Success in music can be broadly defined. On one hand, there's the quantifiable success of hit records, sold-out stadiums, cocaine and hookers — the gold standard, rock-star version of success. On the other hand, there's the more working-class definition that involves owning your own work, paying your own way and never being beholden to interests other than your own — creating art for yourself and your fans, rather than some anonymous shareholders and their corporate lackeys. If you define success by the former, Murfreesboro rockers Glossary are what the Internet would call an epic fail. If you define it by the latter, well, Glossary might just be the most successful band in town.
"Yeah, don't be sad for us, we do cool shit all the time," says singer/guitarist Joey Kneiser, eliciting a hearty round of guffaws from his bandmates as we sit in his Murfreesboro apartment.
The group has been tagged as "underdogs" by unimaginative music journalists from one coast to the other for over a decade, and at this point it's more a source of amusement than anything. Sure, they've seen many of their peers get the champagne-and-flowers treatment from labels big and small — and sure, some of those peers have gone on to big things — but the majority found disappointment at the end of their corporate courtships. For instance: How many albums have The Features recorded in the last decade-and-a-half? Seven, maybe eight, maybe more if you count the odds and sods. How many have been released? Two.
In the same stretch of time, Glossary have released six albums, all of which they own outright. None of their music is tied up in the corrupt indentured servitude that is the major label system. You could argue that Glossary's latest album Feral Fire is part of the big bad system, since it's being released on Lucero's Liberty & Lament imprint, which has distribution via Warner Music's Alternative Distribution Alliance, but that's a bit of a stretch. Glossary are getting help from friends to put out their album, only this time instead a glue gun and a case of beer, their friends are bringing national distribution to the table. With friends like that, who needs A&R guys, right?
Not that Lucero's motives are entirely altruistic — solid bros as they may be — but one listen to Feral Fire's taut mix of Springsteen shuffle and Thin Lizzy-by-way-of-Dinosaur Jr. guitar harmonies and it's hard not to imagine cash registers ringing and wallets emptying. Feral Fire has the historical hugeness of classic rock — the huge drums, the soaring guitar solos and hooks galore you'd expect from, say, Meatloaf — but combined with the intimate lyricism that made indie rock in the '90s so exciting. The grand vistas of rock 'n' roll mythology — the boy, the girl, the open road — cozy up alongside the realities of living in a small Southern town — the struggle between piety and partying, damaged love and limited opportunities. Not exactly Top 40 fodder in these days of artificial, Auto-Tuned pop music, but for those who feel marginalized by the artifice of the Billboard big chart, those who desire a bit more depth than your average Miley Cyrus, Feral Fire is worth plunking down a few clams. Lucero happen to have just that type of fan — fortuitous, no?
Good timing and good luck have been Glossary's best companions on this journey, turning up at all the right times. When they decided to release their previous album Better Angels of Our Nature as a free download back in the summer of '07, it was kind of a fringe idea, a promotional concept that only tech-obsessed nerds were really engaging. It was a radical idea, for a band — a business, really — to make a record, a product, and just let it loose on the Intertubes, for free. Then, about a week later, Radiohead announced that they would be releasing their next album In Rainbows, sans record label, using a pay-what-you-feel model.
And whaddya know, Glossary's adventurous (some would say foolhardy) approach was vindicated by the world's biggest rock band — and don't think people didn't take notice of who was there first. Largehearted Boy, MSNBC, the late, lamented No Depression were all talking about this little band from Murfreesboro and how they got the leg up on the most massive music industry innovation since magnetic tape.
It was during the deluge of press surrounding Better Angels that they ended up on the soundtrack for 20 Years After, a post-apocalyptic movie shot in Huntsville, Ala., and Fayetteville, Tenn. The movie, originally titled Like Moles, Like Rats, is somewhere between A Boy and His Dog and Children of Men, a Southern meditation on the effects of the end times on every day folks. It's a part of a modern wave of Dixie-sploitation films and a part of a regional D.I.Y. underground that's quickly finding its identity. And for B-movie hounds like Joey Kneiser and the rest of Glossary, it was an easy fit — even artists in different media need to band together, especially when working outside the coastal media centers. And just to sweeten the pot there was also an appearance by Dan Beene — father of Glossary's steel player Todd — whom you might recognize as June Carter's father in Walk the Line or Dilbert the Grocer from Steven Seagal's magnum opus Fire Down Below.
(Dan Beene rules. Look out for him in this year's The Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, the one with Hillary Duff. No, we're not kidding.)
Creating Southern art and exploring Southern character, for good and for worse, is what Glossary do, and maybe that's why they're continually tagged as underdogs. They don't play on the Southern caricatures of contemporary country and the Larry the Cable Guy knuckle-dragging that corporate culture merchants like CMT pedal, and they're not a museum piece of Southern culture, carefully preserved relics.
Not that Kneiser isn't the kind of guy who brings To Kill a Mockingbird on tours of the West Coast to keep himself grounded — because he is — and it's not that they aren't the kind of kids who won't break out a spontaneous chorus of "Dixieland Delight," — because they are — but Glossary aim for richer worlds and deeper characters. When Joey and Kelly sing, "If what I want to do is a sin, God better cover his eyes," they get right down to the heart of the matter, the tension between culture and desire, primal urges and piety. It's not dissimilar from a case of the spins on late, late Saturday night — a head-on collision between the Mythology of Rock 'n' Roll and the Mythological South.
But in the end, they're just stories, and like so many stories they have different meanings for different people. For some, life in a small town in a fly-over state is a handicap to be overcome; for others it 's at the heart of their hopes and dreams — and if there's anything that Feral Fire proves, it's that patience and hard work pay off in the form of great art. Glossary may have never gotten a hand job from Jimmy Iovine or spent half a million dollars making videos of girls on rollerskates, but they've made six albums and toured all across America with no end in site.
And that's pretty damn successful, if you ask us.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
