With their new album, the hard-living Shinedown guys strike gold somewhere between hard rock and Southern style.
Simple Men of Shinedown
In the stifling heat of a summer afternoon, a mini-fleet of high-end cars — a Benz, a Beemer, and a Jeep — pulls up to a small club in Jacksonville, Florida. Four long-haired, tattooed badasses step out into the sun. This isn’t just any Monday in August: A few hundred miles west, Hurricane Katrina has just made landfall in New Orleans, marking the start of one of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. history. But here on the eastern coast of Florida, the sky’s clear and the ocean is calm.
The newest members of Shinedown, Florida’s newest hard-rock heavyweights, collect their gear and head inside the Freebird Live rock club. This isn’t just any Freebird joint — it’s the Freebird, owned and operated by Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant’s widow, Judy, and their daughter, Melody. They’ve got a Hard Rock Cafe’s worth of gold and platinum Skynyrd albums around the bar to prove it. The Shinedown guys have keys to the club, thanks to guitarist Jasin Todd, who happens to be Melody’s husband. It’s only two in the afternoon, but Todd’s already passing around plastic cups of Bud Light and firing up the first of many Camel Lights underneath a sign that reads THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.
“Those guys are badass-looking. Lynyrd Skynyrd were the outlaws. I mean, you’re not exactly going to be scared of Linkin Park, but those guys would kick your ass.”
— Jasin Todd, guitarist
Someone fidgets with the PA, and the first anthemic strains of Us and Them, Shinedown’s sophomore album, fills the space with Barry Kerch ’s pounding backbeats, the thunder and lightning of Todd’s guitar and Brad Stewart’s bass, and singer Brent Smith’s soulfully savage yet vulnerable croon, which conjures images not just of the departed Van Zant, but of more recent rock ‘n’ roll casualties, such as Damageplan’s Dimebag Darrell and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley.
“We played a lot of shows with Damageplan,” Todd says with a slight wince. “We played on the same stage [where] Dimebag was shot just three days before it happened.” His voice trails off, but the implications are clear: Shinedown have taken their own dangerous route into rock ‘n’ roll’s heart of darkness. But they’re not about to turn back. Todd points to a vintage photo of Skynyrd — a 1977 Street Survivors tour poster. “Those guys are badass-looking,” he says with admiration. “They were the outlaws. I mean, you’re not exactly going to be scared of Linkin Park, but those guys would kick your ass. I’ll talk about the South all day. We all grew up extremely poor — I don’t know how you can sing the blues if you don’t.”
It may have taken nearly two years on the road and an extra push from their record label, Atlantic, but Shinedown’s 2004 debut, Leave a Whisper, eventually went platinum. Along the way, they were helped by a happy accident involving a radio interview and an old Skynyrd song. The band had already gone two singles into Leave a Whisper when Todd and Smith played an impromptu acoustic version of “Simple Man” at a radio station in Boston. “Jasin and Brent had played the song once here at the Freebird just for fun,” Stewart relates. “But they really nailed it on the air. It was just an acoustic version, but Brent went into his soul-singing thing and it became a hugely requested song. It let people know we were for real.”
Todd adds, “The first single, ‘Fly From the Inside,’ was crazy produced, with ten or 12 guitar tracks and, like, 15 vocals. It didn’t get much airplay. The next one, ‘45,’ was more stripped down. And then it was our studio version of ‘Simple Man,’ which they added to the second pressing of the album, that had the biggest impact. With each step, the production got smaller, and people seemed to like it more and more.”
On the surface, and certainly without “Simple Man,” Leave a Whisper is just another nü-metal creation. You would’ve needed to see Shinedown live to realize the Staley-esque soul at the heart of Smith ’s singing; the lean, mean Led Zeppelin blooze bends of Todd’s guitar riffs; and the power of a rhythm section brought up on Metallica, but schooled in the groove of good ol’ Southern R&B.
“I think nü-metal is a joke term that somebody made up,” Smith says. “Nü-metal is a term radio came up with to sell the music. The good stuff is all just rock music.”
“And without R&B there would be no rock ‘n’ roll,” Todd interjects. “All that great stuff came from the South, all the Stax stuff.”
“Yeah, there’s no sex in nü-metal,” Smith shoots back. “That groove on the drums is where it all comes from.”
“It doesn’t matter what genre they label us,” Kerch weighs in. “If it’s good music, we listen to it — everything from Coltrane to the new Mars Volta. Of course, we are a rock band from the South, so we’re a Southern rock band.”
“Everybody says that because of the Skynyrd cover,” Todd explains. “But we have no affiliation with Skynyrd — the new Skynyrd — at all. Of course, we listen to all that old Skynyrd.”
“It’s music we grew up with,” Stewart says. “But it’s one of the many pieces that made us who we are. It’s a small piece in a big puzzle.”
