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RISE AND SHINE
Bishop Gunn Puts Natchez, MS on the Rock-and-Roll Map
© 2018 Tom Scarborough
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Bishop Gunn (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati)
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It’s a warm spring evening in
early May at the First Annual Bishop Gunn Crawfish Boil in Natchez,
Mississippi. Darryl Grennell, the charismatic mayor of the city, bounds onto
the stage wearing a t-shirt that reveals a sleeve of tattoos covering his left arm.
On the Natchez bluff, 150 feet above the Mississippi River—on the same ground
where Spanish soldiers occupying the town drilled nearly 250 years earlier—the
mayor surveys what is perhaps the largest single-day event crowd in Natchez
history, and approaches the mic:
“Let’s bring Bishop Gunn up
here…come on up here boys.”
Nearly four thousand fans
from as far away as Chicago, Washington state, Arizona and Oregon let loose a
lusty, well-lubricated roar as the four members of Bishop Gunn—the fast-rising young
rock band from Natchez--trot up the steps to receive a heroes’ welcome, and the
key to their hometown.
After the mayor has left the
stage, the band—Travis McCready, Drew Smithers, Ben Lewis, and Burne Sharp—take
their places and McCready’s guitar detonates with the opening chords of “Silver
Street,” like a derecho exploding in from the west:
“There was blood on the sidewalk / Full moon in the
sky/ Lawmen standing ‘round making small talk / As the coroner closes the dead
man’s eyes.”
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| Travis McCready (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
McCready’s dark lyrics of murder on Natchez’s most infamous street are rendered
all the more ominous by the setting sun balanced on the flaming horizon like
some portentous End of Days prophecy.
Over the next ninety minutes, Bishop Gunn storms through its catalogue, including
all the cuts from its debut album, Natchez
released the previous week. Recorded at
the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio by Mark Neill, and at the Purple House by Casey
Wasner—both Grammy winning producers—the record has already climbed to Number 4
on Billboard magazine’s Blues chart.
McCready seemingly has no existential destiny other than to be a rock front man.
He has the classical features of a Donatello sculpture, and the stage charisma
of Robert Plant or Roger Daltrey.
But it is his voice, a summoning
of Otis Redding, Bob Seger, and mid-register Plant that electrifies the crowd. It emanates
from somewhere near the soles of his feet, courses through his body gathering
strength, and erupts as a protean blast of molten rock and soul redemption.
During the infectious
soul-infused single, “Shine,” three young musicians from Natchez High School
supply the Memphis-style horn fills that, along with lead guitarist Drew
Smithers’s deft phrasings, showcase the song’s unmistakable Muscle Shoals
imprint.
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| Travis McCready (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
The song concludes, and the
young horn section’s members grin in delight as they revel in the crowd’s
thunderous cheers. On this night, Natchez, Mississippi feels like the best
place on Earth to be, and Bishop Gunn—perhaps the best emerging band in America.
Five months later, on a humid
October day, drummer Burne Sharp greets a visitor at his recording studio in
Natchez with an easy grin and a firm handshake. Inside the studio, all 6’3 of Travis
McCready is sprawled out on a leather sofa in the control room, which is
dominated by Sharp’s API console. Ben Lewis, the bassist, strolls in a few
minutes later and offers a friendly greeting. Fed Zeppelin, the porcine house
feline, settles on the visitor’s lap.
The three members of Bishop
Gunn (the fourth member, lead guitarist Drew Smithers did not make the trip)
are in their hometown for a couple of days at the tail end of a national tour
that has seen the band play fifty-eight dates in eighteen states since mid-May.
In July, the band opened two shows for Lynyrd Skynyrd in New York City.
Most recently, the band has shared multi-city co-bills with the Marcus King
Band, and Whiskey Myers. In Spring 2019, Bishop Gunn will open for Guns and
Roses guitarist, Slash, on the final leg of his European “Living The Dream”
tour. Released within the past month, the video for their song “Alabama” was
reviewed by Rolling Stone literally
hours after it hit the bandwidth. In an industry ecosystem known for devouring
the weak, the insipid, and the foolish, Bishop Gunn is well on its way to
becoming an apex predator.
