Detroit-raised and Nashville-based band the Deadstring Brothers released one of the finest records of this year, and for the last 10 months the band has been perpetually on the road.
Kurt Marschke (pictured at left) and his band the Deadstring Brothers are resting outside a small Nebraska town that can best be described as the middle of nowhere. Cell phone reception is spotty but we agree to try and make it work. Taking gigs in tiny towns on the outskirts of America wouldn’t even be conceivable for most other bands, but for the Deadstring Brothers these gigs are a daily reality and all part of the master plan. This is a good starting point for our conversation, because I’ve been wondering why a band that released one of the best albums of this year, and plays a style of country rock that should appeal to larger audiences, chooses to play backwoods beer joints.
Yawning, the lead guitarist and songwriter behind the band answers my question. “The reason that we play all of these places is that if you’re going to play seven nights a week you’re going to have to find places to play. You have to find places that are in different markets that are smaller and will allow you to play Sunday through Wednesday. We play everywhere; we’ll play a bar or restaurant, or we’ll play a regular concert venue that’s in our genre and is on a normal routing for a band like us. That’s how we facilitate the concept of what we’re doing now.”
With the music industry in its current state, there are basically two ways for a band to “make it” these days. The first is to push your material online through the vast social media landscape and hope that one of your songs goes viral enough to actually make some money and fund a tour or an album. The second way is to tour constantly. Being a road dog is mentally and physically demanding on a musician, but that is the route the Deadstring Brothers decided to take at the beginning of this year.
“Last year I put the band back together as a full time unit, and the plan was that we wouldn’t tour in chunks, we would just tour straight. We set out to make up for lost ground that we might have had, because the Deadstring Brothers had never really toured properly for all these years that I had the Bloodshot [Records] deal,” says Kurt.
The band’s most recent album, Cannery Row, is a gorgeous production filled with well-written lyrical tales, omnipresent pedal steel guitar, rich vocal harmonies, and incredible organ playing. It’s as if The Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main Street had a chance encounter with The Band in an old time saloon and put together a record that oozes soul, blues, country, and rock.
Given the seemingly elaborate and meticulous production of Cannery Row, I can’t help but wonder how the Deadstring Brothers manage to both translate the sound live and bring a range of instruments and musicians on the road for a year of straight touring.
“It’s a 3-piece right now so everything is kind of stripped down. Those arrangements you hear are kind of amongst us. I had to expand my guitar repertoire quite a bit to try and cover what we could do with a 5-piece band. All of the records I’ve done have that arrangement of a lot of piano, organ, and pedal steel guitars and vocal arrangements,” says Kurt.
Being committed to playing basically every night of the week has lead the band into some less than ideal situations, like their recent five-day run in Sturgis, South Dakota for the largest biker rally in the world, a gig that Kurt describes as “the most surreal, weird thing that any of us had ever done.”
However, playing in so many different places to every type of crowd has forced the band to hone their skills as musicians, and has even inspired them to hit the studio this coming winter and make a “tour record” of mostly honky tonk covers.
“We really love playing country and honky tonk stuff, so we’re kind of doing a honky tonk record with a lot of the same people that were on the last record. It’s gonna be a real celebration of our friendships in Nashville and with other folks around the country that we’ve become friends with,” says Kurt.
With five albums of original material out, doing an album of mostly covers is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it aligns with the band’s mentality to stay on the road at all costs. If you listen to the Deadstring Brothers this somehow all makes sense.
As our conversation rambles on Kurt sums up the state of one of America’s great bands with a simple yet honest statement: “We’re creating a family on the road and this is the way we are gonna live. We changed our lives to do so. We’re gonna do this for a few years and see how much we can stand it and see how much it actually works.”
This article was originally published on The Horn, an online news website based out of Austin, Texas. Check it out at readthehorn.com! Neil Ferguson is the Media/Music Editor.