Of course, Todd is married to Melody. He’s got keys to the Freebird. Judy Van Zant is his mother-in-law. And his five-year-old is Ronnie’s granddaughter. As Shinedown promote their new album, living down Skynyrd comparisons may be less difficult than living up to the Skynyrd legacy.
“I’ve heard people say we got signed because of Skynyrd,” Todd says, “and that’s so far from the truth. We don’t even know those guys. I mean, I do, but only a little. We did get to play a show with Skynyrd, but then we didn’t even get invited onstage to play with them. I was pissed.”
“What built this is Jasin, Brad, Barry, and Brent: three B’s and a J,” says Smith, who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, before hooking up in Jacksonville with the two B’s and a J in 2001. “We mean absolutely no disrespect whatsoever to Skynyrd or to the Van Zants. I mean, Judy helped me out when I got down to Jacksonville. She housed me for six months for free. Brad, Jasin, and Barry all housed me, too. We’re a family. I came from a different state, left everything I had and everyone I knew behind, and all the pieces fell into place here in Jacksonville.”
Jacksonville’s musical roots run deep and wide. Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, and Tom Petty, who emerged from nearby Gainesville, tend to get the most notice, but as Todd is quick to point out, “Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi live right up the road from here. Everybody always talks about Limp Bizkit and Cold being from here, but that band Evanescence are here right now. And Judy hangs out with Otis Redding’s wife all the time. It’s a lot deeper here than people know.”
As each new Us and Them track begins, Todd offers a running commentary. “This song was inspired by drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, pussy, and alcoholism,” he says of “Atmosphere,” after admitting that the solo is a “note-for-note rip-off of the solo in the Skynyrd song ‘Gimme Back My Bullets.’” Todd may romanticize crash-and-burn rock ‘n’ roll (“I spend all my money on guitars and cocaine,” he boasts after explaining how he recently tore up his knee in a dirt-bike accident), but for all his talk, he’s got a good head on his shoulders. He makes sure the bar’s cleaned up before we leave, and, along with Melody, he runs a studio in town called Made in the Shade, where most of the first Shinedown album was recorded. The new disc was recorded at Todd’s house. “People aren’t even going to know that, because on the CD it says ‘recorded somewhere in Jacksonville.’”
With their matching dreadlocks, Kerch and Stewart look like the quintessential nü-metalheads of the band — especially Stewart, with his nose ring and his vintage Metallica Metal Up Your Ass tour T-shirt. But looks are deceiving: Both earned science degrees before Shinedown came together, Stewart as a chemist and Kerch as a biologist. Stewart, who has a black belt in karate, ended up working for a liquor company in a role he was “perfectly” suited for: analyzing the purity of rum. Meanwhile, Kerch was working for the state of Florida cleaning up lakes. “We got two scientists and two bums,” Todd jokes.
“Nü-metal is a joke term that somebody came up with. The good stuff is all just rock music.”
— Brent Smith, lead singer
But there’s a bittersweet aftertaste to the laughter because, while Todd, Kerch, and Stewart have all bought houses and nice cars, Smith remains essentially homeless. “This guy’s crazy,” Todd says with a nod toward Smith. “I remember one time his clothes were so messed up, he just took them off and went into Target with just his boxers on. So he goes in and puts on some Wranglers and a shirt, goes up to the register, pays for them, and walks out.”
“I care about these guys,” Smith says of the band, “but I don’t care about much else. The band is everything. I live and die by it. I don’t even really know what home is anymore. I try to have normal conversations with my mom and my dad, but I just can’t.”
For Smith, Shinedown are more than a band. “Each person in the band has a different meaning to the other,” he says. “When I’m with them, I have no fear at all when I get up onstage. And I count on our fans, too. I remember when we first started out, I noticed all these bands who just didn’t acknowledge their fans. That’s one thing that I’ve always felt is really important.”
Indeed, a typical Shinedown show is peppered with Smith sharing his thoughts with the crowd between songs in a way that’s more intimate than your usual “Hello, Cleveland” banter. Kerch agrees, saying, “If it weren’t for the fans, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
“And,” Todd interjects, “where exactly is that?”
That’s something Shinedown are going to have to figure out over the next year. They’re aware of the price paid by those who buy into rock’s most destructive romantic myths, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that Shinedown have all the makings of something major — either a breakthrough or a breakdown.
It becomes more likely with these recent Legacy that the artists may still be active and essentially focused in the same direction. Such would be the case with Shinedown. They look a bit older (Don’t we all?), but the drive and devotion to the music remains. Over the last 20 years, though, YouTube has rocketed into a prime space for entertainment. (Sorry for the pun, Amazon.) Mostly, though, we really appreciate that they have a teddy bear in their merch selection. Ronnie Van Zant would be proud.