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The band now resides 400
miles up the Natchez Trace from its hometown outside Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee—close enough to Nashville to be in proximity
to the tools and the connections of Music Row. But it is to Natchez that Bishop
Gunn routinely returns to recharge the band mojo when the members are not on
tour or recording. While in the old river city, the band hangs out and jams at
Smoot’s Grocery, and drinks glasses of Bishop Gunn Ale at the Natchez Brewing
Company. They remain local guys without any pretense or rock star affectation.
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| Travis McCready working the stage. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
Bishop Gunn is not an easy
band to categorize. Rolling Stone
magazine recently listed them as one of the top ten new Country bands to watch,
even though only one song on their debut LP can be remotely construed as a
twanger. Billboard Magazine tossed them into the Blues blender. Others describe
the band as Southern Rock—an uninspired assessment most likely based on the
band’s home state.
None of these attempts to
define Bishop Gunn are altogether wrong, but they provide only a partial
taxonomy of the band’s sound. Indeed, the band’s music is a dense construction
of Delta blues motifs, Memphis soul, four quarts of dirty motor oil and metal
shavings, a shot of Nashville and a chaser of Allman Brothers—all wired, taped,
and packaged into a straight-up rock-and-roll time bomb, circa 1974.
Along with other neo-classicist
bands such as Greta Van Fleet, the Sheepdogs, and Black Stone Cherry, Bishop
Gunn is poised to reintroduce a generation wandering the digital deserts of
Electronic Dance Music to mechanical instrumentation, and the human voice.
There is, however, another element—a rock-and-roll God particle—infusing Bishop
Gunn’s music with a dynamic totally and uniquely the band’s own: Natchez,
Mississippi.
Born in this struggling river
city of 15,000, Bishop Gunn speaks the language of its people. It’s the musical
dialect of a Southern town with a complicated history that resonates with the
weary accent of hard times. Since 1960, Natchez has lost half its population
and nearly the entire industrial base that once supported the town’s thriving
local economy.
Says, McCready, “We’re a band
from Natchez, MS. That’s something to be proud of. We want to bring Natchez to
the world, and to show everyone the history and culture of our town. Natchez is
a diamond in the rough ”
Bishop Gunn first showed up
on the Natchez music radar in 2015, when the band played its inaugural gig at
the Great Mississippi River Balloon Race, an annual festival held the third
weekend in October that draws thousands of visitors to Natchez. “The gig was
supposed to be a one-off,” recalls McCready.
The band’s set was so well received though that McCready and Sharp decided to
continue writing and recording music together at Sharpe’s studio in town. Sharp laughs, “I was getting a bunch of
recording equipment in for the studio that I really didn’t know how to use yet.
So I told Travis, ‘You just sing, and I think I can figure out how to record
here pretty quick.”
Over the next few months, Sharp and McCready labored in Sharp’s studio writing
and mixing songs. The following July, Bishop Gunn played its first date as a
full-fledged band at a now defunct bar called the Devil’s Punchbowl. Dub
Rogers, the former owner, recalls that night:
“The bar was a blockhouse out on Highway 61, next to the Kaiser gas station. It
was summer and the air conditioning was broken. The guys brought every damn
piece of equipment they owned, and more than a 100 people crammed into that
little building to hear them. It was just like rock and roll is supposed to
be—loud, hot, sweaty and nasty.”
Several months later, the
band made its second appearance at the 2016 Great Mississippi River Balloon
Race and, again, was enthusiastically received. Kid Rock, and Mike Wolfe of
“American Pickers” fame came to Natchez to take in the event and see Bishop
Gunn’s performance.
McCready laughs as he recounts the weekend. “So Kid Rock and Mike came down to
Natchez with our manager and booking agent.
Well, the next day after our set, our agent, and our manager flew out
and left Kid Rock and Mike with us from Friday to Sunday—so we were basically
put in charge of handling Kid Rock in Natchez. You can imagine how well that
went.”
“On Saturday night, we were
at the Under-the-Hill Saloon. The bar wouldn’t sell Rock a bottle of Jim Beam
over the counter, so Burne asked his brother, Chapman, to go to the liquor
store and get Rock the biggest bottle of Jim Beam he could find. There was a
cop sitting in his car out front, and Chapman says to the cop, ‘Hey, uh, Mr.
Kid Rock says we gotta get to the liquor store real quick. And the cop says,
‘Alright, get in.’ So Chapman gets in and the cop turns on his lights and off
they went to the liquor store. Only in Natchez.”
