Interview: Blackberry Smoke

It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating: Blackberry Smoke are the real deal. Worthy heirs to the mantle of such great Southern rockers as the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Atlantan quintet are superb musicians with a packed catalogue of magnificent songs. They regularly top the country and rock charts – as well as featuring on the folk and indie charts – and are increasingly popular in the UK, first breaching the top ten with their Like an Arrow album back in 2016. Ahead of the band’s O2 Academy show on November 11, we caught up with guitarist/vocalist/songwriter and all-round polite, thoughtful Southern gent Charlie Starr somewhere in Europe on yet another of the band’s seemingly never-ending tours.

Your second album, Little Piece of Dixie, wasn’t initially released in this country. I had to buy it from a US eBay seller who expressed surprise that anyone in the UK would be interested in Blackberry Smoke. A few years on, you’re packing out our biggest city halls. Does this surprise you?

It does, yes. I’m pleasantly surprised with each visit. I’m as happy as can be with the way that it’s all turned out.

So to what do you attribute your success over here?

[Long pause] I don’t know. We’re working class people. I don’t know whether our music somehow resonates with working class people in other countries. But I’m a nerd when it comes to music, and as a guitar player I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that so many of our guitar heroes are British guys: Clapton, Peter Green, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. And what they loved was American music – the blues and this beautiful music from the south. So it’s kind of a crazy musical circle.

A lot of your songs seem to be very personal. How many of them are autobiographical? Pretty Little Lie, for example, feels as though it might be based on a real incident.

Yeah, well, most of ’em are. And if they’re not, they’re from me watching it happen to other people. As a songwriter, you learn to be a little bit of a spy. Or you just keep your antennae up and grab little bits either as they happen to you or fly by into the ether. There’s a song on the Holding All the Roses album called Payback’s a Bitch. That’s not about me. It’s about somebody else. But watching someone go through that was pretty intense.

One Horse Town speaks to all of us who grew up in a shitty little town, regardless of where we come from in the world. But the one thing the song doesn’t address is the resentment often felt towards those who manage to flee by the people they leave behind. Have you ever experienced any of that?

No, I never have. I really don’t know how many people from my home town are aware of what we do. I know that some do, of course. I’ve got a lot of friends from there still, and I’ve never had any resentment from them. But where I come from is kind of forgotten in time. It’s a textile town [Lanett, Alabama, if you’re looking for it on a map]. All the mills closed and it sorta dried up. My dad still lives there and my sister and some family. They do other things now. My dad’s a farmer. So they’re not reliant on that economic system. But, boy, like so many other small towns in the United States, it just dried up. It’s really sad, you know?

You’ve been fairly prolific as a band over the last few years. Is that because you have a backlog of songs waiting to be recorded, or because success has stimulated your creative juices?

I think the work has been stimulating. I definitely don’t keep a huge backlog of songs. Usually songs are in a secondhand box for a reason. I’ve often gone back and found old songs and rewritten them, and fixed whatever I maybe thought was wrong with them in the beginning. That notwithstanding, it’s just been a rich period creatively for the band. I’ve had some good luck with writing songs, and with writing with friends. And that’s not always planned. I’ve never been a big co-writing kind of a person. All the people in Nashville do that. They just write songs for a living. They write songs every day. I can’t do that. It doesn’t feel inspired to me. So I just kinda wait for ’em to come. As a guitar player, you pick up a guitar, nine times out of ten you’ll play a lick and go, ‘Oh, that’s cool’. And it might grow from that…

But then you’ve got to find the lyrics. Does songwriting come easily to you?

I don’t know if I would say easily. I really enjoy it, but it’s a search. Because most everything has been said and my job is to try to find a way to say it that’s just different enough.

The Blackberry Smoke line-up has been remarkably stable. I don’t believe anyone has ever left. What’s the secret of keeping a band together, especially when you tour constantly?

Yeah, it’s the same original four with one addition about ten years ago. We love it, of course. That’s obvious. But you stay busy enough, there’s not enough time for resentment to grow. As for the things that normally break bands up, none of us has at any point decided to go, ‘Hey you know what? We’re gonna do a bunch of synthesiser music now.’ So creative differences have not been a problem.

I read somewhere that Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes came up with your band name. Is that true?

It is, yeah. He was hanging around with Brit, our drummer, one night years ago and they were out doing something nefarious. It was right in the beginning of our band and Brit said, ‘We need a name. None of us can come up with a suitable name.’ So he said Blackberry Smoke. He actually had a few other ones first.

So what else could you have been called?

New Earth Mud. That was one of the first things he said.

He snaffled that for himself though, didn’t he?

He did. He named his first solo album that.

I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but what are the advantages or disadvantages of playing to both rock and country audiences? Over here you’re signed to a metal label.

I don’t know. Each night there will be a nice cross-section of people. I gave up trying to figure it out. Simply put, I’ve always loved the Rolling Stones. They are most definitely my favourite band. And they were really good at playing country music. That’s the vision I always had for our band: we’re a rock’n’roll band but hopefully we can really play a country song. Cos that’s a big part of where we’ve come from.

