Party on It

Posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 2:40 pm

For the four last four years, I’ve played drums in a band called J Roddy Walston & the Business.  Don’t wrack your brain – unless you’ve come to one of our shows or work at the Weis my mother shops at, you probably haven’t heard of us.  But there’s a king-hell load of someone else’s money that says it won’t be that way for long.  (Just kidding, Vagrant.  Keep it coming.)

By my reckoning, we’ve played 342 shows over that time span, with all but two dozen of them somewhere other than Baltimore.  When drive days and off days are added in, there’s a year of our lives that was a mad blur of faces and foreign skylines and rest stop dinners and dingy bars and dingier living room floors, with the subtle hum of busted eardrums hovering over it all.  And it only just became my job in November.

Things changed for us in April of last year, when producer Kevin Augunas (Cold War Kids, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros) caught wind of some demos we’d recorded in our practice space, and he invited us out to his studio in L.A. to do some recording and to make the rounds of the industry.  By the end of our three-week stay, Kevin had introduced us to a small army of label and publishing folks, most having never heard us outside of Kevin’s recommendation.  On the strength of those demos, we drew interest from a few companies, and we spent the rest of the Summer eyeing up our options.

In the end, we were swept off our feet – and humiliated at Arkanoid – byVagrant Records (which partnered with Kevin’s Fairfax Recording for the album, the same arrangement that accompanied the release of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ “We All Belong” album, which is riding quite a wave of momentum at the moment).  Vagrant has a great roster with several bands we’d become great friends with – especially the Hold Steady and Murder by Death – and we heard nothing but great things about the folks at the label, the atmosphere, and – most importantly within the climate of the current music business – their financial and promotional acumen, making them one of the more stable independent labels in the country.  We signed a deal in November, and within days were on a plane back out to L.A., where we cut 13 tracks with Kevin in the legendary Sound City Studios, where Nirvana’s Nevermind and Weezer’s Pinkerton were made – among several dozen other platinum records – bringing my life full circle.  (I refer you to our website – www.jroddy.net – for a full recounting of that experience via photo blog.)

These are all things to elaborate on at a later date, when I’m not trying to cram all my worldly possessions into a duffel bag for the next two-and-a-half weeks.  Today we’re heading out for a two-and-a-half week tour down to Austin, Texas’s world-famous South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival.  This will be our second time at SXSW, though the circumstances could not be more different.  In 2008, we played two non-official SXSW shows to a grand total of approximately 100 people over four days, and slept in tents in our friend’s backyard.  To make matters even sweeter, on the first night we were there, some drunken lout decided the best way to “win” the argument he was having with his girlfriend was to punch out one of the side windows on our poor, besotted van.  Between all this and the discovery of Texas’s bewildering frontage roads – which seemingly go everywhere but over the highway to the other side, where we needed to go – I was ready to sell the whole mess back to Santa Ana’s descendants with a box of Ferrero Rocher for their troubles.  Dispirited, but not defeated.

This year, we’re going down there with a different head of steam.  Once our album was finally mixed and mastered last month, our manager and the label were able to selectively shop it to folks in charge of SXSW happenings, and the response couldn’t have been greater.  We have four amazing shows, including a highly-coveted set at “Mr. and Mrs. T’s and Rachael Ray’s Feedback Festival at Stubb’s BBQ” – yes, that Rachael Ray – which has suddenly become one of the biggest and most highly-regarded best parties down there, no doubt because of Mrs. Ray’s generosity in providing lavish amenities, as well as their annually star-studded line-up. (Performers this year include Bob’s son Jakob Dylan, Andrew W.K., Neko Case, Dr. Dog and She & Him, featuring actress Zooey Deschanel.)  We’re also playing Vagrant’s showcase, held at the 1,200-seat La Zona Rosa and headlined by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.  As if to signify how much really has changed in two years, earlier this week, Spin magazine named us one of the “50 Must Hear Bands of SXSW” and in an interview on L.A.’s KROQ radio station, the editor of the magazine plugged us as the band he’s most looking forward to seeing at the festival.  Suddenly – people know about us.

Our itinerary looks like this:

3/10 – Washington, D.C. @ DC 9

3/11 – Raleigh, NC @ Slim’s Downtown

3/12 – Atlanta, GA @ Star Bar

3/13 – Athens, GA @ Caledonia Lounge

3/14 – Off

3/15 – Oxford, MS @ Parrish Baker Pub

3/16 – Shreveport, LA @ Hayride Diner

3/17 – Off

3/18 – Little Radio Austin party @ Red-Eyed Fly

3/19 – Vagrant Records Showcase (w/ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Murder by Death ) @ La Zona Rosa

3/20 – Mr. and Mrs. T’s and Rachel Ray’s Feedback Festival @ Stubb’s; 40 Watt party @ Side Bar

3/21 – Little Rock, AR @ Whitewater Tavern

3/22 – Off

3/23 – Cincinnati, OH (via Newport, Kentucky) @ Southgate House

3/24 – Lexington, KY @ Proud Charlie’s (w/ Afroman “’Cause I Got High”)

3/25 – Chicago, IL @ The Metro (w/ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)

3/26 – Louisville, KY @ Zanzabar

3/27 – Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant Street

And all of that is happening…now.  I’ve left myself about 15 minutes to throw my entire existence into a duffel bag for the next two weeks, and that can lead to an existentialist quandry no matter how it turns out .  But I’ll be blogging plenty on the way down and back, so keep an eye out for frequent updates.

Over and out…

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