Gaslight Anthem sails ever since sink-or-swim ultimatum
“I had been in bands for years, plugging away and I had the conversation with my wife,” Fallon says. “She says, ‘If this doesn’t work out, you have to figure something else out.’ My parents said it. Her parents said it. Working two jobs, trying to make the band work. It was going nowhere. That was no joke.”
Appropriately, the Gaslight Anthem named its first album “Sink or Swim,” released in 2007 and the band has been on an upswing ever since with Fallon’s ultra-earnest, hard-strumming folk songs played by a punkish rock quartet.
Fallon, with his cropped hair, boyish face and countless tattoos, is the band’s affable guiding light, a student of music history who was reading about, listening to and playing rock since he was 11 while growing up in New Jersey.
“I had the songbook from Pearl Jam’s ‘Ten’ and I took guitar lessons because I couldn’t read it,” he says. “When I finally learned to play the song ‘Alive’ it was a big moment. I thought those guys in Pearl Jam sort of looked like me, and I got the idea in my head that maybe I could do this too.”
Fallon played with a couple of struggling bands while working countless jobs at diners, gas stations and construction firms. Music got squeezed in between shifts. Fed up with dead-end jobs, he decided to go all-in with Gaslight Anthem, joined by fellow Jersey bar-scene veterans Alex Levine, Ben Horowitz and Alex Rosamilia.
“It wasn’t like we had a lot in common musically,” Fallon says. “The criterion was: ‘Are you willing to leave everything behind and go on tour until you drop in this green, broken-down van that we bought for $3000?’ They were the only guys I ran into that were crazy enough to do this with me.”
The quartet had the will but not the way. “We were all coming from totally different realms musically,” Fallon says. “Nobody had heard some of the folk music I was listening to. One guy was into punk, another into the Cure, another into New Jersey-New York hardcore. Put it together, and it sounded like trash.”
The band got signed to a small record deal, but was dropped within six months. Fallon knew the band didn’t have the goods because they were “too concerned about what we thought the other guys wanted to hear.”
At the breaking point, the band arrived at a new approach. “I just said, ‘Let me write these county songs,’ and they said, ‘We’ll do our own thing’ underneath my words and melodies. That’s when we wrote ‘I Coulda Been a Contender,’ which is basically a country song with hardcore breakdowns, and we found our sound.”
Relentless touring built a strong grassroots foundation over the next two years.
“We weren’t a punk band or a DIY band by all the rules, but we were still accepted by that community, and the word-of-mouth power of those people was really important,” the singer says. “We’d see five kids the first time through a small town, then 20 the next time and it gave us a triumphant feeling. It was such a joyous time for us, to know that people were showing up not because we were ‘cool’ but because they liked us.”
The quartet’s 2008 album, “The ’59 Sound,” won rave reviews, even as it transparently referenced the band’s heroes (from the Clash to Bruce Springsteen). Fallon even found himself sharing a stage with Springsteen last summer at the Glastonbury Festival in England.
With “American Slang” (SideOne Dummy), released a few weeks ago, the band’s lyrics get a little more specific, with Fallon reflecting on his life, and the sound broadens to incorporate subtler, more spacious melodies and new textures, including reggae.
“It was a big reassessment for us,” he says. “We knew we can’t just be the sum of our influences, we have to be our own band. We started that process on this record, and I can see this being the direction for the rest of our career.”
For Fallon to talk about the long-term future of Gaslight Anthem is something of a breakthrough. The band is playing to bigger audiences than ever, and the singer’s make-or-break career choice now seems like a sound one.
“The ultimatum has long since lifted,” he says with a laugh. “I’m in the good graces of every family member I’ve ever had. In fact, it’s brought my family together. Now they’re all talking about this music thing, like it was gonna happen all along.”
-- Greg Kot, greg@gregkot.com
The Gaslight Anthem: 6 p.m. Tuesday at House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, $21; 312-923-2000.
Sponsored Link: Amazon's The Gaslight Anthem Store
Great to see a nice write up of a band as heartfelt and deserving as this one. Not great to see them playing the home of advertising and $7 Bud Lights, The House of Blues. Get on that Metro!
Posted by: John | August 01, 2010 at 10:32 AM