A couple of members of Blackberry Smoke were formerly in a metal band, I believe.

Yeah, Brit and Richard, the bass player and drummer. They’re brothers. They were in a metal band in Atlanta years ago.

Are the audiences you get elsewhere in the world different to those you draw in the States?

They are. They react differently in different countries. Sometimes you’ll find people that are very reserved and polite. They don’t give a lot of energy while you’re playing the song. But when you finish they applaud. Then they get really quiet and wait for the next one. That can be really odd. They were like that in Zurich last week. I had a good time. The people aren’t leaving and they’re not booing or throwing eggs. But it’ll throw ya. Then we’ll go to Glasgow and the Glaswegians will be going completely bananas.

From a UK perspective, it seemed as though Southern Rock petered out a bit after that first great flourishing. Was that actually the case, or were there a lot of great bands that we never got to hear?

I don’t know. I would say that there’s not been a quote-unquote Southern rock and roll band that’s been fashionable in the music business or trendy. The mid-late seventies into the early eighties were the heyday for all those bands. But then you get these pop country guys now that love to namedrop Lynyrd Skynyrd. And that’s good, you know. I love Lynyrd Skynyrd, so I can’t complain. But I’m kinda like, ‘That’s not very cool. You’re making this plastic music and then you’re invoking the name of something that to me is sacred.’ But I don’t think the love of that music has ever petered out. People will love it forever. It’s so good and so pure and it stands the test of time. That’s why each generation of people that come along find the Allman Brothers and find Lynyrd Skynyrd and find the Marshall Tucker Band and they love it. That keeps it going.

I believe you’ve played with Skynyrd quite a lot. I’ve read virtually all the books about them and they’re full of pretty hair-raising stories. Do you get to quiz Gary Rossington about what it was like in the seventies?

I’ve never really asked him about anything like that. I’ve read every one of the books and just absorbed all those stories. I love Gary dearly. He’s just a sweetheart. And he’s always so nice to us. We talk more to Ricky Medlocke about what it was like for him in Blackfoot. Because they came over here a lot – here being Europe. They played with a lot of really heavy rock bands like The Scorpions and AC/DC. He loved all that. He said, ‘Man, we were doing good business, playing big shows.’

It seems to me the thing about Skynyrd is that people who only know the hits don’t appreciate how diverse their music was and what great songwriters they were.

Oh my god. And it was perfectly written, perfectly arranged. Especially from a guitar player’s point of view with their three guitar players most of the time, playing three completely different things, staying out of one another’s way. It was brilliant. And different from the Allman brothers – the Allmans being more blues/jazz/rock’n’roll, and then it got really country with Dickey Betts’s songs, with open-ended soloing, but a really tight way of doing it. Skynyrd never did that. Skynyrd don’t jam. They play their songs. In our music, we’ve tried to take both directions.

What’s your position on the use of the Confederate flag? Some bands, like Skynyrd, consider it to be part of their proud southern identity, while others avoid it altogether because of what they perceive as its racist connotations.

Well, I can only speak for myself. All throughout my life, it meant to me what it means to Skynyrd. And I would say this to a person of any colour, if asked: I was not aware, honestly, that it was that offensive to people until really the last 10 years. Because growing up, it was on The Dukes of Hazzard television show and in the south it was omnipresent. To people like me, it was really just a symbol that stood for the south. I watched it become a sore subject. The animosity grew and grew and grew until finally people were like, ‘OK, fine. Fuck it. Forget it.’ We’ve never flown it, just because it isn’t what we do. Somebody told me at one point that the Allman Bothers never flew it. Ever. In their entire career. I never really noticed that. Tom Petty flew it on the Southern Accents tour a few years ago. And he apologised. And I thought, OK, far be it from me to second-guess Tom Petty, but I can be pretty sure that he wasn’t flying that flag to try and offend anyone. I dunno. I have mixed feelings about it. Obviously, you don’t want to do anything to hurt someone intentionally…

I guess you’re familiar with Southern Rock Opera by the Drive-By Truckers.

Yes. And they hate this kind of shit. They don’t cling to anything ‘southern’, that I can tell. They’re very openly left-wing guys.

Moving on, you appeared on Later… with Jools Holland, which is our only national music show on TV but generally features rather bland, middle-of-the-road acts. What was it like being a rare rock band on that show?

It was great. It was unlike anything I’d ever done. We’ve done some television in the States. We did Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert. With Jools, you play three songs and one of them is live. Two songs are taped for later broadcast. None of those other shows that we played in the US were live. You tape it. And if you have a serious fuck-up, you have a do-over. We never had that problem, but when that light went on for Jools and it was like “You’re live across the entire UK,” that was a bit unnerving. But I enjoyed it. I think we played well and were received well. He came over during rehearsals and was really friendly. He said: “You guys are bona fide in the boogie”. We said, “Thank you very much.”

Finally, on a lighter note: why did you trim those magnificent sideburns of yours?

I don’t know. Just change, I guess. It may have been my little boy. I have a four-year-old and he may have tugged on them enough times for me to decide they have to go.