Events

[ROCK] As bands go, Blackberry Smoke isn’t much interested in chart numbers and sales figures. But the Georgia-born, Southern-fried quintet, who play Town Ballroom on Saturday, June 24, make for an excellent study of how chart success and sales figures don’t equate like they once did. Having a Billboard #1 record used to mean big numbers, not to mention the cumulative sales of having a record consistently selling (relatively speaking) as it moved up and down the chart. Now, a record’s first week is usually the highest it gets with a dramatic drop right afterwards.

Blackberry Smoke’s latest, Like an Arrow, and its 2015 predecessor, Holding All the Roses, both debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. For both, that translated to roughly 20,000 copies sold out of the gate. Like An Arrow went on to sell just 4,200 copies in its second week—and this is entirely normal. But they were #1 albums—and Blackberry Smoke is quite successful as indie bands go.

Lead vocalist/guitarist Charlie Starr is just happy knowing that the band’s fan base made it a #1 record.

“That comes from fans who are excited about a new release, and it tells us they’re still listening,” he said during a one-week tour break while babysitting his three-year-old son. “Since we’re not working with a major label, we couldn’t give a fuck who’s selling records, and our fans don’t care what’s happening on the pop charts either. It’s a completely different industry now. I was discussing this just recently with Tom Keifer from Cinderella. All of us make our money on the road now and it’s a funny thing to see when you consider this guy was all over MTV, has sold millions of albums…but I think I saw a flicker of relief when he was speaking of it, probably because there’s not this huge expectation anymore. For us, we’re not willing to sacrifice our integrity to do it, but I feel as if I’ve watched other folks dumbing down their music in hopes that it’ll be accepted on a broader level.”

It’s just as well, since sanding down the corners of what Blackberry Smoke does would completely kill the vibe. Plus, there’s enough ear candy naturally present in their music to satisfy the average pop sweet tooth: if you enjoy the way the Allman Brothers straddled the lines between AM and FM idioms, Blackberry Smoke is bound to have some appeal. At a time when America’s identity is becoming politically maligned and so much country music is just part of the corporate pop machine, it’s refreshing to hear such an unmistakably American band make Southern music that isn’t trying too hard to be anything other than what it is—rock and roll with a twangy edge. Over a dozen years they’ve released five albums on five labels, finally opting this time around to form their own—3 Legged Records—and handle the production themselves as well. The album is pared down from its predecessor and stays faithful to the original demos. Under other circumstances it’d seem like a reclamation, but Starr says there’s really nothing to reclaim.

“We’ve enjoyed 100 percent creative control on all of our other records as well. We’ve never had to answer to anyone,” he said. “I guess we’ve been lucky because we’ve never had anyone say we have to do this to be successful, and at each of the previous four labels, nobody has ever said, ‘This sucks, start over.’ We’ve never had a major label beating down our door, which allows for certain freedoms. We’ve worked with great people all along and they’ve seen that we’re stubborn and determined…they’ve helped rather than steered.”

Starr, who is in his 40s, grew up listening to the classic rock bands you might imagine: Aerosmith, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Little Feat. But Gregg Allman and the Allman Brothers hold a special place in his heart. It seems fitting, then, that one of the late legend’s last recorded contributions to another artist’s album would be the final track on Like an Arrow, “Free on the Wing.” Blackberry Smoke also played with him at the Laid Back Festival in Atlanta last October—Allman’s last show.

“I can say most definitely that we wouldn’t be making the music we make were it not for Gregg Allman” Starr said. “I think he hated the ‘Southern rock’ tag…I think he found it redundant, and what that term had come to mean for some people might have been taxing to him. We were looking at old Allmans footage from 1969 the other day and I kept thinking how there was nothing else like that then. What they did was special, and even when they were just kids, they were like giants walking the earth. I didn’t have any contact with him after the Atlanta gig, but we’d heard he had to cancel some shows. We hadn’t been told anything about the severity of his illness, but we had heard he wasn’t doing a very good job of resting. It’s very special to have ‘Free on the Wing’ on our record, and we performed the song the night he died, somewhere around Knoxville. I get goosebumps thinking about it. It was very emotional.”