A Church Van? It’s With the Band
BAND ON THE RUN Members of J. Roddy Walston and the Business with their well-traveled Ford van. From left, Mr. Walston, Logan Davis, Billy Gordon and Steve Colmus.
ONE drizzly afternoon last month, J. Roddy Walston and the Business, a gritty four-piece rock ’n’ roll outfit from Baltimore, were congregated around their tour van after performing three songs in the WNYC studios in SoHo.
They were talking about a previous visit to the city, which had coincided with an installation by a British artist, Luke Jerram. Mr. Jerram had placed 60 upright pianos throughout the five boroughs, and in a publicity stunt the band attempted to play all of the 33 pianos in Manhattan. They spent 12 hours — the instruments were available from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. — driving from Battery Park to Harlem, and fell short by two pianos.
“You know the end of ‘Crocodile Dundee,’ how everyone’s cheering him on?” said Mr. Walston, who is mostly dark hair and beard above the neck and denim below it. He was wearing black boots.
“There were construction workers with the paper in their hand, coming to us shouting, ‘It’s you!’” he said. An article on their planned exploits had appeared in The Daily News that morning. “It was a really positive, really cool thing. And the van was very much a part of it.”
The van — a big white Ford Econoline Club Wagon — has been a big part of their lives for 10 years. Mr. Walston bought it from a church for $4,000 and never bothered to remove the lettering. So it transports the four young musicians — they have been described as “AC/DC fronted by Jerry Lee Lewis,” but you could also add “look like Lynyrd Skynyrd” — across the country, while bearing the identification of its previous owner: the Hampton Cove Christian Academy of Huntsville, Ala.
This incongruity is not lost on the band, but they also recognize another, more practical incentive for keeping the Club Wagon — essentially a passenger-hauling version of the Econoline delivery van — as is.
“The van is really good camouflage,” Mr. Walston explained.
In the band’s early days, he said, they kept their equipment in the van, parked on the streets of Baltimore. “Everyone knows you don’t leave so much as a candy wrapper visible in your car,” Mr. Walston said. But for six months, no one touched the equipment.
“People are not going to mess with a church van,” he reasoned.
On this visit, in October, the band was in New York for a show in Brooklyn, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. (They will make a return performance there, opening for Deer Tick, on Wednesday.) They were in the middle of a tour to support their latest album, called “J. Roddy Walston and the Business,” their first on a label. The tour started in Louisville, Ky., and wound west through the Rocky Mountains and into California before turning back east.
“The last four years, we’ve put on almost 160,000 miles,” Mr. Walston said, adding that the group didn’t travel that much last year because it was recording the album in Los Angeles. Otherwise, the band typically plays 130 to 150 dates a year, he said.
“I feel like we get a vision of America that other people don’t, one that only other traveling bands have,” he said. “We don’t just play New York or what the industry calls ‘A’ markets.’ We play, you know, ‘F’ markets as well.”
At that moment, Brooklyn beckoned. They were scheduled for a sound check, so the band piled into the van. Mr. Walston jumped behind the wheel, programmed the Music Hall’s address into a portable GPS unit suctioned to the windshield, and they were off.
The other members of the band — the Business end, so to speak — are Billy Gordon on guitar, Steve Colmus on drums and Logan Davis, who joined only in May, on bass. Mr. Walston plays piano, often raucously, on many of their songs, and he sings (hence the Jerry Lee Lewis reference).
While the band has been on the road since September, much of what was inside the van predates the tour. “There’s stuff in here from four years ago,” Mr. Walston said. It was a claim easily verified by scent.
“We call it the diaper,” Mr. Walston said of the van, continuing, “it smells like a diaper.” He added a colorful description of what it was full of.
A cursory inspection of the van revealed parking receipts, candy wrappers, plastic flowers and a container half-full of Beer Nuts strewn throughout. The floor was not visible. CDs without cases were stuffed in the center console. The driver’s side mirror was broken.
“The van has been chugging along,” Mr. Walston said. “Right now we don’t have defrost or any sort of air-conditioning in the front, which is amazing.” The climate control stopped working while crossing the desert on the way out of California. “So there’s air-conditioning in the back, but not in the front,” he said.
“When we were in Seattle,” he continued, “we had just gone through the Rockies for the first time with the van. It was amazing and scary. We got there, and the guy there said, ‘Oh, yeah, your brakes are completely locked up.’” They replaced the brakes in Portland, Ore.
The band enjoyed Portland, Mr. Walston said, and playing the Troubadour in Los Angeles. They also played with the band Cracker, an indie darling from the 1990s, at a bar near the Joshua Tree National Park.
“If you think of a middle-of-the-desert biker bar, that’s what this place was,” Mr. Walston explained. “It’s a rowdy roadhouse. In fact, after that night I was either severely dehydrated or had a concussion — I went to the doctor because I couldn’t stand up straight.”
Reared in Cleveland, Tenn., Mr. Walston grew up listening to gospel music. His grandmother played the piano. “I grew up in a pretty typical Southern situation,” he said. “The town I’m from, I heard once, has the most churches per capita in the nation or something like that.” (True or not, a Google Maps search verified that Cleveland is definitely in the running.)
“One of the good parts of that is they’re all very musical churches,” he continued. “So you almost have to be a good musician to relate — at least you have to be able to sing.”
Mr. Walston played in bands through high school. He started writing songs on his own when he was 19 and moved the band to Baltimore a few years later. His girlfriend — they’ve since gotten married — was studying opera at the Peabody Institute, a division of Johns Hopkins University. The city was also inexpensive and centrally located on the coast. “That was part of the selling point for sure,” he said.
The original lineup disbanded soon after the move. New members came and went until the current configuration, which Mr. Walston says is pretty solid. “Steve and Billy have been in the band for four years,” he said. The previous bassist, whom Mr. Davis replaced, had been with the band for six years.
They’ve been on the road for nearly the entire time. “Steve likens it to the space shuttle,” Mr. Walston said. “We have this pod that is the van. The language is different. I often don’t know what day of the week it is. Sometimes we’re not even sure what town we’re going to. That’s your world.”
J. Roddy Walston and the Business arrived at the Music Hall on time for the sound check. There was a time when the band shoved all of its equipment into the van, including Mr. Walston’s piano, a Yamaha upright that he customized for the rigors of travel. But the recent record deal has afforded them, of all things, a trailer — albeit a small one.
While the additional space inside the van has increased the comfort level, the trailer has made parking more difficult. As Mr. Davis negotiated another illegal spot — they had received a go-ahead from the club — a large gold bus emerged down the street like a stately cruise liner. And there in automotive form was the difference between an opening act and the headliner, Shooter Jennings.
Nonetheless, the members of J. Roddy Walston and the Business said they couldn’t imagine giving up the van, even if great success soon followed.
“It’s been with us forever,” Mr. Walston said.
Mr. Jennings, son of the country legend Waylon Jennings, took over the stage setup, and that pushed back the sound check for J. Roddy Walston and the Business. The band decided to go for dinner. After a quick debate, their manager decided on a fried chicken joint that had received great reviews.
But first they needed to find parking for the van.
Credit: The New York Times
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