It's a brisk Wednesday afternoon when the Scene sits down with Cage the Elephant guitarist Brad Shultz at Bond Coffee, located on the ground floor of the Icon in the Gulch. It's a rare day off for the hard-touring 33-year-old, who's all smiles as he talks about rock 'n' roll and how he got good at it, speaking with a bright, nasal Kentucky drawl. Minutes into our conversation, this reporter's private eyes are diverted by a distraction. I can't help but interrupt Shultz to point out that a genuine icon — John Oates, who reportedly resides in a condo upstairs — just took a seat at the table behind us. We both laugh — it's the kind of sight that, though not necessarily unexpected in Nashville circa 2016, never ceases to amuse. Meanwhile, these days Shultz's band Cage the Elephant is headlining some of the same venues that Oates' band does.
"We started writing songs because we wanted to play house parties," Shultz says of Cage the Elephant's 2006 inception in Bowling Green, Ky. On Thursday night, the band tops the bill at the 6,800-capacity Ascend Amphitheater (where Hall & Oates performed in September). The band is riding high on the success of Cage's fourth LP, 2015's Dan Auerbach-produced Tell Me I'm Pretty, and this will be its biggest Nashville gig to date, and a stop on its first tour headlining at arenas and amphitheaters after years grinding it out as a support act for the likes of Foo Fighters, The Black Keys and Muse, whom they opened for at Bridgestone Arena in 2013. But Shultz looks back more fondly on the Nashville shows the then-baby-faced band — which is fronted by his younger brother Matthew Shultz and also features drummer Jared Champion and bassist Daniel Tichenor — used to trek 65 miles down I-65 to play shortly after forming in 2006.
"I think we freaked some people out sometimes," Shultz recalls. "The first time we ever opened up for a band in Nashville, at an actual show ... we opened up for How I Became the Bomb, and Matt came out, his whole body painted red, in just underwear, and had 'Fuck Satan,' written on his chest." The guitarist lets out a gut laugh remembering the looks they got, from people thinking, "What the fuck are these, like, redneck Kentucky kids doing?"
To be sure, the band's bourbon-baked Bluegrass State stomping ground shaped its identity on the art-quirk side of the equation. "Bowling Green, I think, was very good for us, because it allowed us to find our way without having too much pressure from a scene that's paid attention to nationally," Shultz says.
And, he adds of Nashville, in "any kind of tight-knit scene, you kind of have to prove your way into it. ... And I think it's a good thing, too, because it shows that people actually give a fuck about what they're doing and the kind of thing that they're creating and the kind of scene that they're creating. ... Nashville, at that time period, it was really budding, I think. The whole Infinity Cat [scene] was setting a whole standard for Nashville. ... I feel blessed to have been in Nashville for the time period that I've been in it."
Shultz says today Cage the Elephant claims both Bowling Green and Nashville as hometowns. He moved to Music City in 2009 after a two-year stint living in London, building a following that saw the band headlining 1,500-cap venues across the U.K., at a time when it seemed like every buzzing band in Britain was a dance-y, angular Gang of Four knockoff. "We were like the kids outside a glass house," Shultz jokes. The experience left the band longing for a bigger musical body politic than Bowling Green had to offer.
"When we moved to London, what we were looking for when we moved there was in Nashville the whole time," Shultz says. And it's Nashville that shaped the hungry, ambitious side of the band that, over the course of four full-lengths, has produced rock radio hits, built the band an international following and garnered guest drummers like Dave Grohl, who filled in with the band during a series of shows in 2011, when Champion was sidelined with a ruptured appendix.
Success came early for Cage the Elephant, when "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked," a single from their 2008 self-titled debut, hit the Top 10 on Billboard's Alternative Songs, Hot Rock Songs and Mainstream Rock charts. The album's second single "In One Ear" (a video for which the band shot at Rock Block haunt The End) fared even better, reaching No. 1 on the Alternative Songs chart. The success of those early singles, which still enjoy regular airplay eight years later, is bit of a blessing and a curse for Shultz, who, along with his bandmates, has to play them every night onstage, long after outgrowing them.
"I used to say I hated the first record," Shultz recalls, "because musically we didn't have a lot of depth, because we weren't really exposed to a lot musically, honestly. ... Now I appreciate the first album for what it was. It's kind of a snapshot of our life in that period, but I think our intentions have always been true. ... It was all just us finding out who we were. ... The second record [2011's Thank You, Happy Birthday] I think was a step closer to that."
Living in London proved a coming-of-age crash-course in musical exposure for the band. That's when they discovered artists like Kurt Cobain's desert-island faves, the Pixies and Daniel Johnston. "It was stuff that people listened to in high school that we just weren't exposed to," says Shultz with the frustration of a kid arriving late to the greatest party ever.
With those influences came more musical depth, but the band was still searching for its own identity. Like most young, wide-eyed, open-eared bands, Cage was "so excited about [what we were listening to], subconsciously we wore those influences heavily on our sleeves," Shultz says of Happy Birthday, an album that yielded another successful single with the undeniably Pixies-esque (and excellent) grunge-pop throwback "Shake Me Down," which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Rock Songs chart.
One crucial classic rock influence that, thanks to their father, did reach the Shultz brothers early in life was Iggy Pop. Comparisons to the "Godfather of Punk" aren't lost on anyone who's seen Matt Shultz work a stage. He throws his wiry frame around, hair flailing, with arrhythmic reckless abandon, aping Iggy antics like walking atop the outstretched hands of the crowd. Moves like these aren't notable in their audacity, but rather in how convincingly the younger Shultz pulls them off, often with his brother following close behind. Brad Shultz's eyes light up when, like a jolly and amused Hooper or Quint, he recalls breaking a rib at one recent show; another time he jumped into the crowd and a fan bit his back. These are injuries he usually doesn't notice until the adrenaline wears off after the gig.
