FOLIO
Aging gracefully isn’t easy for punk rockers. Those tattoos stretch, your hair falls out, that leather jacket doesn’t fit anymore, and the grind of eating and drinking on the cheap finally catches up to you. And that doesn’t even touch artistic evolution, which in many hardcore punk circles is tantamount to heresy.
Good thing Lucero doesn’t give a shit about any of that. Birthed in Memphis in the late ’90s, the blustery, beer-soaked quartet cranked out seven albums of country-fried rock ‘n’ roll in six years. But 2009’s 1372 Overton Park and 2012’s Women & Work, twin embraces of fiery soul and sultry R&B, felt like a revelation, both on record and in real life: Lucero had finally figured out how to embrace the hometown it worked so hard to escape.
“We were kids when the band started up,” Lucero bassist John C. Stubblefield tells Folio Weekly in a phone interview. “No matter where you’re from or what your upbringing is, you rebel against your parents and say, ‘I wish I was from anywhere other than here.’ We all grew up wishing we were Southern California skater kids, but over the years, as we dug deeper below the surface stuff that was there your whole life, we went, ‘Holy crap — look at all this great music from Memphis, from Sun to Stax to Hi Records to Royal Studios. That is Memphis, that is our lives.'”
Of course, releasing an album on a major label and polishing off the rougher edges of your sound will always alienate some diehard fans. But those Lucero lifers will be thrilled to hear that the band is following up last year’s mammoth Live in Atlanta four-disc set with another rootsy studio record, for which writing and pre-production occurred in January and recording will commence in April.
“Last fall’s By The Seat of Our Pants Tour gave us the chance to reexamine our roots because we were doing acoustic sets to open for ourselves,” Stubblefield says. “The new album will have more acoustic guitar and upright bass, which is why I started out playing in the band.” Stubblefield says the recording process will also hark back to Lucero’s beginnings. “We’re doing it old-school to get more stuff off the floor, so to speak, with all of us playing together rather than tracking individual parts — a more collaborative, ensemble effort with a more cohesive sound. We’re stoked about that.”
Even though they’re reconnecting with their past, Lucero has definitely more grown up. Frontman Ben Nichols morphed in the late 2009s from a skinny singer to a bona fide heartthrob, and the band plays a handful of local shows every year to raise money for local hospitals and music education centers. When asked about the irony of growing into community leaders, Stubblefield laughs, “I never even thought of it that way. But we get to go be ambassadors for this whole Memphis music thing: How cool is that?”
And even though the band still gets drenched in beer every time they play Louisville, Stubblefield says their hard-partying reputation has been somewhat tamed. “As we’ve aged, so has our crowd, so it’s calmed down a little,” he laughs. “Things still get a good bit raucous, but our shows aren’t quite the baptismal celebrations they once were, with all the beer. You get to a point where you’re like, ‘Hey dude? This is electric — do you want to be the guy shutting the whole show down because our guitars won’t work anymore?’ Also, if you just waited in line with 800 people for an hour to get a beer, don’t spray it on me? Where I come from, that’s alcohol abuse. Drink that beer!”
There’s no doubt that Stubblefield, Nichols, Brian Venable, Roy Berry and Rick Steff still love to tour. After 17 years, they’re still playing nearly 200 shows a year, and their upcoming stint, billed as a co-headline affair with Ryan Bingham, promises the kind of creative mid-career setup confident bands can do. “It’s 22 shows, so we’ll flip-flop Ryan closing and us closing, 11 nights and 11 nights,” Stubblefield says. “Maybe we’ll even be playing some songs together by the time we get to Florida.”
Stubblefield adds that going on the road is the perfect antidote to the weeks holed up in the studio for 12 hours a day. “Coming out of that creative period, we get to play new tunes and flesh out new arrangements to see how they work in the real world,” he says. “That live release is what we’re doing it all for. It’s very rewarding.”
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