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| Ben Lewis and Travis McCready, 1st Annual Bishop Gunn Crawfish Boil, Natchez, MS(Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
Travis
McCready came up sturdy. The son of a metal worker, it seemed foreordained that
he would spend his working years behind a welder’s mask, like his father. His
young years were rough. Painfully shy and afflicted with a speech impediment,
Travis fought his way through elementary and middle-school, defending himself
against the physical and emotional predations of his schoolmates.
“I couldn’t pronounce my ‘Rs’,” remembers McCready. “When I would try to say a
word like ‘world’, it would come out as ‘wulled.’ The interesting thing is that
when I sing now, you can hear traces of my speech impediment—like anytime I
sing the word ‘heart.’”
Music
provided Travis with only a partial escape from the hardships of growing up
different. “I sang when I was a little kid, then I kind of put it away. My
grandpa told me one time, ‘You shouldn’t try to perform in front of anybody
until you know what you’re doing’—he was an accomplished steel guitar player—so
I didn’t until I was seventeen.”
In high school, McCready was artsy with long hair, and weird enough by local
standards to be picked on relentlessly. But he was a fighter.
Says Aubrey Preston, the band’s manager, “Travis came from one of those
environments where you get in an argument—the next thing to do was fistfight
until near death. He’s just a junkyard dog—he was fighting his way all the way
through. He’s had like twenty lives or something.”
Most musicians in Natchez work regular day jobs to pay the bills, an imperative
that deters them from traveling any distance to take other bookings. This was
the trap McCready found himself in—playing gigs until two or three in the
morning and, after a few hours of sleep, putting in a full day torching and
bending metal. For a musician on fire to pursue his passion, McCready knew his
aspirations would suffocate if he didn’t devote himself entirely to his music.
In 2016, McCready showed up
at work one morning:
“I got my bucket of tools and
I brought them out into the middle of the shop and left them in the middle of
the floor—then I left. Some of the guys were saying, ‘You’ll be back.’ But I
never did.”
One evening, McCready played
a reception at the Natchez Convention and Visitors Bureau, where he encountered
the man who would alter his and Bishop Gunn’s trajectory—Aubrey Preston.
Preston is the founder of the Americana Music Triangle, a Nashville-based
organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the rich musical legacy of the
area between Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans. Within this fertile womb of ground, nine
distinct genres of American music have gestated. The 40 million visitors annually who come to
this region to glean the musical and historical culture of the Triangle
represent tremendous economic potential for towns like Natchez. To this point,
it has been a lode of mostly missed opportunity. It is Preston’s mission and
passion to change this.
It was during one of
Preston’s trips to Natchez to work with local tourism leaders, that he first
encountered McCready.
“The city had asked me to
come down and speak about what we at the Triangle were doing. That night, the
local CVB had a reception—typical kind of thing, meet and greet, and a bar.
They brought over Travis, Burne, and Hudson Laird, who was the first lead
guitar player in Bishop Gunn”.
‘They were playing some cover
tunes—Bob Seger, that sort of thing. I
end up talking to Travis. He stood up and he’s like this really good looking
6’3” kid singing out of his mind and playing guitar. I shot a little video,
sent it to my wife and said, ‘Is this as good as I think this is, or am I in
some kind of reality-distortion field?’ She texted back, “Yeah, it is that
good.”
Preston resolved to bring
McCready to Nashville where he could write songs and connect with people who
could help him develop his career. McCready made the trip to Nashville with Sharp
as his wingman, but he was not synching with Preston’s plan to develop him as a
Music Row singer-songwriter.
“They gave me a recording of some music they had done. So anyway, I sent them
home, and I didn’t bother to listen to it that much, but then they got back
home and I listened to it, and its like this really hard driving rocking thing
that they had recorded themselves. So I kind of pulled my chair up a little
closer and started listening to them.”
“Finally I just decided this needs to happen, and I connected them with Casey
Wasner, a young producer I’ve helped who just won a Grammy for producing the
recent Taj Mahal/Keb Mo album.”
The result of that
collaboration with Wasner was Bishop Gunn’s first EP that showcased their
evocative lyrics, slicing guitar, and McCready’s muscular vocals.
Not long after the EP’s release, however, the band foundered. Preston had been
pressing for the band to relocate from Natchez to Leiper’s Fork full time.
McCready and Sharp were willing, but Hudson Laird and bassist Dan Scott elected
to stay home in Natchez.
