The Kings of Leon: Sex on Fire (New Edition) E-Book

Michael Heatley

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

By any standards, Kings of Leon are unique. Consisting of three brothers and their first cousin, all surnamed Followill, the quartet from Tennessee have conquered the music world on their own terms. They have audaciously mixed elements of classic rock with grunge, garage and a very contemporary attitude. The result is music that has found a global audience, drawn from all ages. Along the way, the band have earned the respect of Bob Dylan, U2, and other A-list celebrities. Their hard-partying lifestyle and glamorous girlfriends ensure that the band remains a favourite with the media. This book traces the rise of Kings of Leon from local hopefuls to Grammy-winning chart-toppers. A religious background that kept them well away from rock music until 1997 has further added to the mystique surrounding the Kings, as Michael Heatley recounts in this first-ever full-length, authoritative biography of the band.

Leseprobe

KINGSOF LEON

SEX ON FIRE

MICHAEL and DREW HEATLEY

TITAN BOOKS

The Kings of Leon: Sex on Fire

ISBN: 9780857687203

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark St.

London

SE1 0UP

This edition: September 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First published in the UK 2009.

The Kings of Leon: Sex on Fire copyright © Michael and Drew Heatley 2009, 2011.

Designed by James King.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Nigel Cross for his crucial contribution

to the first two chapters, and Alan Kinsman for

compiling the discography.

This book is dedicated to all the bands who have

played ‘Molly’s Chambers’ in bars across the world

- they know who they are.

PHOTO CREDITS

PAGE ONE: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE TWO: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE THREE: Ross Gilmore/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE FOUR/FIVE: Tabatha Fireman/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE SIX: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE SEVEN: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images

PAGE EIGHT: Matt Cardy/Redferns/Getty Images

FRONT COVER: Gareth Davies/Getty Images International

Michael Heatley has written over 100 rock books, including

Dave Grohl: Nothing To Lose, The Complete Deep Purple

and John Peel: A Life In Music. He contributes to Guitar

and Bass and Record Collector magazines. His son Drew

is a freelance writer who has followed Kings of Leon since

their recording debut and co-wrote the best-selling Michael

Jackson: Life of a Legend.

CONTENTS

PHOTO CREDITS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE BORN, NOT MADE

CHAPTER TWO BAND AID IN NASHVILLE

CHAPTER THREE HOLY ROLLERS

CHAPTER FOUR SHAKING HEARTBREAK

CHAPTER FIVE CHANGING TIMES

CHAPTER SIX SEX ON FIRE...

CHAPTER SEVEN DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS

CHAPTER EIGHT GRAMMIES BUT NO GLEE

A-Z OF MUSICAL INFLUENCES

UK DISCOGRAPHY

INDEX OF SONG TITLES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

‘The Kings of Leon’s history is the epitome of a mythological rock’n’roll story.’

Rolling Stone

By any standards, Kings of Leon are unique. Consisting of three brothers and their first cousin, all surnamed Followill, the quartet from a Godfearing Tennessee background have conquered the music world on their own terms in a manner reminiscent of the Foo Fighters.

They have audaciously mixed elements of classic rock, namely the Southern strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, with grunge, garage and a very contemporary attitude. The result is music that has found a ready audience, ranging roughly between the ages of 15 and 50. Their music has also been used in several significant movie soundtracks, the resulting exposure accelerating their rise to superstardom still more.

The band have so far released four albums which have, until now, proved more popular outside their native United States than within their home country. Once America fully wakes up to their promise, Kings of Leon (the name comes from the Followill brothers’ father and grandfather, both named Leon) will truly have the world at their feet.

The band has been hailed by the British press as ‘the kind of authentic, hairy rebels the Rolling Stones longed to be,’ while their retro-chic look of long hair, moustaches and seventies-style clothing has also inspired comparisons to the Strokes, with whom they once toured and have now overtaken as headline attractions.

