Blackberry Smoke’s long road to Southern rock stardom

? When Blackberry Smoke’s Holding All the Roses (Rounder Records) was released in February, it quickly climbed to the top spot of Billboard’s Top Country Albums. To the uninitiated, it was an overnight success story. But the Atlanta-based Southern rockers have been constantly touring for well over a decade, winning the admiration of their classic rock heroes and forging a working relationship with fellow Georgian Zac Brown. Slow building success has made the band’s post-Thanksgiving Atlanta show a special event. Titled the Brothers and Sisters Holiday Homecoming, the Southern music showcase takes over the Tabernacle on Fri., Nov. 27.
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? Singer and guitarist Charlie Starr recently chatted with Crib Notes about a 15 year career that’s taken a band that struggled to draw locally in the early aughts to the cusp of mainstream stardom.
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? There’s some video on Youtube of Blackberry Smoke playing the Star Bar. That would’ve been an ideal place for your music circa 2000. Were you guys fixtures there when you first started out?
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? We played the Star Bar several times in the early days. This was around the time of 9 Lives Saloon also, and I think we played the Cotton Club before it moved. But we definitely did our time at the Star Bar.
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? So I guess anywhere open to rock ’n’ roll and country, too…
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? Yeah, and we played Smith’s a bunch. We’d make the trip down to Birmingham and play the Nick also. But then we really toured. When we formed the band, we jumped in the van and stayed gone most of the time. Which has kind of been our M.O. ever since, really.
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? ??? Did you jump head-first into life on the road?
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? We pretty much just went head-first into it as Blackberry Smoke. None of us had ever really done a whole lot of traveling. Not nearly as much as we wound up doing in this band. Nobody really cared about seeing us much. Even at the Star Bar, we would play to five people. So we wound up going out with Jackyl, an Atlanta band. We toured with them for a month. That was our first tour. That’s sort of how we learned how to tour and how to not kill one another — watching how they operated.
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? Did the relationship with Jackyl open you up to more people in Atlanta?
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? Not in Atlanta because they didn’t play Atlanta either. It was quite a few years before we could start to build on our Georgia fan base.There wasn’t a whole lot of interest in the type of music we play in Atlanta proper at the time. And still I don’t know of many bands that play the kind of music we do in Georgia even. There are a few now that are really great, of course, like Brother Hawk, Stone Rider, and a band called Radio Lucent from Athens that we play with now. I think Stone Rider was around back then, but I don’t think I met them back then. I think they did the same thing. They just took off and toured.
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? The first big break you guys caught would have been working with Zac Brown, right?
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? Well, we toured for years and years before we met Zac. The way we met Zac was on one of those cruises with Lynyrd Skynyrd. At the time, he was doing the same thing we were, which was low-budget touring in a van. Playing every honky tonk between here and the West Coast and just trying the grassroots approach. Then his popularity exploded with country radio. Maybe even Zac didn’t see that coming in such a big way. Nine or 10 number one singles in a row later, there he is. But we had a slow build going previous to our working with Zac. After he cemented his position in the industry and built his label Southern Ground, we signed with his label and put out an album called Whippoorwill. Then we went out and opened for Zac a lot on tour. That was great because he was playing 20,000 seat venues.
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? Did his country radio audience warm up to Blackberry Smoke?
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? It’s funny because I think Patterson Hood from Drive-By Truckers made this observation a while back. When you play an arena with 20,000 people, it’s someone else’s fans. It’s not a guarantee for success. You might have half the audience saying ‘Who the Hell is this? I paid to see the headliner.’ But if you get 200 new fans out of 20,000 people, that’s a victory. If you are playing a different kind of music than the headliner, that’s not always the most comfortable position to be in. People might stand there and look at you with a scowl or two. But Zac’s fans were pretty open-minded.
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? You mentioned Skynyrd because of the cruise. Did groups that are still doing it embrace your band early on? You emulate them, in a way, but add your own twist to Southern rock.
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? We’ve got a hand-written letter from Rickey Medlocke from the first time we played with Skynyrd. I think our drummer Brit (Turner) has it. I think it was 2002 or ’03 that we first got the opportunity to open for them. I remember the show and looking over and seeing Rickey Medlocke and Gary Rossington watching us from over in the wings. That was really a crazy feeling because they are obviously a big influence on our music. Rickey wrote us a little note saying he loves what we’re doing and to please come to his dressing room to meet him. We did, and it was the beginning of a great friendship.
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? Have you picked Rickey Medlocke’s mind about touring and being in a band and just, you know, basically your life and how he’s already lived it and learned lessons?
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? Not with Rickey per se… When I was a teenager in the town I grew up in (Lanett, Al.), the second singer from Molly Hatchet, his name is Jimmy Farrar… He’s from that town. We all looked up to him. He came from our town, started a band, sold millions of records, and played Madison Square Garden. He sort of warned me and some friends of mine when we were young about the trappings of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Of course we didn’t listen. You have to go out and learn those lessons for yourself.
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? I assume, even with a hit record, touring constantly like you’ve done from the start, is still how you are going to make money in the current musical climate.
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? Selling lots of records is hard to come by. If you do a little research and find out how many physical copies were sold of the best-selling record of 2000 and compare it to the top record of 2015, I’m sure there’s a big difference. Streaming and online music services have changed the game. For us, touring already was our bread and butter. I think a lot of artists realize that if it wasn’t before, it damn sure is now.
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? Does this lack of record sales affect the album creation process for bands that have tasted some success?
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? It hasn’t affected us at all. We still enjoy the same process now. It’s still exciting to make a record. I never sit and think ‘Wow, this is not going to sell at all.’ Or ‘Boy, we are going to sell way fewer copies of this than the last one.’ If anything has changed for Blackberry Smoke over the past 12 years or so, we try not to make the same record over and over again. AC/DC is the only band that can do that. Each record is a picture you are painting, and each show on the tour is a snapshot of the band at that particular time.
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? Blackberry Smoke, the Kentucky Headhunters, and Levi Lowrey play the Tabernacle on Fri., Nov. 27. $35. 8 p.m. The Tabernacle, 152 Luckie Street. 404-659-9022. www.tabernacleatl.com.