By Noel Murray

The Shazam

July 7 at 12th & Porter

Hans Rotenberry is a big, boisterous man, with a hearty twang and a mouth that runs like a Deere. He talks in circles and punch lines, and he excuses himself by explaining that he’s left-handed. “I tend to read backwards,” he says. “And tell stories backwards.”

So we’ll begin this story at the end, with Rotenberry relaxing at his Kingsport, Tenn., home a few weeks after returning from London, where he and his mates in The Shazam, Scott Ballew and Mick Wilson, played at a daylong BBC radio broadcast from the fabled Abbey Road studios. They were the only American act besides techno-wizard Moby to be invited to perform, and they joined such British pop legends as Billy Bragg, Death in Vegas, Ocean Colour Scene, Paul Carrack, and Kirsty MacColl, among others. The buzz before they arrived was that Paul McCartney would make a surprise appearance, but even though The Cute One didn’t appear, Rotenberry says “his presence was felt.”

Rotenberry is a devout anglophile, hooked on the British proto-power-pop of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and therefore a true Beatlemaniac. He even named his daughter Astrid, after the German photographer who dated John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe and nearly broke up the band before they’d so much as played The Cavern.

So there’s an equal measure of awe and enthusiasm in Rotenberry’s voice as he describes the events surrounding the Abbey Road gig. The day before, The Shazam rehearsed at a studio where T-Rex, David Bowie, and The Moody Blues had all recorded. At Abbey Road on the day of the show, they changed clothes in the fourth-floor penthouse suite where The Beatles Anthology tracks were mixed down. Producer Brad Jones accompanied the band and made friends with the Abbey Road engineers, who delighted in pointing out where different Beatles songs had been written and recorded. And The Shazam performed in the cavernous first-floor Studio One, where the Fab Four did the famous TV broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” with a massive choir of friends and children.

The Shazam’s set was scheduled for 8:25 p.m., between Duran Duran and show closer Paul Weller. Other acts were limited to three songs, but The Shazam was allowed to do four, because members of legendary British rockers The Move had agreed to join their Tennessee fans for a cover of The Move’s “Beautiful Daughter.” The Shazam-Move combo also performed The Move’s “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” for BBC-TV earlier in the day. During their radio set, Paul Weller—who had talked about joining the band to sing on “Beautiful Daughter”—sat in the engineer’s booth with his feet up on the board, presumably enjoying the show.

A few days after the Abbey Road performance, The Shazam drew an enormous crowd at London venue The Garage, with fans singing along with every song. VH1 Europe taped the show for future broadcast.

This sounds like a fantasy doesn’t it? The fertile imagination of a hardcore UK rock fan spilling over into the kind of fairy tale that every small-time, small-town musician would love to tell. Only The Shazam have the press clippings to back it up. The weekly Melody Maker newspaper described The Garage show as “Quite simply the best pop show of 2000 to date.”

The Shazam has actually been to London three times since the beginning of this year, and both their shows and their album Godspeed the Shazam have received raves from Mojo (“A gloriously upbeat journey littered with psychedelic nonsense and snapshots of girls so gorgeous that our man can barely string a sentence together”), Q (“Once upon a time, many records sounded this way”), Uncut (“Enough verve to restore your faith in the possibilities of pop”), The Evening Standard (“[Rotenberry is] one of the best vocalists to come out of Tennessee since Alex Chilton”), and New Musical Express (“The glorious sound of Americans-singing-like-Brits-singing-like-Americans”).

Rotenberry is well aware of the fickleness of the British weekly music press, but the response still overwhelms him. “I think the British press is the way to go if you want to read about music.” he says. “Mojo especially. The weeklies? The opinions change with the wind...but it’s the weeklies you want to be in.”

The presence of VH1 at the group’s last London show seemed especially appropriate to Rotenberry, because he says the story of their three trips across the Atlantic plays like a three-act episode of Behind the Music—ending in triumph after beginning with success and getting mired in difficulty.

“On our second trip, in February, we had better crowds, and we were headlining, but we had a gig canceled because we got stuck on the subway. And at our one really big gig, we had equipment trouble. We were renting our stuff, so we had no backup guitar. We were cheered when we walked on the stage, and then halfway through the second song...snap...broken string. And manual dexterity is not my forte. I’m all left big toes.”

It took 10 minutes to get restrung, and Rotenberry says he was out of tune for the rest of the show. “Luckily, there were no bad reviews,” he says. “We went home thinking that we blew it.”

