ROBYN FRIDAY
MU SIC I S S UE
“I went through three failed record deals before I was 26,” he says. “I got beat up and burned out pretty early.” So you’ll excuse him if he can hardly believe his good fortune: Years after he’d decided, well, “fuck this,” he finds himself fronting a band with guitar legend (and Spradlin’s boyhood hero) David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and longtime Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas, who Tom Waits has called “one of the best rock drummers alive.” How he got there is a story that sounds like a Greg Spradlin song: A whole lot of heartbreak and a whole lot of shouting that ends in, if not redemption, at least a well-earned hallelujah.
HIDALGO (RIGHT): Boyhood hero.
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pradlin has been playing music professionally since he was 14. While still in high school, he became a guitar mercenary for the honky-tonk bands in White and Cleburne counties. Word got around: If your guitar man fell out, there was a kid in Pangburn who already knew the pickup to all your songs. The gigs were rough — a teen-ager waltzing into grimy bars with grown men who showed up as much for the fighting as for the music. His parents made him take a pistol to gigs, just in case. “I didn’t think it was weird at the time,” Spradlin says. “It never occurred to me that I might end up in a shootout.” Everyone agreed: This boy could play. These were hard-bitten and inglorious days for Spradlin — going to familyband rehearsals in creepy shacks in the boonies, playing “Sweet Home Alabama” in a Hawaiian shirt, entertaining town drunks. But let’s not get off track. Spradlin is like a windup doll of redneckGothic memories and too-good-to-check stories; one whiskey in, he rattles off more material than could fit in these pages. Point is, by the time he was 20, he was “hard and crusty,” having spent every week of his life in dive bars, paying his dues well past the point of any reasonable return. He was playing one night at White Water Tavern when a fast-talking, long-haired guy approached him after the set. “I’m from Arkansas and I live in L.A. now and I’ve got a deal with Warner Bros. and I want you to be in my band,” the dude sputtered breathlessly. Figuring he was full of it, Spradlin gave him his number and forgot all about it. But it turned out that this big talker was a guy named Bryson Jones from Newport who really did have a development deal with Warner Bros. What
THOMAS: One of the best drummers alive, according to Tom Waits.
“We signed a ridiculous deal. That’s what you get for hiring a $500 lawyer.” Jones didn’t have was a band, or even an act. He had been in a hair-metal outfit that tried to make it in L.A. The band sucked, but a record-industry manager thought the charismatic Jones was cute. She hooked him up with an A&R guy, and in those heady days of fast-and-loose deals, that was all it took. The A&R man told Jones they didn’t need any more metal acts. But Jones was from Arkansas and The Black Crowes were huge at the time, so how about a Southern-rock band? Why not? Jones saw Spradlin and thought “the thing that you do, I need that.” The decision makers at Warner Bros. agreed and Spradlin, who had never been on a plane before, was flown out to L.A. to start a band with Jones. What followed was essentially an attempt to put together a Southern-rock boy band. “Straight up, this was a manu-
factured act,” Spradlin says. “There was no art involved.” The A&R guy brought together a mismatched crew to play with them, including a speed-metal drummer from Iowa and a male-model guitarist from Hawaii. Their big moment was supposed to come with a showcase in front of all of the Warner brass, in town for their annual meeting. Unfortunately, it had been a bad year for Time Warner, and immediately prior to going to see Spradlin and company, the label honchos had been told that there was a signing freeze and rosters needed to be slashed. “Then they came to see us,” Spradlin remembers. “They’re like, why are we here? There’s not going to be any new band.” At this point, the band didn’t even have a name (surely “creek” and “boys” would have been involved). Of course,
as ridiculous as these Bad News Bears of Southern rock were, they might well have made it on to the scene if the whole goofy scenario had taken place a year earlier. “The theme of my life is timing,” Spradlin says. “With my music, it’s always stuff like that. If I booked a gig tonight, it would come a hailstorm.” Spradlin, dejected, went back to Arkansas. He finished up college, worked odd jobs, and eventually started The Skeeterhawks. This was no boy band. Beloved in the burgeoning alt-country scene, they made impassioned country rock that combined a rollicking punk spirit and soulful, Gram Parsons-tinged twang. The band got the thumbs up from No Depression magazine, then the kingmakers of alt-country, where an apparently over-caffeinated writer declared that Spradlin “would rock you like the wind of an Ozark overlook, where tips of descending burnt-yellow sycamores open on the gleaming blue of Lake Quachita [sic].” Labels came calling. Things were looking up. And then a wrong turn: The Skeeterhawks signed with San Francisco-based Synapse Records, a rap label looking to branch out. “We signed a ridiculous deal,” Spradlin says. “That’s what you get for hiring a $500 lawyer.” The band went to California and cut a sub-par version of the record they’d already made back in Arkansas. Everyone was getting a bad feeling about the label and the deal, a feeling that got worse as the days went by without anyone seeing a dime. The band went back to Little Rock, the record never came out, and they never heard from the label again. “We thought our whole record was gone,” Spradlin says. “They wouldn’t call us back. We didn’t own anything, we couldn’t do anything.” Their record in limbo, the band slowly fell apart. Spradlin took some time off, then cut some solo demos with a Music Row manager. The manager was shopping them around to labels when someone broke into his house in Nashville and stole his hard drive, which had the only copy of the demos. Spradlin is the sort of guy apt to believe in signs, and by this point, the signs seemed clear. “I felt like the universe was telling me something,” he says. “I thought, ‘Obviously music is not what I’m supposed to be doing,’ even though I know down to my core this is all I’m really good at.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 19 www.arktimes.com
DECEMBER 12, 2012
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