The Black Diamond Heavies hail from the deep south of the USA and bring some fierce blues trash Rock N’ Roll with them when we see them at the Roundhouse. They take some time out from the beer bucket and female fans to talk to Big City Redneck.
BCR: So how’s the tour going?
Black Diamond Heavies John Wesley: It’s been a really great tour so far - near sell out crowds every night, really good. Except for Cardiff, but even that was good.
BCR: Why Cardiff, why was that bad?
BDHJW: It just wasn’t the best crowd.
BCR: Cardiff is rough.
BDHJW: Really?
BCR: Yeah, I went down to Cardiff once, and I had been in one fist fight my entire life – that night in Cardiff I got into five.
BDHJW: The Scottish say not to trust the English and the English say not to trust the Welsh.
BCR: You started out the tour in Aberdeen; how was that?
Black Diamond Heavies Van Campbell: Aberdeen was good. The venue was nice, a bit small, it was an interesting gig. We got there and there was a bit of a situation. Well, we got there and did our sound check. And sometime between sound check and show time, the Fender Rhodes Piano crapped out completely. We pushed a grand piano out onto the stage. And that worked out really well. Normally we play shitty rock’n’roll clubs, and they don’t all have grand pianos. But this one happened to have a grand piano, and John totally saved the day. And I got to sit there and drink and watch, I never even do that when we play. The show was incredible. It was actually a highlight, because I didn’t have to do anything!
BCR: Your tour has recently been extended; you’ve had some extra dates added on going on to France and the Netherlands as well. You’ve been to France before…
BDHVC: A few times.
BCR: …and the Netherlands?
BDHVC: We’ve not been before, which is good. Every time we come over we try to do at least a city - preferably a country - that we haven’t played before. It’s kind of our motivation for doing it.
BCR: How did the extra dates get added on?
BDHVC: It’s our booking agent and also particularly the internet has made the world so small now. People hear about things and they want you to come over. It’s very easily done these days.
BCR: You’ve been touring quite a lot this year. You were out in March doing a tour of UK, Portugal and France, and then you went back to the US and did a bit of a tour in the States…
BDHJW: Pretty much all the states!
BCR: From the research that we’ve done, it seems that every time you get a new member you seem to lose them to a woman – why is that? And with Ashley, you [Van] seem to be kinda on and off…
BDHJW: laughs uncomfortably…How do you know all this stuff?
BCR: And you’ve been living in Kansas City, John.
BDHJW: I did for a minute. I lived out there for about a year, chasing a woman.
BDHVC: Seriously, speaking for myself, I love going home and seeing Ashley.
BCR: How old were you when you started playing?
BDHJW: Started playing, or started playing rock’n’roll?
BCR: Started playing seriously…
BDHJW: I didn’t start playing rock’n’roll until I was about 21 but I was playing for ages.
BCR: I heard that you started out playing gospel, but it wasn’t until you were 18 that you were allowed to listen to any other music.
BDHJW: Yes, that’s true.
BCR: How important do you think that’s been?
BDHJW: Pretty crucial, I hate to admit it.
BCR: And Van, you’re the son of a whiskey distiller. You two have histories that are so country. Do you think you’d be able to do what you do if it wasn’t for that?
BDHJW: No, I would definitely say who we are comes from our roots.
BCR: How do you switch from doing gospel to the blues and r’n’r?
BDHJW: It was a natural, natural transition. Well, gospel music, seeing revivals and the choirs…people just go apeshit and have no control over themselves – running around, talking in other languages, just total chaos.
BCR: Do people speak in tongues?
BDHJW: Oh, yeah. I mean, the whole thing, it’s very much like a rock show in that sense, the explosion of spirit or whatever you want to call it. The transition… it’s just the words are different - the music is exactly the same.
BCR: How do you feel about that and being influenced by r’n’r at an earlier age?
BDHVC: I was surrounded by that – my parents both played. My dad was a jazz player, my mom was a singer in a folk band. I was raised around music – rock’n’roll music and folk music were always encouraged.
BCR: What did you listen to?
BDHVC: You know… Peter, Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, stuff like that. I hated it growing up, but it’s all up there rattling around. That’s obviously not the kind of music I play, but it’s had an influence, whether I like it or not.
BCR: It seems a strange seed… With one of you being from Kentucky and one from Texas, how did that work out?
BDHVC: Well, I had just moved back from London, tried to move back to Louisville, Kentucky, and I didn’t want to live there, so I went down to Nashville.
BCR: Why?
BDHVC: I couldn’t live in England anymore because it was illegal for me to live here and I wanted to try to make a living from making music.
BCR: Did you know anyone down there?
BDHVC: No, but I figured, it’s two hours away from KY. I started hanging out at this bar called the Radio Café, and long story short – the bartender was a friend of John’s named Martin who used to play in a band.
BDHJW: The Radio Café was the first bar he went into, and we were playing that night.
BCR: Who were you playing with?
BDHJW: It was me and Porkchop [ex BDH member] and an interim drummer. We were doing a show, and we put up flyers around Nashville looking for a drummer. I was out behind the club, the phone rings and it’s Van, he’s inside. He saw the flyer and called up, and I could hear the bar in the background and we established that he was there so I said, check it out and see if you’re into it.
