VOTED "BEST OVERALL MUSIC ACT 2007"- 11TH HOUR'S READERS CHOICE AWARDS
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Even after you follow the instructions, a child’s toy dinosaur – one of those weird sponge things dropped in water and left overnight to swell – is still a dinosaur in the morning. It’s just a larger, wetter and more slippery dinosaur. Hank Vegas isn’t much different. Since its inception in Macon, GA, the band has grown larger, wetter and more slippery, but they’re still Hank Vegas, a group that’s had to carry around the “alt-country” albatross because the sound is Southern and the stories tainted with rural, gothic poetry. To be sure, they are Southerners – they dig fried foods, speak with accents, have bouts with whiskey and list tiny towns on their birth certificates. But… but they have been dumped into the world and left overnight to swell. Actually, they ran headlong into the world, turned its endless vats of experience up and drank. They’ve stayed out all-night and collapsed in the morning, waking in the afternoon ten times their original size. In other words, they aren’t just Southern and are more than just alt-country. Rife with their sundry influences, their debut CD, "The Things You Are", proves it.
Chad Evans, lead vocals and the chief songwriter, was living out of an RV in St. Simmons, GA, when he met Vic Stanley. Someone had taken Chad’s guitar into a bar there. Drunk but recognizing his guitar, Chad – almost inadvertently – got up to play some of his songs. Blown back, Vic was convinced the boy needed a band. The two clicked, and Hank Vegas was set in motion. Though each was essentially just a good ol’ boy, former high school athletes from the small parts of Georgia, each also had extensive book-learning: Chad graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature and Vic with a masters in Psychology. From the start, it was going to be a different animal.
Looking for greener pastures, they came to Macon and made them a band. The lineup changed here and there, went through shifts, but by 2005, brothers Justin and Josh Smith were holding down the rhythm section – bass and drums respectively. As Hank Vegas polished its sound – cutting demos and opening for acts like The B-52s, The Drive-By Truckers and Billy Joe Shaver – it also got stuck. They were bringing a new wave of alt-country and it was good, but it was still alt-country. Something about that wasn’t working; it felt limiting. Having gone briefly into the studio without Justin, Josh, Vic or Aaron Irons, who joined Vic on the guitar duties, it looked like the band had disbanded. Things were quiet and there were whispers that it was done.
In a basement, Hank Vegas came back to life, rising less like a phoenix and more like an old man with arthritis. Justin and Josh returned, and guitarist Rob Evans, owner of said basement and no blood relation to Chad, got on board. Stripped down some, the band went to work rearranging the arrangements, playing with the lyrics. By and large, it sounded a lot like the “old” Hank Vegas – still smart, catchy and intermittently gut-wrenching, but tighter and with some pop and rock thrown in for good measure. They played a few shows just to remind the people what they were missing. Then the band finally took celebrated producer David Barbe up on his invitation to record at his Chase Park Transduction studios.
Barbe has produced Son Volt, the Drive-By Truckers, and Amy Ray (Indigo Girls), and played in Sugar with Bob Mould, so he more than had the chops to get Hank Vegas to reach its potential. In fact, he’d ridden around listening to it for a long time, waiting to get his hands on it. Chad’s heartache-carved lyrics and his soft, salty vocals laid the foundation. Justin’s and Rob’s musical prowess and vision for the band’s sound meshed with Barbe’s own to craft a new direction, a deviation, while Josh held it all together with some remarkable work on the drums. Sage of the steel pedal John Neff (Star Room Boys, Drive-By Truckers) joined the band, lending every track a high-whining bit of honky tonk over every other style present, while backup vocalist Siobhan Glennon worked lilt and lament into every word she sang. Hank Vegas had finally found the bridge between its home down South and the world at large: "The Things You Are".
If REM had gone through a steel guitar phase with Gram Parsons on lead vocals, singing songs that Charles Bukowski had written with Bruce Springsteen in mind, then someone would’ve already come up with a genre for the music on "The Things You Are". But instead of thinking that this is Hank Vegas’s permanent sonic placement, think: a full and textured cross-country trip over several musical borders, a trip made solely to express itself in the now.
“Just by coincidence, on the day we went to the studio, it was announced that REM was entering the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame and that they would be recording in the next room beside us at Chase Park Transduction. You could hear Peter Buck tracking in the studio we weren’t allowed to enter,” Chad Evans says, “It (REM’s influence) wasn’t intentional. It’s just that they were at the front and the back of our minds the whole time.”
Some of the long time fans, those who’d heard them play on stage and in private countless times, have heard the results and are stunned. For them, "The Things You Are" is an aural case of déjà vu, something so familiar and still brand new. Every spin through the disc, the songs grow, leading the listener toward something unnoticed the time before. It bends so many ways. It’s a rock album and pop music and country too. Call it what you will, the damn thing moves. And really, this is what Hank Vegas wanted all along.
QUOTES
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“Hank Vegas now signifies one of indie rock’s most compelling new bands, known for literate, wistful-as-woodsmoke lyrics and vocals that are polychromatic to the point of iridescence.” -Georgia Music Magazine– Candice Dyer
"Based in Macon, Hank Vegas is a true, new-age, southern, rock band. Their heartache-carved lyrics mixed with screeching steel-guitar-sounding solo’s make a sound all too familiar, but just as addicting. Listeners describe this band as “REM with a steel guitar.” -- Georgia Public Broadcasting 2007 Year in Georgia Music
"Macon has long been the breeding ground for a wide selection of earthy, timeless art -- and a bunch of bad blues bands. Whether or not the Hank Vegas catalog will remain a beloved staple of music history remains to be seen; for now, Chad Evans and company are riding a Central Georgia buzz of interest with a rootsy new album and strong ties to the legendary breeding ground of the Allman Brothers and the decidedly more progressive environs of Athens."
-Creative Loafing Atlanta
."In fact, much of the album has that hazy, dog days of August feel to it, thanks to pedal steel guitarist John Neff’s searching guitar lines. “Crazy With Fever” feels like a deranged drinking anthem, capturing the feeling you get from too much sun and Pabst Blue Ribbon. All told, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year."
--Maggie Large The Macon Telegraph
"Though the name conjures up images of cowboy-hatted good ol' boys and the band has many connections to the alt-country scene, Hank Vegas is another animal altogether. While it's still got the swagger and genuine Southern-ness you'd expect from a band from the Allman Brothers' neck of the woods, Hank Vegas actually has more in common with the jangle-pop traditions of nearby Athens - bands like REM and Matthew Sweet."
--The Clarion-Ledger Jackson, Mississippi
CONTACT INFORMATION: Management:Rob Evans 478-390-4015rob@hankvegas.com
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