Zac Brown Band keeps it real for fans

In 2004, Zac Brown saw guitarist Clay Cook wailing away at a gig with the Marshall Tucker Band. Brown turned to his bassist, John Hopkins, and said, “Clay is going to be in our band one day.”

Back then Brown’s group, scheduled to headline the Comcast Center on Sunday, was just another struggling act in the Atlanta scene. But Brown was true to his word after breaking big with the triple-platinum disc “The Foundation.”

“Two years to the day of him seeing me with my uncle’s group, the Marshall Tucker Band, we had our first conversation about me coming on board,” Cook said. “We’d been running into each other for years, and I had always been the guy people call when they needed a replacement guitarist or a fill-in bassist. That’s what I became for Zac, but it became permanent.”

Brown wasn’t the first rising star to notice Cook’s skills.
As freshmen at Berklee College of Music, Cook and John Mayer became friends and eventually band mates. In the late ’90s, the two dropped out and tried to make it as a duo in Atlanta but fizzled out.
“We lived together, worked together. He didn’t have a car, so I was his ride,” Cook said. “It was too much and we were too young to realize each other’s talent. But we taught each other how to write songs. We’re back in touch now and are buddies again.”
After Mayer took off for solo stardom, Cook kicked around Atlanta. He didn’t find success on his own but was always in demand. He played guitar with Marshall Tucker, handled bass duties in the first Sugarland lineup, toured with Shawn Mullins and produced other artists.
Brown’s band has finally allowed Cook to play the rock star stages Mayer enjoys — Zac Brown Band’s Saturday show at the 21,600-seat Darien Lake Performing Arts Center in New York will be the group’s largest headlining gig yet.
“I remember when we were struggling to fill these minor league hockey rinks,” Cook said. “Agents wanted to put us in smaller venues so we could have people wishing they could get in and drive up ticket prices. But that’s never been what we’re about. We’d rather have empty seats and make sure everyone who wanted to come got in.”
There’s a certain humility, a homeyness to the Zac Brown Band that is missing from slick rock acts and pre-fab country artists. The guys in the band aren’t pretty or glamorous. But they can play.
Cook attributes the band’s success to this humble, bar band aesthetic.
“The songs are real songs about real stuff,” he said. “And with Zac, you get what you see. There’s a couple of country artists who do a lot of posturing when they play. We go out there and we’re ourselves. It’s genuine.”

Zac Brown Band's Southern Ground Festivals

Zac Brown Band's Southern Ground Festivals include Avett Bros., Grace Potter and more 

The Avett Brothers, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Gregg Allman and The Lumineers are among the artists who will join Zac Brown Band for ZBB’s  two Southern Ground Music & Food Festivals this fall.

After bowing last year in Charleston, the Southern Ground Music & Food Festival will expand to Nashville this year. ZBB headlines each night at the events.

The line-up for the Sept. 21-22 Nashville fest, which will be held at Riverfront Park, is Amos Lee, David Gray, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, The Lumineers and Los Lonely Boys, among others.

Top names for the Charleston fest, which will be held Oct. 20-21 at Blackbaud Stadium, include The Avett Bros., Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, The Charlie Daniels Band and The Wailers.

In addition to ZBB, both festivals will feature Michael Franti & Spearhead, Jerry Douglas, and Southern Ground artists Sonia Leigh, Nic Cowan and Blackberry Smoke. Southern Ground is ZBB’s label.

As the name connotes, the emphasis is also on the food, with chefs from around the globe working with Southern Ground executive chef Rusty Hamlin. Among the ticketing options are Front Porch Stage Boxes, which allows patrons to sit on stage, enjoying a four-course gourmet meal, just feet away from the performers. Prices start at $325/seat.

Non-VIP tickets are priced for as little as $89 for a two-day early bird ticket.  For more information, go to www.southerngroundfestival.com

In an interview I did earlier with Brown for the Los Angeles Times, he told me the guiding principal behind planning the line-up and festivities: “What would I want to have if I was at a festival?’,” Brown said. “I’d want to have amazing food and drink and see an eclectic group of artists play. Too much of any one kind of music for six hours in a row is going to wear people out.” Brown added that ultimately, he'd like to expand the festivals to 10 cities.

Zac Brown Band Stretches Country's Limits 

 

Country music has never had a simple relationship with Mexico. While outlaws like Waylon Jennings once warned that there "ain't no God" on the other side of the border, Tim McGraw more recently took the opposing position, suggesting that God in fact created the country, but only as a place for trapped American adults to go when they needed a vacation.

