Interviews
Liquid Futures
by Brian Quincy Newcomb
All good things come to end, the saying goes, and the older you get the more you tend to make peace with the changes that life demands. Well, you make peace with it or learn to live with frustration. For Bill Mallonee the time for a change is past due, yet club owners—like the folk at Off Broadway—continue to put 'Vigilantes of Love' on the bill. As for those Trophy Wives on stage in St. Louis in late July—Jacob Bradley and Kevin Heuer look just like the guys who've been playing with Mallonee for a while now, in fact they're the rhythm section on VoL's concert DVD and live album, Resplendent.
Chatting after a solid two hour show dominated by songs from VoL's last disc, Summershine, and a new disc designated under a solo moniker, Fetal Position, Bill Mallonee is warm, philosophical and chatty as he reflects on life in the business of music, the faith and family that sustains him, and Christian music fans, who come out to see him religiously, ten years after his introduction to them on the Mark Heard produced classic, Killing Floor.
"I wanted to change the name of the band with Summershine," Mallonee says as he's putting his guitars away. "It felt new and fresh and had a different kind of sound. That felt ideal for me. But the guys at the label, said 'oh, no, (VoL) still has retail value.'"
But Mallonee has learned the hard way that such value is limited. "(Vigilantes) was a critics' darling band, and you could find that out from everybody from RollingStone to Spin to Alternative Press, but we could not sell records to save our neck. I got really discouraged, but I thought you could have worse things carved on your gravestone than 'critic's darling; can't sell records.'"
Mallonee had already shifted gears musically—to a Brit-pop direction on Summershine, not unlike Let's Active back when being from Athens, GA, meant something—and now it was time for the name to follow. But first there was the matter of the label. "Two weeks after the record came out they pulled the plug. They didn't know what to do with us. All we asked them to do was re-release the record at the front end of this year. I understand that (the events of) 9/11 put everyone's world in a tailspin, but I thought that Summershine was a good enough record, that if you put it out again in the spring of this year with a single like 'Putting Out Fires,' it might have a chance."
But labels sometimes can't be reasoned with, and often the folk who run the business can't hear what's going on with the music or guess what they should do about it. Ask Wilco. And when Vigilantes weren't being labeled as Americana folk/rock, they were described as "Christian," something that has inhibited the mainstream success by all but rare exceptions.
"We're going after a different audience now," states Mallonee, matter of factly. "I don't think we'll ever go back to playing just for the church crowd."
Playing in a roots music bar, Mallonee is aware of the fact that the majority of his fans are drawn from that unique subculture. He's grateful, but at the same time he's aware that he needs to expand or die, treading water will no longer do. "In my perfect world," he states of his place as an artist and believer, "one of the things that I think I've undergone subtly is that I've tried to make it so that the delivery, or whatever it is that I'm doing up there (on stage), has no pretense or pretext about it. I don't have an agenda."
"I tell people, straight up that I'm a believer, I'm a Catholic Christian, I embrace that, I love it, I try to live it and breathe it, I try to walk it, but it's not an agenda. When I step foot into a club, my job is not to make your life better or save you, it's just to play what I feel like is music that makes me happy. Sometimes being happy is exposing sadness. Sometimes it's getting a grip on stuff that would be grievous left to its own, and it's all in those tunes. And that's the only reason I stand on that stage."
Paradoxically, Mallonee's faith is as present in the lyrics of Fetal Position as they've ever been. In "Life On Other Planets," Mallonee writes "I've got you... and some scars for all my labors... You've got me... and everyone needs a Savior." It's just that he doesn't feel the need to explain or preach, apologize or defend. "We love the Christian audience," Mallonee admits. "We love the audiences that come to the shows and listen and support and nurture us, but it's not enough to sustain us."
And in nightclubs, the promoter is often as concerned about selling beer as they are tickets, and Mallonee's tried and true religious fan-base are not what you would call great customers. "I offered the bartender $70 tonight," admits Mallonee as we wait for our early morning breakfasts in the Denny's after the band has loaded out. "I know the bar was dry as a bone. She wouldn't take it, but I feel real self-conscious about it."
But, for Mallonee and his Trophy Wives, there will always be England. Both the band's growing audience there, and the palpable influence it has had on the music. "I've been getting more and more away from 'Americana' and more into pop music," says Mallonee. "That's the reason I started playing drums when I was a kid. I've spent most of my life trying to get back at that stuff. It's a British influence with an Athens, GA kind of vibe to it."
"What got me into music in the first place was the melody of the Beatles, and the intelligence of the Kinks, it was the three-minute pop song that made me feel alive. It was big jangly, beautiful guitars with lots of diamonds in them, and that's why I'm playing a Rick again. One of the hardest to manage guitars in rock & roll is the Rickenbacker, but they sound great, there's nothing quite like them."
As important as guitar sound is, most folk come to Bill Mallonee's music because of his songs, and he's as prolific as he is able to capture an emotion in a single literate phrase. "Not all of them were great, but all of them were done," he says. "Picasso went through a blue period, but not every blue painting was a masterpiece, but it was a collective of work over a period of time. Out of fifty songs a year, maybe twenty of them are stunning. The rest, I write them because they need to be written. My attitude now is put out four records a year. Some of them might be very low to the ground, just recorded on a convenient weekend, but I'm going to put them out just to get them off my chest."
Success in life may be about adapting to change, but from the right perspective it's all good. "It's good things," says Mallonee of the future. "Spiritually speaking, I'm just trying to bring down my expectations as far as the business goes. For me to get out and do it, it means all my bases at home have to be covered. That means my marriage and my two kids, but there's all this band-related debt. We have a good time getting into the van; we have the most stunning conversations about our faith and our walk, and we get to play rock & roll together. No complaints, it's a great little life. Of course, my wife is a saint for letting me chase that dream around the block."
Of course, that's a given.
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