The Kings’ record sales are matched only by their frequently lurid tabloid headline notoriety. Having broken through in Britain, they are huge in Australia and New Zealand, and are now finally beginning to conquer their own Middle American backyard.

Yet the Followills’ rise to superstardom is all the more remarkable, given their backgrounds and early lives. The Kings’ ride to the top is a tale so steeped in Southern Gothic Romance that you could hardly make it up – with, some would say, as epic a sweep as Gone WithThe Wind!

The saga starts out in the American South, home to so much great and influential music from Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash to Bo Diddley and Little Richard. Since its heyday in the seventies, when white-boy Southern rock was at its zenith and bands like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Grinderswitch and Wet Willie were among the most popular acts, that good ole boy blues boogie music has been out of favour – until now.

Kings of Leon (note the deliberate lack of a definite article) have turned a generation more interested in the Strokes and the White Stripes on to this fried-chicken flavoured, hard-stompin’, redneck rock’n’roll. They may not be the first – recent acts as diverse as Kid Rock, Black Stone Cherry and My Morning Jacket have all flown the Confederate flag in their music – but they are certainly the one band to take it outside the USA and make it hugely popular in the UK and Europe, and now around the world.

The band themselves have always tried to distance themselves from being tarred with this label. ‘We’re not taking-our-shirts-off, barefoot, drinking moonshine, kicking our wives. We want to stay away from the Southern thing as much as possible.’ But that’s not something that’s easily done. After all, to quote the old Dusty Springfield hit, three-quarters of the Kings of Leon literally are sons of a preacher man.

The four individuals’ unorthodox background and beliefs, together with a lifestyle that kept them well away from popular music until 1997, when their father sensationally resigned from the church and divorced their mother, has led to some fascinating results. Subsequent exposure to sex, drugs and the rock’n’roll lifestyle has led to crises that have had to be resolved as a band and individuals – so the human story is as fascinating as the music itself.

Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke were also pastors’ children, and while Cooke made a seamless transition from sacred to secular music, he also lost his life in the shotgun-fuelled aftermath of a liaison outside marriage. Money or salvation seemed to be mutually excusive in the eyes of many, and this ensured that the Kings of Leon has always been a band steeped in contradictions.

Yet in many ways that age-old dilemma has only added to their appeal. As one reviewer put it, ‘Caleb has a model on his arm and money in the bank, but he’s still haunted by his Bible-thumping’ daddy. As long as the power of the preacher is out there, the boys will never get too comfortable. And God bless ‘em for that.’

The closeness of the family bond is arguably a factor that keeps the Kings together – but it can also cause internal stresses and strains that have more than once threatened to pull the band apart. Backstage fights, brawls at awards ceremonies and even a fist-fight in the studio between elder brother Nathan and singer Caleb that led to real damage to the latter’s arm have all caused headlines and threatened to derail the quartet’s progress.

The band members make light of their disagreements, which have remained frequent despite recent success. ‘I remember taking a class at high school called inter-personal communications,’ Jared says. ‘I learned about this wheel of abuse that involved couples arguing and then making up with champagne, flowers or candy.’ Nathan continues with tongue in cheek: ‘For us it’s fight, flowers, chocolate, champagne, drunk, fight. On second thoughts, fuck the flowers and chocolate – it’s fight, champagne, drunk, fight, champagne, drunk....’

There’s also the very real possibility that Kings of Leon could burn themselves out through overwork. In 2009, Caleb said ‘We’ve finally earned a year off but we’re liking the buzz [of latest album Only By The Night] so much we’re jumping back into it.’ It’s certain management, record company, promoters, venue owners, merchandisers and the thousands of people who depend on their activities to bring them their wage will be happy to hear that news, but if the goose that lays the golden egg is harmed then they could still conceivably become a ‘what might have been’ band. We have to hope that doesn’t happen.

The most fascinating thing about Kings of Leon remains their back-story, and the feeling that there are forces at work we know not of that help them produce the magic music. Compare, for instance, the titles of their albums – Youth And Young Manhood, Aha Shake Heartbreak, Because Of The Times, Only By The Night. Detect a pattern?