No matter one's position in this rather limited point-counterpoint, the "Mexico song" has become a staple of nearly all mainstream country albums. Kip Moore, for instance, recently gave the genre a nostalgic turn on Up All Night's emotional center, "Everything but You"; Brad Paisley, never one to pass up a chuckle, rounded out last year's This Is Country Music with the Blake Shelton-featuring "Don't Drink the Water" ("No one I know / goes to Mexico / to drink the water anyways" rolls the punchline). Shelton, meanwhile, once pushed the senorita-chasing, Van Morrison-quoting "Playboys of the Southwestern" up into the country top 40, though the tune never caught on as successfully as Kenny Chesney's chart-topping "Beer and Mexico," Toby Keith's "Stays in Mexico," or Zac Brown's platinum-selling "Toes," the opener on the band's 2007 major-label debut, The Foundation.
"Toes" begins like all the rest: The narrator, exhausted by the "concrete and cars" that "are their own prison bars," hops a plane heading south and spends four days emptying his pockets living the life he's always wanted. But where the majority of these songs must eventually return back to the everyday grind of life in the U.S. of A., "Toes" turns the vacation into a way of life and concludes with its singer posting up on a Georgia lake just as he once posted up on a Caribbean beach.
Combining this attitude toward the world—so Buffett-influenced that their eventual collaboration felt almost superfluous—with subtle, harmony-filled arrangements and the repetition of a few gloriously empty clichés, the song couldn't have been clearer statement of purpose. Five years later, it instantly comes to mind upon hearing the "island lullabye" opener to Uncaged, the band's third major studio album and the country crossover hit of the summer—it sold some 234,000 copies in its first week.
Still, when breaking down those sales figures, it's the crossover that's key: Although country radio has yet to fully embrace any of Uncaged's eleven tracks, still preferring 2010's "No Hurry," to any of the newer material, the traditionalist band has cultivated audiences via non-traditional routes, developing a jam-ready sound that's best heard live and which coincided perfectly with the recent festival boom. Just as Eric Church recently reached a new market by shedding some twang and delivering a hard rock set at the Metallica-curated Orion Festival, Brown was taking the I-24 from Nashville to Bonnaroo way back in 2009. Lately, that sound has found a more comfortable fit at New Orleans's more roots-driven Jazzfest, and Uncaged's Trombone Shorty guest spot "Overnight" finds the singer embracing this collision.
As I was organizing this blog post, I was surprised to walk into a D.C. Starbucks and find the record sitting directly in front of the register, ready to be purchased by an audience about as far from "Stays in Mexico" as you can get. In turn, this new audience moved from purchasing Uncaged to exploring previous efforts like the aforementioned The Foundation, pushing that record to the top of Billboard Catalog Albums chart and the live Pass the Jar.
At the same time, beyond the bluegrass fiddles that endear the band to Jazzfest or the overpriced coffee crowds and the extended jams that fit right in at the Phish-headlined Bonnaroo, it doesn't seem far-fetched to suggest that this record has reached so many people in part because, to paraphase that "Knee Deep," pop has its mind on a permanent vacation more now than at any point in recent memory. After all, what group of artists, DJs, and producers have turned the getaway into a way of life more successfully than those who brought four-on-the-floor Eurohouse off of the island resort and onto everyday radio? If the EDM-inclusive playlist that warmed the crowd for Lady Antebellum's recent Radio City Musical performance is any indication, audiences have no problem listening to both.

 

Zac Brown Criticized by Little People of America

Zac Brown Criticized by Little People of America for ‘Midget Bowling’

 

From here forward, Zac Brown should probably stay away from controversial forms of recreation. The singer made headlines earlier this week when he went ‘midget bowling’ — which literally involves throwing a willing little person down a slip-and-slide lane into some pins — but now, he’s facing backlash from the Little People of America.
When the non-profit organization, which provides support and information to people with dwarfism, caught wind of the Zac Brown Band singer’s antics at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota last weekend, they were upset. ‘The Wind’ hitmaker teamed up with a little person named Short Sleeve Sampson, and together, the pair earned a strike when Brown slid Sampson down a greasy bowling lane toward 10 pins, which was caught on camera.
While Sampson was an eager participant in the ‘sport,’ Little People of America still gave Zac Brown a virtual slap on the hand for taking part in ‘midget bowling.’
“Little People of America does not endorse any activity in which a person of short stature is used as an object rather than regarded as a competitor, in a ‘sporting event’” a rep from the organization told TMZ. “We believe that such practices are a direct insult to the equality of people with dwarfism, grounded in a respect for basic human dignity.”
After the fact, Sampson spoke up in the singer’s defense, calling in to TMZ Live to insist that the game wasn’t such a big deal — and he wasn’t the only little person to show support of Brown.
“There’s no reason to give Zac Brown a hard time,” said James, a little person who called in from New York. “If it’s Sampson’s prerogative is to be hired as a human bowling ball, then that’s his prerogative. There aren’t many job opportunities out there for people of our stature, and I think that’s Sampson’s prerogative.”
Somehow, we think next time Zac Brown is invited to play midget bowling, he will probably decline.

