On a recent Thursday night, Windy Citizen sent me on a mission to see the band Leslie open for The Trews at Evanston’s classiest little venue, the Space. Thank you, Windy Citizen! I had a great time. Here’s what I discovered:
a) Leslie is a power trio consisting three rail-thin, tall, long-haired Southerners who are super-nice dudes and have great manners. They have appropriately badass names for their line of work: Sadler Vaden (guitar/vocals), Jason Fox (bass), and Jonathan Carman (drums).
b) They’re from Charleston, SC and have played extensively through the Southeast, but they’re not a “Southern rock” band per se. Their music is definitely retro, in the vein of the Dazed and Confused soundtrack. It’s like if a music broker went back to the 1970s, bought an option to mortgage a decade’s worth of riffage, sliced those riffs into little tranches and repackaged them as complex financial instruments, Leslie would be one of the premium rated AAA ones.
c) Their first big recording, the “Rebel Souls” EP, came out on March 31 and is available on iTunes, Amazon, etc. They recorded it in Memphis with producer Paul Ebersold, who helped them hone their songwriting and add texture to their arrangements. Ebersold has lots of modern rock/alternative credits to his name, and I think his sensibilities mesh well with Leslie. The songs are straightforward riff-rockers, so they benefit from the instruments sounding impeccable and fitting together just right. A good producer = money well spent by Leslie.
d) On stage, the band can seriously put out. For starters, if you’re a rail-thin, tall, long-haired Southerner, there’s very little you can do onstage that won’t look great, so if you actually know what you’re doing you’ll end up looking extremely cool. Add to that the fact that Leslie have been on the road pretty much constantly since forming in the summer 2004—they’ve got the chops to back up the visual. Live, the songs lose the sheet of production and achieve that ragged sound that you associate with the Who, Zeppelin, or Cream. With these bands there are only three instruments, so the palette of sounds is limited and the musical vocabulary is pretty much the blues. The performance becomes about conjuring a very primitive, powerful energy and mastering its ebb and flow, more like a magic show than a night at the symphony. Not many bands perform that way any more, maybe because using a non-ironic blues vocabulary is out of fashion, or because it’s so easy to buy so many sound-making toys, or because, for the first time in human history, musicians now record first and learn to play live second. It’s a great feeling to be giddy and impressed by skill rather than cleverness in music. I’d recommend going to see bands like Leslie if only to be reminded that rock is a vocational, not professional, endeavor.
e) Speaking of vocation, not profession, in the five years that Leslie have been on the road, they estimated a net profit of, like, $400 each. They’ve played on a cruise with Lynyrd Skynyrd, been caught up in gunplay at a Young Jeezy afterparty, appeared in the movie Tropic Thunder with the Mooney Suzuki, and crashed on couches all across the nation. For three guys in their early 20s, to have logged the hours that they’ve logged before releasing their first big, official recording, you get the feeling they’ll only get better.
Leslie are headed back to South Carolina, then to Texas, then to California, but will eventually be back in Chicago. They’re on tour with The Trews and then Bang Camaro. You should check them out next time they’re around, especially if they’re playing at a high-volume venue (the Space was a little fragile for their performance).
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Chris Douthitt
I'm a musician/person with a day job living in Rogers Park and working in Chicago's bizarre aspirational non-place known as "SoNo." I play guitar and sing for a culturally important band called the H More
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