The seeds of The Shazam’s UK success were sown on their first trip over in January of this year. It went like this: Noel Gallagher of Oasis spent a year talking up the Texas power-pop band Cotton Mather in interviews, and then invited them over to play a gig. Cotton Mather’s European label, Rainbow Quartz, is also The Shazam’s, so The Shazam was brought over to play a few gigs of their own and to open for Cotton Mather at The Barfly in Camden Town. A big crowd, including, oddly enough, Liam Gallagher but not his brother Noel, turned out and was blown away as much by the opening act as by the headliners.

“We hung out with Liam,” Rotenberry recalls, adding, “I couldn’t understand much of what he said.”

Then the press campaign began. “We got a great review in The Evening Standard. They said something like, ‘If Oasis aren’t any good anymore, at least we can thank them for bringing over Cotton Mather, who brought over The Shazam.’ ”

As a result of the instant buzz, the band was tapped by the BBC for the Abbey Road concert. Ironically, before getting the offer, Hans and his bandmates had gone to Abbey Road as tourists and had their picture taken by a Japanese man as they stood on the steps of the building that they would enter for the first time only six months later.

Since the European activity, The Shazam has actually begun to get a little airplay in Nashville (where the rest of the band is based) and has been added to other playlists around the country. Despite the little bit of domestic success, though, the band still struggles in its homeland, and in its home state. Rotenberry says that the biggest chain record stores in Nashville won’t stock Godspeed the Shazam except on consignment—despite the fact that the record’s on a real label and can be just as easily mail-ordered as anything else in the racks. “At a certain point,” Rotenberry sighs, “It’s embarrassing to have to beg these people.”

As for the next step, Rotenberry says that the band would love to tour the country, but they’re still in debt from their last American tour, which wrapped up in 1998. Instead, they’re playing only a few select shows, including a homecoming gig at 12th and Porter this Friday—their first performance since getting back from England. Soon, they’ll start putting together the next album, something Rotenberry is eagerly awaiting. “We’re hoping the records will get us to a point where we can afford to play again,” he says.

In the meantime, Rotenberry finds himself spending much of his time in a pleasant fog, reflecting on what has happened in the past six months and calling back to England to check on the latest developments in The Shazam’s expatriate career. “I have an AT&T long-distance plan that kicks ass,” he says. “I can call London cheaper than Nashville.” He’s not entirely sure what sparked this fire that’s currently blazing thousands of miles away, but he says the fact that the band is from Tennessee allowed for a certain amount of novelty. “The vibe I caught was that, ‘You’re where Elvis came from.’ We’re not wavin’ Dixie flags and stuff, [but] I did push the Gomer Pyle angle.”

Rotenberry is referring to the origin of the band’s name, which was inspired by Captain Marvel’s magic word and an album title by The Move, as well as by Jim Nabors’ trademark exclamation on The Andy Griffith Show. But the remarkable popularity of The Shazam is due to more than the exotica of a Tennessee band playing music inspired by Brits. Godspeed the Shazam is just a flat-out wonderful pop record, full of loud rock strut and doe-eyed sweetness. Brad Jones’ punchy production values make Rotenberry’s anthemic songs sparkle, and the band’s assured, shout-from-the-mountaintop performance gives tunes like “Super Tuesday” and “The Stranded Stars” a timeless quality. It’s a surprise and a shame that The Shazam haven’t yet been feted at home the way they have on distant shores.

The band got home from Great Britain on June 3 and is planning to return in September. To pay the label back for sending them over, they’ve banged out a quickie EP featuring a cover of—this isn’t a misprint—“Revolution #9,” the experimental audio pastiche that represents Yoko Ono’s most provocative influence on John Lennon and The Beatles. It’s just part of the respect for rock history that has helped make The Shazam stars in a foreign land.

While he sits in his home in East Tennessee, where his face is known more to friends and relatives than to rock ’n’ roll fans, Rotenberry gets excited about what the future might hold, and where it might take him. “People [in England] said to us, ‘You’re not like other American bands,’ I guess because we’re so obviously impressed with the place. It was everything I expected it to be, and better. I got back and told my wife, ‘You know where we’re going to move?’ ” He laughs, but then his voice gets very serious. “It’d almost be stupid not to.” He continues, with intense sincerity. “A lot of folks in Nashville may have done bigger and better things, and maybe it wasn’t bigger and better to them. But it is to us.

“It’s hard to really want much more,” Rotenberry says, finding the center of his story after taking the scenic route around it. “We’ve got it all except the fame and fortune.”

“It’s hard to really want much more,” Rotenberry says, finding the center of his story after taking the scenic route around it. “We’ve got it all except the fame and fortune.”