Here’s a clue – the answer lies not in the meaning of the words but their shape. Each title is five syllables long. ‘We never want [a title] that isn’t,’ explained Caleb, adding that their 2008 release should have been Only By Night had they not altered the phrase from novelist Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Interestingly enough, the gothic wordsmith started life as plain three-syllable Edgar Poe...

Whether or not Rolling Stone was right to call it a mythological rock’n’roll story, Kings of Leon’s history to date is short but fascinating. To start rubbing shoulders with royalty, just turn the page!

MICHAEL and DREW HEATLEY, SEPTEMBER 2009

CHAPTER ONE

BORN, NOT MADE

The two elder Followill boys, Anthony Caleb and Ivan Nathan, came into the world when they were born to father Ivan and mother Betty Ann in Mount Juliet. This small town is situated close to the home of country music, Nashville, in the western portion of Wilson County in the state of Tennessee. Younger brother Michael Jared was born in Oklahoma City. It’s a family tradition that they go by their middle names.

The three brothers – Nathan (born 26 June 1979), Caleb (14 January 1982) and Jared (20 November 1986) – are the children of an ex-hippie, Neil Young-loving, holy roller. The boys all spent much of their formative years travelling through the Deep South from one church service to the next – revivals that could last anything between three days and 12 weeks.

The family was part of the United Pentecostal Church. Since its inception in 1945, this Church has become one of the fastest-growing sects within the Pentecostal movement. The Church is quite unusual in holding some non-traditional beliefs, which separate it from being called Christian.

The basic tenets of the United Pentecostal Church’s faith include the belief that the ability to speak in tongues is a necessary indication of valid religious conversion. It shares with the ‘Oneness Pentecostals’ the practice of baptising in the name of Jesus Christ only. They believe that anyone who is not baptised in the name of Jesus only will not be accepted into heaven when they die. They reject the traditional concept of the Holy Trinity. They do not believe that the Godhead is composed of three persons: father, son and Holy Spirit. And they also believe that there is no salvation outside of the United Pentecostal Church.

The Followills’ unusual and distinctive surname is supposedly of Dutch-German origin, but through the bloodline on their mother’s side of the family they claim to be one-eighth Choctaw and Cherokee Indian. ‘We’re kinda mutts,’ Nathan joked to Mojo magazine. Raised as God-fearing youngsters, the Followills criss-crossed the Southern states – Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma – while their father preached the word of Jesus according to the United Pentecostal beliefs in churches and at revival meetings. ‘We preached in some churches where literally we were the only white people in the room’, Caleb would later tell New Musical Express.

When they were not in school, Betty Ann taught them their lessons. It was a little like living life in a bubble, as Caleb later pointed out: ‘When we were growing up our parents didn’t talk about politics and they never voted because they were all wrapped up in the religious life. The family listened to nothing but gospel music and didn’t own a TV.’ It wasn’t all hellfire and old-fashioned religious devotion, though.

The family travelled through the South in Ivan’s purple Oldsmobile, a vehicle as venerable and distinctive as the family itself. ‘It would backfire’, recalls Nathan, ‘and we were so embarrassed that when we’d pull into a church, we’d have to kill the engine and coast into the parking lot.’ He humorously adds that his dad could cause the car to backfire on command on occasions, such as when they might be driving past a building site. ‘The guys would literally drop to the ground. I don’t know how my Dad did it. He was a man of God, he was gifted.’

The constant frenetic travelling certainly had its drawbacks, as Caleb later reflected. ‘People picture this great travelling lifestyle. There were moments that were awesome and then there were moments that we don’t think were that awesome. I guess it was tough, and it shows more on us now than it did then, because at the time it was just our lives and we didn’t know it was weird. If you made a buddy or found a girlfriend, it could never last long.’ Talking to New Musical Express, he added, ‘We were pretty young and travelled around all the time. We never stayed in one place longer than five years, so we never got to go to high school and make proper friends.’