 

Zac Brown Band releases new album

Zac Brown Band releases new album

 It's an important election year.
We know.
We get it.

And we also understand everyone with a cause and a soapbox is going to try to do everything in their power to persuade as many of us as possible to vote in favor of the candidates who support those causes.
We all have our political views.
But, patriotic anthems aside, music is where people go to get away from controversial and often divisive subjects like politics, and a good many of the albums I'm getting in these days include message songs from all colors of the political spectrum.
Of course, the artists who record them can do that. It is, after all, a free country.
But since to recommend an album that promotes a position is tacit approval of that position, I'm not going to comment on any albums containing overt political statements. If they want their political message to get out, they can buy an ad like anyone else.
So in this election year, this space is going to be a calm haven from the continuous clamor of the political wars going on in the rest of the media.
So let's talk about a new country album just coming out.
"Uncaged" by THE Zac Brown Band
I've been watching the Zac Brown Band come along as a major force in country music since the Georgia-based group's first big league release, "The Foundation," came out. And, to be honest, I still just don't see it.
I mean, it's a good band, it's a great band; but I just don't hear the difference between Brown and his boys and any number of other Southern rock-based country outfits fighting it out for a place on the charts or among the Grammy Award nominees.
Still, the ZBB's new release, "Uncaged," is another extremely tight and well-crafted set of original material — songs that draw from a wide variety of influences and styles that the fans are going to love.
Brown's potent leather-lunged vocals not only sound right at home on the power-driven numbers such as "Natural Disaster" and the title track, but his voice purrs with plenty of subtle nuance on more sensitive pieces such as "Lance's Song" and "Sweet Annie."
Some of the other stylistic textures are just as interesting. "Overnight" has a sophisticated R&B feel I would ordinarily expect from an old Motown hit, but it works nicely in this setting, and the nod to Jimmy Buffett's trademark island groove on "Jump Right In" almost makes me wonder why Buffet himself hasn't recorded it.
Overall, "Uncaged" is a very good, very solid, modern country album, with plenty of nice traditional touches among the guitar-driven Southern rock muscle, and I'm sure it'll be another big hit release for Brown and the guys. Maybe even help them rack up another Grammy Award.
Could "Uncaged" have been done as well by someone else? Maybe, maybe not. I just know that I don't have to understand it to recommend it.

Zac Brown Band Studio Opens

Zac Brown Band Studio Opens in Nashville, Bar & Restaurant Coming Next

 

"We want to exceed expectations," says Zac Brown. And that's not only what Zac Brown Band is doing with their third studio album, Uncaged, but also what they're doing with their whole business philosophy.

Just a little over a year after Zac started his own record label, Southern Ground Artists, Inc., the Grammy-winning musician has opened the Southern Ground recording studio just off Nashville's Music Row. And even though his home remains in Georgia, Zac says the new studio is just the start of his Music City monopoly.

"We're coming to Nashville," he says with a smile. "We're infiltrating, so (the studio) is the first step towards that. We're gonna have a restaurant here and a bar here eventually."

While the Zac Brown Band restaurant may be a ways off, the guys do plan to feed fans in the city this September 21-22 when their Southern Ground Music & Food Festival comes to Nashville. The unique concert experience pairs an eclectic musical lineup with gourmet food prepared by award-winning chefs.

"We want to be known for doing things differently," says Zac. "When you feed somebody a great meal, they remember it. We are one of the people, and when we get to sit and eat with our fans, it's a reminder to them and to ourselves that we're no different than they are even though we're up on stage."

Zac Brown Band's latest single is the catchy, uptempo "The Wind" -- what the lead singer calls a "barn-burning song." "It showcases everyone's musicianship in the band," he says. "It's the most country thing that's been on the radio for a while." Listen to "The Wind" below.

Zac Brown Band's Uncaged is due in stores July 10.