’s difficult to say. It’s been a long time since the world minted a rock ’n’ roll band capable of selling out arenas and stadiums on the strength of their own merits.
Greta Van Fleet blew up immediately and they’re still playing sheds, 2,000 seaters and theatres.
Rival Sons are essentially joining them now in that touring set up, but their rise has been slower, steadier and more reliable. There’s nothing microwaveable about what Rival Sons have achieved.
I enjoy Greta Van Fleet, don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate them simply because a bunch of other people do, but people tend to resent those who rise to the top from the jump. It feels phony, even if it isn’t.
Rival Sons don’t have a phony bone in their collective bodies.
Jay Buchanan is easily one of the most electric, soulful, and authentic voices that’s come around in some time. A folk singer by trade, Buchanan wanted nothing to do with rock music and the tired tropes of the genre’s bygone era when Holiday approached him to join his band, then-Black Summer Crush. His inclusion in Rival Sons occured because of musical kinship and the connection he felt to the music being made.
Scott Holiday is a guitar hero, plain and simple. His fuzz tones and eccentric solos are pure dynamite, both on record and live. But Holiday didn’t just arrive and succeed. He went through the heartbreak of landing a major deal, oddly enough with Atlantic Records, with his band, Human Lab, only to see their debut permanently shelved and the band dropped.
Black Summer Crush was supposed to be his rebirth, but when singer Thomas Flowers fled the group after recording many of the songs that would appear on Rival Sons’ debut, Holiday found Buchanan on Myspace by simple happenstance (that again!). The band’s drummer, Mike Miley, had played with Buchanan before, so overtures were made, music was played, and Rival Sons were born.
Michael Miley is the perfect rock drummer — a jazz drummer by trade, and a funk/R&B enthusiast — he combines the power, precision, and dexterity of guys like Keith Moon, John Bonham, and Ringo Starr and mixes it with his own background and creates a sound unique to himself and to this band. Rival Sons do not exist without the looseness and ferocity of Miley’s drumming.
If Miley is the perfect rock drummer, then the perfect rock drummer needs the perfect bassist to assist in upholding the rhythm and timing when the drummer goes away a bit for a bender of wild fills and musical exploration — that man would be Nebraska’s own Dave Beste.
A self-taught musician, Beste has blended beautifully into the band after replacing original bassist, Robin Everhart, after the band’s Head Down album and tour cycle in 2013.
Behind them, is long-time Grammy-winning producer, Dave Cobb.
Long before he was known for guiding Chris Stapleton’s solo career, Cobb was the Long Beach quartet’s secret weapon, guiding their sound in the studio in an immediate, lay-it-down-now-and-forever-hold-your-peace sort of way.
The band always writes, records, and mixes their albums quickly and, largely, on the spot. What you hear on records is, most of the time, the first or second time the band has played that song.
Cobb’s style and ideas for bringing out the best in the band’s sound and need for immediacy is perfectly suited for what Rival Sons do. There’s danger and anxiety in it and there’s a distinct feel of human beings being recorded live with little or no artificial puffery going on.
You take those individual and collective elements, mix them with the right approach to writing, recording, and touring, and you get a band destined to fire on all cylinders for as long as they see fit.
Time will tell if we ever see Rival Sons headlining arenas or playing to large enough crowds to where it becomes standard to think a Rival Sons show = lots of $$$. I’m not even sure that that is success anymore. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe where they’re at now is true success — just enough money, critical acclaim and circumstance to keep you hungry, but not enough to allow you to start mailing it in.
But it’s hard to ignore what used to be and not wonder what could be.
Either way, if you want to see a band that really burns on stage, records killer albums and writes songs which should be generational hits, this is the band for you. Everything about them is real. Everything, from their music, their style, and their stage show.
Perhaps their rise and future success can be found in the key ingredients of geology — perhaps it’s all just a matter of pressure and time.
FYI: Rival Sons will be performing for the members of Black Sabbath at the GRAMMY Salute To Music Legends show, an awards ceremony and tribute show, on Saturday, May 11th in Los Angeles.