McCready recalls, “We had a bass player married with three kids, and Hudson,
our guitar player, didn’t really want to do the traveling thing. So me and
Burne went up by ourselves to Leiper’s Fork to start whatever the next chapter
was going to be, and we just started writing a bunch of songs.”
Without a lead guitar or bass player, Bishop
Gunn was, for the moment, dead in the water.
Sharp remembers, “We were back to the initial plan of let’s work on Travis as
singer-songwriter, and I was going to work on producing. But one night we were
walking down the road in Liepers Fork and there was this little band playing
outside at one of the little spots in town. Aubrey, our manager, spotted the
guitar player, and said ‘THAT’s the guitar player we need. He plays slide, he
looks good—that’s the one!”
Soon after this initial encounter, McCready and Sharp ran into the guitar
player again at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville where he worked. Sharp chuckles as he remembers, “Travis and I
looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s ask him if he wants to jam with us.’ It
was kind of like being at a party and asking a hot girl out on a date. We
invited him out to the farm to make some demos with us, and he did, and he’s
still with us.”
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| Burne Sharp (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
The guitar player was Drew
Smithers. Originally from Connecticut, Smithers’ parents had been fans of the
Grateful Dead, and they gave their son a vast and diverse exposure to music. He
was considered one of the top high-school hockey players in the nation, and he
was heavily recruited to play college hockey.
One night, he accompanied his
parents to see the Allman Brothers during their annual stand at the Beacon
Theater. The experience transformed him.
Smithers recalls, “I was stunned by what Butch Trucks and Warren Haynes were
doing. I walked in a hockey player and walked out a guitar player—a Mississippi
guitar player. I wanted to play Mississippi style-that Allman Brothers thing
just floored me. I picked up the guitar and blew off the hockey thing.”
After graduating from Columbia College in Chicago with a degree in music,
Smithers moved to Nashville, and began studying guitar under Jack Pearson.
Pearson did a stint with the Allman Brothers and is, by consensus, a guitarist
of near-celestial stature in the music industry. Pearson persuaded Smithers
that he needed to learn to play in standard tuning, rather than in the open
tuning Smithers had taught himself.
With the addition of
Smithers, the band now had a pulse, but they were still down a bass player.
Preston remembers, “So, I was
still trying to push Travis to write songs the Nashville way. Well, we did that
for several months and I could see he just really wasn’t going to mix into that
Nashville thing very well. So one day I called the three of them together, and
I said, ‘Guys, you just want to rock, don’t you?’ They were like, ‘Yeah!’ I
said, ‘Alright, we’ve got our guitar
player, we’ve got to get a bass player—a real one.”
“Of course they just race
ahead. They said, ‘Let’s get Ben!’
Ben Lewis was part of the
network of Natchez players who played with, and filled in for other musicians
when needed. A well–respected local
songwriter and guitarist, he had cut a solo CD, “This Town,” in Sharp’s recording
studio. One of the cuts on the CD was ”The Devil Is A Woman,” a song that is
evocative of some of Lowell George’s best work. The song would later be
re-recorded for inclusion on Bishop Gunn’s debut album.
A former Marine who had
served a tour in Iraq, Lewis was working as a respiratory therapist in Little
Rock. Periodically he came home to Natchez to play gigs, write songs, and
record in Sharp’s studio. In 2017, Lewis made the decision to move back to
Natchez full-time, and even bought a house on the other side of the ravine from
Sharp’s studio.
“By that time, Burne and I
had already made the move to Leiper’s Fork, and Ben was coming up to jam with
us and Drew,” says McCready. “Finally, in March, after having just bought a
house in Natchez, he rented out his house and moved into the farmhouse with
us.”
With the addition of Lewis,
Bishop Gunn was at full-strength and hungry to hit the road.
Bishop Gunn went into Casey
Wasner’s Purple House studio in Leiper’s Fork in January 2017 to begin recording
their debut full-length album, Natchez.
After producing Bishop Gunn’s EP, Wasner had a good handle on the band’s
musical vocabulary and the sound they were dialing up.
“The six tracks we did for Natchez took almost a year to make.
They have the sound the band loves, the big tone, the heavy kick drum, the
powerhouse vocals. They’ve got the kind of power and tone that causes your
clothes to ripple if you turn it up loud enough,” explains Wasner.