BDHVC: Yeah, I called this ad on the wall at the club, not even realising that they were the band playing that night.
BCR: Now when Van joined, Porkchop was still in the band. When he left, how did that affect you guys? Did you know you were going to carry on or were there any doubts at the time?
BDHJW: It was pretty intense. We could kind of feel it coming, he was obviously unhappy and when he told us he couldn’t do it anymore we cancelled a couple of tours. There was one in France that we couldn’t cancel because they had our pictures up everywhere. So the promoter was like, if there’s any way you could do it… plus it paid well. I had just been living in KC and playing with a drummer friend of mine, so we decided to basically cover our professional ass and do this tour.
The first show we played in Paris as a two piece was sold out, we got four encores. We still weren’t really sure, we thought maybe it’s just because we’re from America, and they think this is cool or whatever… We were playing on the show with Scott Biram and Kenny Brown who had seen us as a three piece and they both said, “You guys are fine. It sucks that he left but you guys just need to keep on doing this.” And that was fucking awesome - hearing that from someone like Scott or Kenny Brown makes a big difference. Crowd response is one thing but when you hear it from one of your peers that you love that are doing the same thing you are…
BCR: Someone you give a shit about
BDHJW: Yeah, not like we don’t give a shit about the crowd…did that sound really insincere?
BCR: No…
BDHJW: I think if the initial reaction had been, “well, it’s good, but…” then we probably wouldn’t have… We couldn’t lose a member and then have it get smaller in any way, we had to actually get bigger and harder and louder
BCR: But it’s amazing because… So what did you do to make that sound bigger?
BDHJW: You just go into this weird thing where you’re freaking out and it doesn’t sound like it’s supposed to, so you just revert back to some kind of weird state where you play harder and louder, like you’re playing for your life.
BCR: It must have seemed a bit empty,
BDHJW: Yeah, yeah…
BCR: …with one less member and one less instrument – was it hard, you’ve gotten heavier…
BDHVC: The drums became, they were more of a… if we were a three piece obviously the drums are still going on but with a two piece the drums are more of a lead instrument, it’s not just a rhythm section or whatever, and that really helps to make it bigger. Bigger amplifiers, distortion, yeah. It was pretty cool how losing a member actually freed us up to create something new, a new vision.
BCR: How long was it after he [Porkchop] left that you recorded the new album? Because he left in 2006 and you recorded it summer 2006…
BDHJW: He left in March and we recorded in June, and that was still a reactionary period. We needed something to give to people, we had a CD that we recorded with Mark [Porkchop] and we couldn’t sell that anymore because he wasn’t in the band, so we needed to get something out real quick and it turned into that album, our debut album. It’s the first album we’ve released on a label.
BCR: How did you get the deal with Alive?
BDHJW: I think that the Buffalo Killers, who are good friends of ours and got signed, and we cut them a demo of the new songs we were recording. And then I guess Patrick from Alive liked it and called Johnny Walker from the Soledad Brothers and asked him if he had seen us live, and he said yes, and he gave us a recommendation. Johnny has a new band and is coming over here in the springtime.
BCR: One thing that we did want to ask you but didn’t want to ask you but we do want to ask you but we didn’t really want to ask you… We’re going to ask you… A lot of your songs are autobiographical.
BDHJW: Yes
BCR: The song White Bitch…is it about drugs? Do you want to tell us a bit about it or do you want to let the song speak for itself?
BDHJW: I think the song kind of speaks for itself. Like you say, it’s autobiographical and that one was emotional… it’s a difficult one and we don’t want to play it all the time as we don’t want to alienate anyone. I don’t know, I think if you explore a subject thoroughly…
BCR: Have you explored that subject thoroughly?
BDHJW: I’ve explored that subject thoroughly – whatever it is that I’m looking for isn’t there.
BCR: Are you anti-drugs now though?
BDHJW: Well, I like my reefer, you know. No, I’m not anti-drugs, I think people should do what they want, I’m anti-drugs for me.
BCR: But that’s good for you, that it didn’t take on. Why do so many people fall into that?
BDHJW: It’s just so easy, it’s just there, it’s so easy. It fits this lifestyle, there’s no work at 9am in the morning. It’s 24-7.
BCR: How did you kick it?
BDHJW: Um, reefer…Laughs…
BCR: Did you see him doing that, did you know it was a problem?
BDHVC: That was, uh…
BCR: You don’t really want to get into it?
BDHJW: Some of it’s still kinda fresh.
BCR: Can I ask how did you get the band name, are you fans of Kiss?
BDHVC: Um, yeah, but that’s not where it came from. Black diamonds were a brand of guitar strings that a lot of the old blues guys used, and the heavy gauged ones were called heavies and all the really good players used the heavy gauged string to play the real shit. Black Diamond Heavies, like that heavy gauge of string…
BDHJW: …which is weird considering that we no longer have a guitar player. Laughs The Black Keys don’t have a fucking piano player and they’ve got the good piano name, so… We actually offered to trade names with the Black Keys, but we thought that would be too good a deal for them, they would be getting all our fans, and that’s just not fair.
Black Diamond Heavies official site
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