Behind the Scenes with Rival Sons
In February 2017, I had the unique opportunity to sit down with Scott Holiday, the charismatic guitarist of Rival Sons, backstage in Cologne, Germany. What followed was a raw, unfiltered conversation about life on the road, the band’s creative process, and the harsh realities of being a touring musician. This interview offers an intimate look into the world of one of rock’s most authentic bands.
The Teatro Fiasco Tour: Breaking the Mold
Scott Holiday: The tour is going great. We’re in Cologne, just came from Berlin last night, and we’re about two weeks into this one. We have about two more weeks to go before we go home. It’s called the Teatro Fiasco.
We decided to do something different than we’ve ever done, different than I’ve ever seen, to be honest, especially with a rock’ n roll band. We put together something special with me and our friend, Howie Pyro, who has a radio show at home called Intoxica Radio. When he does it live, it’s Intoxica Radio Live. He only brings very rare 45’s, and he spins garage and soul, funk and everything—his rule is everything has to make people want to dance. Howie is of the indie generation, and he was in dancing, and he’s a legend unto himself. That’s Howie Pyro. He’s great.
After this, we bring out our friend Derrick Brown. He’s a published poet at home. He is the owner and president of Write Bloody Publishing, which is a publishing company for poets.
It was an audacious idea that we had to bring this poet out and set the night up like this, but it’s gone over swimmingly. And you can see people being offended. That’s usually my favorite part when people are caught off-guard and the jeers. There are those who come to upstage and say like, “I don’t know. I felt—I don’t know if they got it, and I felt the most emotionally connected to those moments.” That’s what’s supposed to happen. We’re supposed to catch you off-guard. People are supposed to think, “What the fuck is this? Why are they doing this? I don’t know how I feel about this.” And then you go home with it, and you realize a few days later, “Holy shit! I think I really loved that art!”
It makes people feel things, and that’s the idea. If we don’t spur ourselves and poke ourselves, then our artistic nerves are just becoming complacent, and nothing cool about complacency.
The Rival Sons Sound: A Modern Take on Classic Rock
Scott Holiday: Well, the band is going to be a hybrid of the personalities involved in making it. [We are] very eclectic personalities that like all sorts of music. Mostly, you will probably hear us not listening to rock ‘n roll. We’ve been listening to the newest Anderson Paak record, which is fantastic. We listen to a lot of hip-hop. We listen to a lot of old soul, a lot of funk. I’ve listened the shit out of rock ‘n roll, and I still love rock ‘n roll. But our music is an amalgamation of our joys and consciously knowing that we are a rock ‘n roll band.
And it’s also very traditional and very torch-bearing in a way that we know. Rock’ n roll has seemed to—I think now it’s just re-sprouting. But when we started the band, even before I met the guys when I was looking for everybody, I felt rock ‘n roll had become very complacent with itself, and it felt horrible and, of course, it was never going to die or go away, but I just felt like The Blues Brothers being on a mission from God.
Further Reading: Posters from Concerts I Promoted
We have a responsibility to do it the way that we believe and want to see it done; a dirty rock ‘n roll band. We’ve always said a quote, “It seemed like rock forgot to roll. It’s like rock forgot to dance.” It forgot its boogie. It forgot what it was all about, and I just wanted to make something that I will be proud of and feel like it’s encompassing these elements. It’s dirty. It’s very bluesy. It’s country and western, a lot of R&B, funk, and a lot of soul. That’s what rock ‘n roll is. I think the great amalgamation of all these styles.
The Creative Process: Spontaneity and Collaboration
Scott Holiday: I don’t know how to really prepare it. I think it’s just what we are, the animal that we are. The guys in the group were hungry, and it takes a long time between records even though we’re doing one every year. We’re playing a lot of live shows all year long. We stay on the road quite a bit, and that inspires creation. It also makes you get sick of the old material, not in a way that you’re not going to play well or you don’t want to play it, but in the way that you want new material and you want to expand your catalog, and you want to do new things, and you realize—you see your own patterns. You see how you’ve been doing things and where you want to take them.
The key for me is to not finish anything. That sounds lazy, but it’s quite the opposite. It’s a hard thing to not finish a song as a writer, but if I leave it open, then I don’t think I’m married to it, and then when we get creative together, I’m allowing people to doctor it; add things or subtract things and that’s how we have to create. Otherwise, you get very married to something, and then somebody wants to change one little thing, and you’re like, “Jesus, what is your fucking problem? Don’t you see the masterpiece I made?” So, I don’t make any masterpieces. I write little bits, and then we all work together.