In December 2017, Bishop Gunn
scored a major coup. The recently renovated Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in
Muscle Shoals, Alabama was open and ready for business. The band was invited to
take the studio out for a shakedown recording session.
If recording the remaining tracks for their debut album in one of the most
storied studios in music history was not exciting enough, there was another
surprise for the band. Mark Neill, the Grammy-winning producer behind the Black
Keys 2011 album, “Brothers” would be producing the remaining tracks on the
album.
Neill recalls, “So Aubrey sent me some of the band’s stuff. When I heard it, I thought, ‘Huh, that’s
weird. That’s like the strangest combination of Led Zeppelin and the Allman
Brothers I’ve ever heard in my life.’ And for a minute, I didn’t even like it.
But then it grew on me and within a couple of listens, I’m like, ‘No, there’s
something here that’s deeper—I can feel it.”
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| Drew Smithers (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
The pairing of Neill and the
band was not without creative tension. Neill is recognized in the industry as a
recording purist, eschewing all things digital in preference for live takes, no
headphones, and as much analog hardware as can be crammed into the studio. For
a young band accustomed to loops and beats run through Pro Tools on a laptop,
Neill’s approach seemed positively antediluvian.
“So I’m this guy walking around snapping his fingers, with a pompadour, and at
first it was just very odd to them,” Neill recollects.
“But I saw them develop right in front of me. I literally saw it, minute by
minute. Drew and I would talk later and he’d be, like, ‘Man, I can’t believe
what we just did!’ Every single minute of that process was exhilarating. The
incredible thing is that we recorded those songs in five days.”
Of all of the songs on the album, “Alabama” undoubtedly has the weirdest
provenance. Preston remembers, “Travis, Ben and Nicolette Hayford wrote
‘Alabama’ after the album was in the can—we were done with it. We had ten songs in the bag and then they
wrote that one. They sent me a demo of
it and I was like, ‘Holy shit—do you all realize what you just did? You just
rhymed Savannah, Alabama and Louisiana in the same song! This HAS to be on the
record—we have to go back. This song has got to be recorded on Alabama soil!”
Preston put in a call to
Rodney Hall at Fame Studio to set up a date for the band to record “Alabama.”
Hall’s father, the legendary Rick Hall, was the founder of Fame. From the
studio’s control booth he had launched the careers of Aretha Franklin, Otis
Redding and Etta James, among others.
On January 2, 2018, the band was on the road to Muscle Shoals for the session
when they received a phone call from Preston who gave them the devastating news
that Rick Hall had passed away that morning.
Despite losing his father only hours before, Rodney Hall insisted that as long
as there was good music to be recorded, his father would want the studio to
remain open.
McCready reflects, “So we just kind of reluctantly put it in gear, went down there and recorded the song the day Rick Hall died. So we show up, and Rodney Hall asked us what song we want to cut. And I told him I was a little leery about that because, I mean, the hook line is “Hope I don’t die in Alabama. And he said, ‘Well, is that your best song?’ I said yeah, and so we cut it. It was a very strange day.”
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| (Photo courtesy of Anthony Scarlati) |
Natchez is a
ferocious record, dripping with the sweat of a Mississippi summer. It is beaten
into shape by the band’s blunt-trauma rhythm section, finely scored by Drew Smithers’
arcing guitar, and consecrated by Travis McCready’s soul-drenched vocals. There
are no indie pretensions here, none of the contrived corporate dreck that
currently fouls the bandwidth.
The album rumbles out of the
gate with “Southern Discomfort,” a gritty elegy for the small-town Southern
working class that echoes McCready’s own struggles. It is not so much a
proletarian howl as a weary sigh--“Down South that’s the way shit goes.”
The final cut, “Alabama,” is a chilling psycho-Gothic cautionary tale of a
chance road encounter—set to the haunting cadence of a prison chain gang. The
spaces in between are filled with ruminations on the road as escape from
intimacy (“Wheels”), the virtues of older women (“All The Ways”), and the most
inspirational anthem to despair drinking in at least a decade (“Making It”).
Natchez is an unalloyed resurrection
of everything rock music once was—raw, defiant, ecstatic, and redemptive—before
the industry clubbed it to death like a baby harp seal. If any album today has
the potential to call all God’s children home to rock-and-roll, Natchez is that album, and Bishop Gunn
is the messenger.
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