Less than two weeks ago, four self-described "hairy Southern boys," all named Followill and together a rock band called the Kings of Leon, had their New York moment. The band occupies cultural real estate somewhere between William Faulkner and the Allman Brothers, and its members have a Waltons-gone-bad back story that plays well with American urbanites who find the rest of the country somewhat mysterious.
Now just might be their time, the Followills feel. Their second album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, came out on Feb. 22 and is getting the big, all-American push from RCA. The release was surrounded by the kind of antic swirl that can happen only in New York, a place where hype is systematically and enthusiastically manufactured. (The band's first record, Youth and Young Manhood, released in 2003, did extremely well in Europe but sold only 120,000 copies in the US.)
And so there was a video to be made, groupies to spurn, multiple television appearances, two sold-out shows with lavish after-parties, a clutch of media opportunities and the announcement that the band would be opening for U2 on that band's forthcoming tour.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Just another rock 'n' roll daydream, except that a lot of time and energy went into lifting Kings of Leon from its cult status to a band that can actually sell records.
The future is hardly assured, but these four supposed rustics from Tennessee -- three brothers and a cousin -- who seem to know plenty about fame and its discontents dived into their Manhattan media moment joyously last week and reveled in its squalid, splendid glory. What follows is a look at four days in the life of the next big thing.
The video shoot
Two weeks ago Monday, Dance'N Style in Rockaway, New Jersey, swarmed with Western line dancers. The director Patrick Daughters took a somewhat literal approach to shooting King of the Rodeo, the second song on Aha, and booked local people to line dance their way through the hard-rocking song.
Onstage, two women played a mournful, two-part harmony version of the chorus: "Rise and shine, all you gold-digging muthas, are you too good to tangle with the poor, poor boys?"
At stage right, the four "poor, poor boys" waited their turn to perform in the mock competition that was the conceit of the video: Nathan, 25, drummer, oldest brother and sage of the group; Caleb, 23, singer/preacher/guitarist; Jared, 18, bassist, token teenager and the butt of many jokes; and then the cousin, designated shy guy and lead guitarist, Matthew, 20.
The biblical bent of the brothers' given names is no accident. Their dad was an itinerant, hard-drinking Pentecostal circuit preacher in the South, since lapsed. His name is Leon. His sons are his gift to the world, perhaps not in a way that he intended, but still.
The Followills are all skinny as a swamp reed, a fact that is etched by pants that are so tight that they said they keep pliers in their bunks on the bus to enable quick exits. The three younger band members spend as much time futzing with their hair as a sophomore girl -- Nathan, with a huge untamed mane on his head and on his face, is the exception -- but that is about all the rock star affectation they can muster.
Instead of hiding in the tour bus, they actually watched the video shoot and caught smokes outside with the locals. Matthew tried on a few line dance steps outside and said: "You can't beat these line dancers. I think there is no other kind of dancing can touch it."
Even though it was a long day, they actually seemed happy to be grinding out a video shoot. Between breaks, Nathan displayed a new phone that allowed him to show off video of his girlfriend -- a model in Los Angeles.
Nathan said that although they rose to prominence as curios -- snake-handling Strokes, if you will -- this time, the music will do the talking.
"In Europe, they loved the story, these boys who traveled around the South, sleeping in the car with our daddy. We seemed so foreign to them," he said.
Aha is archetype sophomore rock album -- the wages of fame, the allure of groupies, the toxic chemical mixes -- except it is played out as Southern Gothic. It includes the preacher cadences of the father -- Caleb listened to tapes of his father preaching on a tape recorder tucked under his pillow -- and the recently acquired rock inflections of the sons.
Virtually unexposed to modern music until the turn of the millennium, Caleb and Nathan were given a Led Zeppelin box set and introduced to certain mind-altering chemicals.
Signed by RCA in 2002, they hooked up with Ethan Johns, son of Glynn Johns, the legendary producer of Led Zeppelin, among others. Aha was recorded on the Beatles' old Abbey Road mixing desk and shows the band as full-fledged musicians and self-mocking observers of the life they were living.
The newly hatched rock stars on Aha are drunk a lot, impotent sometimes, and sobered occasionally by the whole rock lifestyle. After a life of chaste home-schooling, they obviously jumped in with both boots. But Aha is less a party record than hair of the dog.
"This is that first sip of leftover warm beer the morning after, the one with eight cigarette butts floating around in it," Nathan said, smiling at the image as he went back inside for the rest of the shoot.
The talk show appearance
On Tuesday the band assembled slowly and creakily in the green room of Late Show With David Letterman at 4pm for rehearsal. There had been substantial foolishness the night before. Caleb made some mock surly noises about Letterman's legendary indifference to the rock bands he invites on his shows. "If he makes eye contact with me, he's done in this town," he joked.
The level of anxiety heightened when Ken Weinstein, the publicist the band has hired, came in with several copies of Rolling Stone magazine that included a 16-page fashion shoot and feature article, just one of a number of press coups that the Followills -- who know how to show some leg when they need to -- have pulled off. The band is seen posing in Guess?, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, accessorized by bottles of whiskey, models in slinky outfits and a blow-up doll.