As traditional an approach as it may be, Cage the Elephant are lone soldiers in an increasingly small crop of arena-level rock acts like Kings of Leon, Muse and The Black Keys that aren't led by a guitar-player frontman. Schultz is instead a Jagger/Iggy-style moves-and-swagger frontman's frontman whose only limiting obstacle is his microphone cable. "Matt always wants to play some guitar on songs, but we never let him," Shultz says with a roaring laugh.
Long before the band realized its potential in the studio, onstage they were vaulting leaps and bounds beyond their modern rock contemporaries with a fourth-wall-bereft live show that saw them steadily clawing their way up, thousands of new fans at a time, to bigger fonts on festival posters with every passing summer.
"You have to lose yourself every night," Shultz says of the band's dedication to the stage. "If you want to be taken seriously and be looked at as a great live band, you can't have any nights where you go through the motions. You have to feel that show. You have to fucking be there with those people, in the moment, exchanging that energy. It has to be that way, or you're just a phony, fraud person up there fuckin' trying to make a paycheck."
Five years of that approach took its toll on the band by the time they headed in to cut 2013's Melophobia.
"It was a fucking hellacious time," Shultz recalls of the period they spent writing the record in a rental house in White House, Tenn. "Our band was fucking sick of each other. ... We would go to this fuckin' house out in the country and literally all show up, barely say a fuckin' word to each other and jam out what we could for a few hours and, you know, then fuckin' leave and not say a word to each other."
At the same time, Matt Shultz fought and won a much-publicized battle with addiction.
"We were lucky enough to get a lot of that shit out of the way," Brad says. "And I guess it is a constant battle for some people in our band, but that was why I said I think we kind of had to get out of Bowling Green because we'd get ourselves in trouble — there's an underbelly in I'm sure any small town where there's not a lot to do that's heavily reliant on drugs, and in our case opiates. And opiates will rip your fucking soul out, you know? ... In the end, it drew us all closer together."
Closer together, that is, with the exception of the band's then-youngest member, guitarist Lincoln Parish. He already had one foot out the door. "Lincoln was really unhappy with his situation," Shultz recalls. "He'd been touring since he was 15 years old, and he just fuckin' hated the road." Parish left the band less than a month after Melophobia's release to try his hand as a Nashville producer.
"Melophobia is where the light bulb really flipped on for us," Shultz says, recalling how the band soldiered on through a process of, "[getting] out of our own heads, even subconsciously, towards pleasing anybody, whether it be commercially, critically, our friends, our fuckin' managers, our booking agent, whoever the fuck it was. We had to write music, and that's it. ... Melophobia was a bitch of a record to make, but it helped shape us and bring us to where we are now."
And where is Cage the Elephant, a band once all too familiar with what it's like to showcase for indifferent crowds? Now the band is making routine television appearances, enjoying regular rotation on rock radio, gracing the pages of Rolling Stone, making main-stage festival appearances, opening for Metallica at the occasional baseball stadium gig (as they did in the metal giants' hometown of San Francisco back in February), and headlining sheds and arenas on their own. Oddly enough, while they've slowly risen to the top crop of modern rock, the four albums they've made along the way have gotten progressively less commercial.
"Bands are almost expected to be a little bit more raw and rough at the beginning," Shultz muses. "And we [started off] with this super-slick pop record. It's been weird, because we've had to fight the opposite way."
Their latest, December's Tell Me I'm Pretty, is the band's most fully realized effort to date. As Shultz explains, "On this record — not that we wanted to capture our live moment, because you're never going to do that — but we did want everything to be a bit more raw and in-your-face and a little bit more stripped-back than our other records." The guitarist credits Black Keys frontman-turned-Nashville-super-producer Dan Auerbach for shaking the band down to its core elements and reining in a tendency to heap every idea they have onto the pile. He recalls Auerbach's reaction the first time he heard the overstuffed demo for British Invasion-indebted Pretty standout single "Cry Baby." "The first thing he said was, 'Are you all a fucking prog band?' "
Prog or not, Pretty is the closest the band has come so far to capturing the explosive directness they've never struggled to find onstage, even as they've made the jump to arenas, even if the album might have better suited the 2006 psychedelic freak-outs in which the band got its start. Shultz remembers an old condemned Bowling Green DIY haunt called The Pirate House. "We would all go over there and, you know, trip mushrooms and paint stuff on the walls and, like, we would just do ridiculous things in the house, and have house parties and play shows. And we never thought that we could do what we're doing right now until we started coming to Nashville."
And how does success feel now that the band's arrived?
"Honestly, I haven't put too much thought into what it means for the band or anything," Shultz says. "I guess if you sit back and reflect on things, my 13-year-old self would be shitting right now. I will tell you this: We played a house party at SXSW that I set up, and going back to that is more of a mind-trip than moving up to arenas."
Perhaps that's because the band's ambition all along has been to continue the excitement Shultz, his brother and their bandmates felt back in Bowling Green, when playing was all about the love of rocking out and nothing else was at stake.
"Some people try to view [our show] as trying to be this whole grand thing, but it's really [us] trying to hold onto that fuckin' small, in-your-face [house-show feeling], because that's where we fuckin' came from."
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