The whole family would often have to sleep in the single backroom of the church itself. ‘We’d have to use the preacher’s shower’, Caleb told Rolling Stone. ‘It made you feel bad about everything you were doing.’ As Nathan elaborated in the same article ‘We’d come into town and there would be all these girlies around us. So every church we went to, we had to convince the guys not to whip our ass. The girls would be talkin’ about us, and the guys would be like “Hell no! You’re not coming into our church for one week and taking our women”.’

The tight-knit religious fundamentalist atmosphere they grew up in did, however, have its upside. Each and every November, for instance, some 150 members of the Followill clan would get together down a dirt road in Albion, the poorest town in Oklahoma, for a family reunion on Thanksgiving Day. This ritual would later be celebrated in the song ‘Talihina Sky’, the bonus cut on their debut album.

Rumour has it that members of the extended family include criminals and drug-manufacturers in addition to preachers. As Nathan confided to NME, ‘Dad’s side of the family are real mountain people. They drink creek water and only eat stuff they’ve shot. A cousin built a house in the forest but the last time we went back it was nothing but a concrete slab. Their methamphetamine lab had blown up!’

Many of the Followills were also living in straitened circumstances, to say the very least. ‘A few are housepainters’, says Caleb, ‘but a lot are unemployed – folks don’t own a pair of shoes and you’ve never seen them wear a shirt. But all the time there’s a pig cooking and no-one’s any better than anyone else. They can all sing good...’ Yet you wouldn’t know there was any poverty as cousins, uncles and grandparents would line up on the banks of the creek drinking beer and whiskey, chewing tobacco and fishing for perch, catfish and bass.

The young lads would let off steam but, when it was time to go, they were happy to be on the move again. ‘We have a blast because we leave after a week – but the people there, they don’t leave. We’ve been year after year and you see the same process. Different high-school kids pregnant. Here comes the new kid and the same thing happens. Drugs or whatever. Everybody goes through the same shit and no one ever sees it coming.’

It’s a wonder, given their mother’s sisters all married preachers, that the boys didn’t end up following in the family tradition too. Legend has it that as a nine-year old Caleb wrote his first sermon – ‘Why beg for bread when you’re living in a wheat field?’ – though he never delivered it!

‘As a little boy’, Caleb told the Guardian, ‘I thought all of us would (be preachers). Every little boy wants to be their dad, and then later on they want to be the opposite of their dad. All our friends would go to bible college after high school. Two years learning how to preach. That was just what everybody did. And we pretty much knew that was what we were going to do, too.’

And contrary to their womanising, coke-snortin’, Jack Daniels-drinkin’ decadent rock image, the Kings grew up as sweet-mannered kids who, like all good country boys, went hunting, shooting and fishing. When it came to killing anything, they felt more than a twinge of guilt – like the time Caleb shot a woodpecker and Jared accidentally shot a rabbit. He tried to revive it with a slice of cold pizza, hoping it might recover, ‘but it just flipped over and died. I swear to God, I felt bad about it.’ As Caleb told the Telegraph,‘We didn’t really look at (our upbringing) as restrictive at the time. We were pretty good kids, really. We would only get in trouble by doing stupid shit....”

The boys would later be at great pains to put the Southern background into perspective. Jared stresses ‘I don’t think we’re that Southern. We’re not racist, we don’t tote guns around and do stupid bullshit like that – we’re just normal people.’ Older brother Caleb adds, ‘Morally we were raised the right way. We’re good guys, we open the door for a lady and all that, so in that sense, yeah, we’re Southerners.’

It was the church that gave them their basic musical grounding – they learnt to play piano, organ, guitar, bass, drums and even horns at gatherings at their father’s church in redneck Mumford, Tennessee. Nathan played drums at services from the age of eight alongside his father on bass and mother on piano, while worshippers danced in the aisles to their 15-minute recitals. As he later observed, ‘Most people think the music is reserved, but there’s organs, pianos, basses, drums, horns. It’s like black gospel music. It’s a full-on Al Green, Aretha Franklin-style service.’

