This band’s looks may deceive but their country blues is from the heart
Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band is a study in contradictions, beginning with the name itself, as many unfamiliar with their music would likely expect to find a stage bursting with musicians not a three three-piece band.
Then there is the visual aesthetic of the band’s music. While it’s never safe to judge a book by its cover, at first glance the bearded, tattoo sporting, suspenders wearing Peyton would hint at a hipster rockabilly act, not the more traditional country-blues that the frontman has perfected after playing as many as 300 gigs a year over 12 years on the road.
That country-blues sound comes honestly, courtesy of Peyton’s finger-picking style of playing the guitar, a traditional method of playing that harkens back to the days of John Lee Hooker and Albert King. The style eschews guitar picks, calling instead on the thumb to play bass while the other fingers play the treble strings; it’s an older — and arguably more difficult — way of playing the instrument that requires an incredible amount of practice, but has resulted in this small outfit producing a Big Damn Band sound.
Reverend Peyton — alongside wife/washboard player Breezy Peyton and drummer Max Senteney — bring their act through the Triangle once again, this time setting up shop at Chapel Hill’s Local 506 on Thursday, Feb. 28. The tour comes in support of their newest album, “Poor Until Payday,” where the band attempted to capture the sound of their kinetic live shows in the studio through the use of vintage equipment. While the equipment on display during their latest Triangle stop may be newer in age than the 1949 Supro amp used on “Payday,” the all-out effort by the band to be one of the liveliest acts currently performing will remain the same.
We had a chance to speak to the good Reverend before their stop in Chapel Hill, and took the opportunity to discuss how appearances can be deceiving, and if it would been more lucrative for the Rev to have just embraced rockabilly, and its ready made fan base.
Q: How often do you notice from the stage an audience member who may be confused at a trio sporting a “big band” name?
A: Not very often, anymore. The people coming out to our shows now seem to know what we’re all about. Everyone showing up is pretty familiar with us these days, so it doesn’t happen as often as it used to.
Q: Even the most established bands traveling the country on tour still have those nights where there are more empty barstools than audience members. During a year where you are playing 300 dates, how often would you look out from the stage and think that the gig wasn’t even worth the gas money spent in getting there?
A: Back in the day, they were almost all that way. It doesn’t happen very often now, you know, which is great. That’s just the music business; you’ve got to tour to survive now. Nobody is buying records anymore, and everyone wants music for free, so for a band like us, touring is it. I don’t have an endorsement with Pepsi or something, so everything we get comes from our music. Because of that, we know what we must do, and that’s just what it is. And over the decade that we’ve been doing this, the music business has changed so much. It’s almost a completely different thing, and we have managed to kind of weather it. I don’t know what will happen during the next decade, but whatever it is, we’ll figure that out.
Q: How far into your career were you when you realized this was something you could do as a living?
A: It was just flowing that way. I mean. What we figured out early on was that we could go out and play a show, and the next time we were there more people would show up. I don’t know how to explain it, we just always believed that that it would work. There were plenty of days where people doubted us, but the fans never did. When I was a kid, or at least younger, people would say that no one really liked the type of music I played; they were expecting blues that sounded more like Stevie Ray Vaughn, basically. I loved older blues players so much, I just thought I’d make people understand why by playing, and that’s kind of what I sort of set out to do: just to play this stuff from the heart. I wanted to be real about it, and just travel around and win people over one fan at the time. When we first started doing this, there was so much change going on with the music industry. No one really knew what was going to happen, with free legal downloads, and then with Spotify coming along. It didn’t really matter then to us, as we believed that we had the music that makes people want to hear it, so we just set out to do that.
Q: One of the things that really surprises me about the band is it has such a rockabilly look, but the music is so blues driven. Have you ever felt like you’re missing out on an almost guaranteed audience, what with the popularity of rockabilly music festivals and such?
A: It ain’t no secret that the blues genre has kind of struggled for years as far as album sales, and concert attendance, goes. I guess all I have to say on going rockabilly, or why we look the way we do, is that I just dress onstage like I dress offstage. I don’t think about that too much; I just try to be myself. This is really just most of the time what I wear any day, overalls or maybe some suspenders, I’ve always just dressed this way. As far as blues is concerned, blues is a genre that has taken some big hits in the last few years [through the loss of older performers]. There’s a lot of record stores that don’t even have blues sections anymore, which to me is crazy, but that’s just the way it is. So that being said, we’ve always just set out to navigate ourselves, and we are going to go and do what we want regardless. Our whole career has been like an oak tree; the tree may grow real slow, but it’s real strong. There’s a lot of trees that grow real fast, but you can pull it right up out of the ground, and I think there are a lot of bands being grown that way now. The blues music business in general has started to kind of come around, because it’s like everyone realized it ain’t going anywhere. That’s just the way we are as far as I’m concerned: We ain’t going anywhere.
Q: I wanted to touch on how you play guitar. When did you gravitate to that style, instead of just the cookie cutter way of playing?
A: When I first heard someone do it. You know when you first hear someone play, and an E chord seems like something that’s impossible to do, and when you first pick up a guitar you wonder how you are going to do this? All of that seems like sorcery at first. Then I heard someone playing finger style country-blues, where they literally played two things at once, and that just blew my mind; it just seemed like magic, and so I became obsessed with it, because I wanted to do that. I wanted to figure that out, and still to this day, it has its own vibe. I’m always trying to take it places and push boundaries with it, and create new ways of playing. ... No one else is going to play like us. It’s like our music is a cozy pair of boots, just kind of lived in, you know? Two new boots, right out of the box, it don’t feel right. That’s the same way a song is better if it’s lived in. ... . I think real music fans want to hear something personal, and the more personal you get in art, the more people respond.