Nathan ducks into the bathroom with one of the few copies so he can look at it unmolested, and Caleb complains that everyone seems to have a copy but him. There is some concern about what the brothers' mother -- Betty Ann, whose name is tattooed over Nathan's heart -- will think of the lascivious cavorting. The boys may no longer be church-going, but they are God-fearing, and their God is a vengeful one.
"We'll just have to tell her we didn't actually sleep with any of these girls," Nathan said.
Most brothers could not build a deck without getting into a fistfight. And, yes, there was some of that early on. But even in the middle of all of the mayhem of a publicity campaign, the brothers and their cousin basically stick together.
"This week is a good test for us because it is full out, always on and it's New York," Caleb said. "It has been fun and sort of mind-boggling, but we are not going to let the pressure pull us apart."
In the background, their managers and press people were dealing with frantic requests for that night's show at Irving Plaza. "How many Strokes and managers total?" Weinstein said into the phone.
Jared agreed. "This is a week we are going to want to end up loving and while we may want to whup each other every once in a while, we're not going to blow it."
With that, they headed downstairs to rehearse The Bucket, an anthemic guitar-fest that Caleb introduces with a "whoop," the kind of noise you hear coming out of a backwoods mountain holler, before tearing into verse that promises, "I'll be in the lobby, drinking for two." Nathan held up his camera phone for a bit, perhaps to give the folks back home a look at the big time.
When they played the show at around 6:20pm, Letterman actually walked over and introduced himself. Nathan remained seated behind his kit and gave the talk show host a modest dude nod instead of trying to clamor over his drums just to get a handshake.
The rock show
Irving Plaza in Manhattan was sold out, with a clot of industry types jammed into the upstairs VIP zone. The band came out with little fanfare and kicked into Happy Alone, and then proceeded to tear though many of what they hope will be big songs on the new record, including Milk, a hillbilly love letter to an anonymous "hour-glass body"; Pistol of Fire, a painful recollection of one of the by-products of sleeping with strangers; and Soft, about the inability to do so.
In a short set, they reversed the usual dynamics of a New York rock show. Normally Manhattan crowds cross their arms and stare hard, while the band jumps all over the place trying to make a connection. But other than a stray twitch of Caleb's leg and Nathan's flailing arms, nobody in the band moved, while the crowd acted as if they were at a sock hop.
Jared and Matthew looked as if their instruments landed on them from a very great distance, which may be part of why they coax such odd and compelling noises from them. Caleb sang with ferocity, all while staring straight ahead.
It could all be written off as rock posture and keen marketing, but the Kings of Leon are one of the few bands to revel unabashedly in their Southernness. They may tour a lot, but every year they spend two weeks at a Followill family reunion in Talihina, Oklahoma.
Some critics have suggested that Caleb amps up his regional inflection for effect, but live or on record, it is far more affecting than affected.
The after-party
The girls do love the way he, and everyone else in the band, tosses his hair. The party at NeoGaea, sponsored by Rolling Stone, was a mix of suits and those lovely, tantalizing young things that seem to be at every A-list party.
When the band came in, the room magnetized and suddenly the corner where the band sat brimmed with women. The band, including Nacho, a roadie and a Followill cousin, found themselves trying to find a place to sit as more and more women angled for an adjacency. As Caleb sang earlier on Slow Nights, So Long: "I just don't know where these ladies come from."
The band finished at 119 Bar, home court when they are in Manhattan. Drinks were drunk, pharmacological experiments took place, lies were told, all before the sun came up and chased them back to the SoHo Grand, where they got a short nap before waking up and doing exactly the same thing.
On Wednesday there were two songs on Carson Daly's show, a sold-out concert at Webster Hall -- Liv Tyler showed up and did the hang thing -- and an after-party at Delancey Bar, followed by another daylight exit from the 119. Nice, but very exhausting work, if you can get it.
The rest
On Thursday there were interviews with MTV, Fuse, Q magazine from Britain, Bass Player magazine for Jared and then dinner with another reporter.
By the time they arrived for the dinner, at Freeman's, a Lower East Side restaurant with significant hipster credentials, they were cold, tired, and just about talked out.
They shivered through a photo shoot and then settled in for food, their first real meal of the day. The band's mood brightens when they see the wine list: One of the hobbies they have picked up since hitting the big time is fancy wines, and they maneuver around the list with expertise and gusto.
With a bus call for Philadelphia in the morning, Kings of Leon's New York minute is just about over. Jared, the boyish bassist of the band -- he is 18, after all -- found the 96 hours of white hot light and very little sleeping in New York to be exhilarating.
"It was easy to go over to Europe and deal with that," he said, tearing into the macaroni and cheese that Freeman's is known for. "But you come over here and do David Letterman and Rolling Stone and all that stuff, it is a lot more scary."
The band was in Chicago two Fridays ago and will spend the month of March relentlessly touring, trying to translate all of the press and hype into an actual hit record. At the end of the month, they will join up with U2 and begin opening shows for them.
In most every town, there will be people lining up to tell them they are the last great hope of rock music, regardless of how true it is. And they'll take the praise while it comes.
"We know but for this," Nathan said, gesturing to his band, "we'd be painting houses in Oklahoma."
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