Though he found the gospel music uplifting and intoxicating and liked to sing as part of the church congregation, Caleb was far from keen to sing publicly, even when entreated to do so by his mother. ‘When I was really young’, he told Mojo magazine, ‘I was always the life and soul of the party, the clown. But around 10 years old, I don’t know, I just became really shy.’

Fortunately, three years later he finally got over this hang-up and managed to perform a gospel standard ‘Love Lifted Me’ in a church in the heartlands of Oklahoma. This was a real Paul on the road to Damascus moment. ‘It was almost like I broke down that shyness for those three minutes, and then went back to being myself again’, he confessed to Mojo, ‘but it felt really good to me.’

Their strict fundamentalist upbringing meant that, as kids, the Followills were not allowed to listen to any secular music, only gospel – though when they did, as Nathan would later observe, ‘we wouldn’t have gotten caned or anything, but there would be a lecture.’ And it didn’t necessarily mean that they saw only the sweetness and light associated with a Christian life.

‘People think that, because you grow up as preacher’s boys, you see only the good side of life’, Caleb would later opine to Mojo, ‘but really we saw a lot of the bad because whenever we went to different churches, the pastor would always let my dad know what was going on. Like so and so used to be a prostitute...’

While Betty Ann was unwavering in her dedication to the spiritual life, and thought of rock’n’roll as the devil’s music, their father, it is alleged, would let the boys listen to all kinds of rock records in the car by artists such as the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Bad Company, when she wasn’t around! Indeed this unorthodox itinerant lifestyle was the perfect training for their later life as international country-hopping rock’n’rollers.

‘The way we grew up, it was me and Caleb and Jared in the back seat of a car, all three together all the time’, Nathan told Mojo. ‘Now we’re either on a bus together, on a plane, at a hotel bar or playing a show together. We wouldn’t be the band we are today if we’d grown up “normal”. Many bands break up because they’re not used to being so close to someone so much of the time.’

After he was given a radio for Christmas one year, Caleb would listen to pop music on the sly. ‘I used to sleep with the radio under my pillow and listen to oldies’, he told Rolling Stone, ‘Other nights I’d get a cassette of my Dad preaching and listen to that. I’d wake up with the worst cricks in my neck from sleeping on that radio.’ At first he’d tune the dial to oldies stations and Ben E. King’s classic soul number, ‘Stand By Me’ became an early favourite but it was listening to the old Tommy James and the Shondells hit ‘Crimson And Clover’ in his uncle’s car that really turned his teenage head – a watershed moment. It is this song that he attributes to making him pay attention to pop music generally.

‘It was the most amazing song I’d ever heard’, he admitted to Mojo. Not even his uncle explaining the explicit content of the song’s lyrics could put the youngster off. ‘He said, “It’s about someone taking a girl’s virginity in the grass – that’s the crimson and the clover.” I was like, wow, even this music is hell-bound. But as soon as I heard that song, I knew I wanted to do something with music.’ The rot quickly set into his teenage mind, as he later admitted on US TV. ‘The next day I got into the car with a buddy at school and he put on some Pearl Jam... I went, “Wow, there’s obviously a lot out there I need to experience”.’

After Jared was born, the family settled down in rural Tennessee. (Nathan calls it Deliverance country, as per the 1970 John Boorman film of the same name which depicted four city slickers challenged by the brutal landscape and its equally brutal inhabitants.) For the first time the Followills were able to put down some roots. The religious reins also slackened around the boys, and acts of rebellion inevitably followed. In one of these, Caleb and Jared shot out the windows of their father’s 4×4 with BB (ball bearing) guns.

And more was to follow. When he was 14 Caleb smoked marijuana for the first time in Henderson, Tennessee with his cousin Peanut. ‘I was with Peanut and we were in a graveyard,’ he says. ‘I was like “I don’t feel it”, but when we got home I was eating a bunch of chicken tenders. Peanut said, “What the fuck, man, you’re gonna kill your buzz.” That’s when I realised, “Maybe I am feeling this!”’ The boys would also hold wild parties at their parents’ place. When Ivan felt enough was enough, he would put jalapeno peppers in the microwave. The fumes burned peoples’ eyes until they vacated the premises!