Life on the Road: The Harsh Reality
Scott Holiday: Yeah, I have two kids. It’s miserable. It’s horrible. It’s fucking excruciating, and it’s no place for a family man on the road. It’s horrible. I already ended a marriage last year because of it. It’s very difficult. My advice about that would be careful what you wish for. I’ve worked on this since I was a kid and ended up having a family in the interim, and it all kind of came to me the way it is now after I had my family, and it’s shitty to be away from home. And we all are dads, and that is the difficult thing on the road. We love our job, and we can’t stop doing the job because the job keeps the family alive, and we could not be happy without the job. But it’s the worst part of the job for sure. There’s no bright side. I know this is a dark answer, but it’s the truth. There’s no bright side to it. It sucks. It fucking sucks. We all hate it.
But, the kids understand, and luckily in this day and age, we have Skype and Facetime. You can only imagine in the ’60s and ’70s up until now, those guys didn’t even have cell phones. You had to find a successful landline just to hope to reach them because they’re on the line. It must have been so sad.
Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Musicians
Scott Holiday: My main advice for people starting out is to learn to enjoy the taste of crow. If you wanted to survive and make music for a living, learn to enjoy the taste of crow. It means, learn to enjoy being poor, get comfortable with it because that’s mostly what we are.
The happiness isn’t going to come from fame or money. The happiness is going to come from the feeling it gives you, the achievement you make, like with the breakthrough with the art, with the expression, with how you’re connected to your instrument or your writing or your painting, your sculpting or your building or whatever. The joy will be from the accomplishment inside of itself, not from the pay.
It’s almost weird for the band when you think about it. It’s almost kind of gross like it’s such a pure thing that I came up with, and now I have to deal with lawyers and money about it. Do music because you love it. I know that sounds generic. Do art because you love it. Because you can’t not do it. Because it’s what you’re supposed to do. And enjoy the taste of crow.
A Surreal Moment with Black Sabbath
Scott Holiday: We toured with Black Sabbath for 13 months, and we often shared the same hotels as them. I remember I could hear like two doors down from me. It sounded like somebody was listening to the Osbourne TV show too loud on the T.V. Sharon and Ozzy were in there, and the kids had dropped by too. He was going, “Sharon, turn down the T.V.” And she’s going, “Ozzy, no!” You can just hear them doing it, like holy shit. They’re right there! I just looked outside the door and thought, “Oh, my God! This is unbelievable. I can’t believe we’re doing this. This tour is going to be great.”
It was just a surreal thing. It all just underscored the importance of authenticity.
The Evolution of Sound
Scott Holiday: If I was going into the studio tomorrow, I wouldn’t know until I was in there tomorrow. Even today, I couldn’t tell you. There are several ideas that we all want to pull in and that we talk about that we’re going to pull in, but you’re never really sure how that’s going to manifest when you get in there.
We went in there and said, “Yeah, we want this like a steady, up-tempo, groovy record.” We can get in there and start striking and hitting at that and then immediately go, “This sucks. This sounds like shit right now. It’s like feeling forced, and it’s not real. Let’s loosen up and try something else.”
So it’s very organic in that way. It has to be—it’s very honest in that way. You can’t force a record. You can’t bullshit each other, and you can’t bullshit the listener. It has to be a real thing for us because, otherwise, it’ll never—it’ll never really come out. That’s for sure. It will never get off. As I said, we’re killing our darlings. So, if we’re in there forcing shit, we can hear it real, real quick. We’re looking for the nugget, the magic where we impress ourselves or somebody’s performance is blowing us away. If there’s something forced, we’re likely to delete it. “I don’t fucking want to hear that ever again in my life. Delete that right now.”
A Message to the Fans
Scott Holiday: If anybody reading this is a fan, thank you. Thank you, thank you. We’re so thankful that we could come back and do this all over the world, and it’s because we have great fans that support us. So thank you.
Join the Conversation
A big “thank you” to Scott and the whole Rival Sons crew for taking the time to participate in this interview. So how about you? Do you love the taste of crow? What road do you travel? Please leave me a comment below, or connect with me directly at @JudsonLMoore. Travel safely!