Even young Jared had his wild moments – he was notorious around the local neighborhood for riding his scooter, naked! ‘I’d wear a T-shirt’, he jokes, ‘so I wasn’t completely naked. I’d be casual but naked from the waist down.’ Unlike his older brothers, Jared actually attended state schools and enjoyed a more conventional childhood – ‘That’s why I’m so much cooler,’ he’d later parry. And mixing with other kids meant that his own musical horizons broadened and he was opened up to alternative rockers such as Weezer, Joy Division and Pixies. These mixed in with the likes of bands such as Television, Credence Clearwater Revival and the Velvet Underground to produce the musical motherlode the Kings would draw upon. As Matthew explains, the sudden exposure was nothing short of life-changing: ‘We couldn’t watch TV and we couldn’t listen to rock’n’roll. I didn’t know who Bono was till I was 18.’

The blinkers were off, and the young men were all but blinded by the possibilities – even though their own music-making abilities were as yet untested. ‘When you grow up listening to rock music all the time, I don’t think you can really grasp how amazing some of these songs are,’ said Jared. ‘’But when you hear them for the first time when you’re 16, or 18, or 19, it’s going to do something to you, and that’s what happened to us.’

Sadly, in 1997, the boys’ world was shattered. Betty Ann and Ivan – who would subsequently go under the moniker of Leon, his middle name – split up. In the eyes of the Pentecostal Church this was an even bigger sin that it was in Christian circles at large. Leon was drinking heavily ‘because his nerves kind of got to him’ says Caleb – and, accused of philandering, Ivan was forced to quit the church. ‘I wasn’t defrocked, I resigned,’ he later said. He gave up preaching and went off to paint houses in Oklahoma, where ‘you’re guaranteed a day off every time it rains.’

While he didn’t miss the daily grind of religion, like most teenagers Caleb took the break-up of his family hard. ‘Same as it is for anyone whose parents split...it was one of those moments when I started questioning what was real and what wasn’t.’

Big brother Nathan took it just as hard. ‘Our parents’ divorce shattered the whole image of this perfect little existence the outside world couldn’t touch and couldn’t pollute. We realised that our Dad, the greatest man we ever knew, in our eyes, was only human. And so are we. People are gonna fuck up,’ he confided to Rolling Stone. ‘They’re gonna want to experiment with drugs, have premarital sex. This whole new world was open to us.’

Indeed Nate remembers it as ‘basically like a new beginning. I was about 18 and Caleb was 15, the natural time for us to turn into rebellious little dipshits.’ They began going out to clubs together, Caleb using their 24-year-old cousin’s ID. ‘’We would tell all the girls we were on the golf team at some university, or that we were doctors’, Caleb joked.

Nathan graduated from the Christian Life Academy, a now-defunct private school in Henderson, Tennessee. Caleb meantime dropped out of school mid-senior year. Nathan went on to study sports medicine and physiotherapy at college in Henderson (‘so he could work with female softball players’), while Caleb started working on building sites over in Jackson.

Their lives, however, were about to take a dramatic turn...

CHAPTER TWO

BAND AID IN NASHVILLE

As the first year of the twenty-first century came into view, the two eldest Followill brothers found themselves living in the Nashville suburb of Mount Juliet with their mum and young sibling Jared. As Nathan would later tell Mojo, ‘Me and Caleb just got bored with our normal lives.’

In common with most youngsters of that age, a lack of ready cash was severely curbing their leisure activities. But Nathan was delighted to find that help was at hand. ‘In Nashville, we met a guy who said he just got paid $2,000 for writing a cheesy-ass country song. We were like: “Really?” We needed money to buy dope and we didn’t want to work at the mall, so we started writing songs.’