If you’re going to do Southern rock right, you probably need to look at the past masters: bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers or even modern day practitioners like Blackberry Smoke are vital to a young band’s Southern rock education.
Luckily, the Auburn, Alabama based quintet The Vegabonds have had front row seats to shows by some of the best to ever play Southern rock — having shared the stage in its early days with Skynyrd and Gregg Allman.
“Those are shows where you just sit back and watch a master at work,” said The Vegabonds’ lead singer and chief songwriter, Daniel Allen. “We played with Gregg Allman, and we just stood side-stage and watched him do his thing. It was just amazing how he commanded the stage and how he connected with the crowd.”
As you might imagine, Allman made an indelible impression on the young Southern rockers.
“As a fan, it takes you back to the first times that you heard those songs,” Allen said, “And that’s what we want our music to do to our fans as well. This is year 15 for us, and we hope that when people come to our shows it takes them back to a time when they first heard our music; it’s almost like a time machine.”
Music like a time machine
The band formed in 2009, and in addition to Allen, The Vegabonds includes guitarist Richard Backhand, keyboard player Beau Cooper, bassist Paul “Loose Moose” Bruens and drummer Bryan “Little Buddy” Harris. They started off playing covers but quickly moved to original songs, and they’ve since released six studio albums, the most recent being 2021’s hard-rocking but country-tinged Sinners and Saints.
The band’s approach is distilled perfectly on Sinners and Saints, ranging from the swaggering stomp of the opening track, “Juke and Jive” to the surging, anthemic “Ain’t Giving Up” to the soulful ballad “Heartache & A Memory.”
It’s a sound that begs for a zero-polish approach in the studio; raw and rugged, and the band is intent on keeping things that way.
“We’re very conscious of it,” Allen said, “because our sound needs to be like you’re listening to it live. I think that’s the best way for us to connect: for us to sound like The Vegabonds. … We want that vibe to be raw.”
Over the years, The Vegabonds have found a sort of second home in South Carolina, particularly Columbia and Charleston. Allen spoke passionately about the fan base they’ve grown here and about the venue they play at most often, The Windjammer, where they’ll perform on July 20.
“We’ve played a lot in South Carolina over the years,” Allen said. “We absolutely love Charleston, and The Windjammer is probably one of the top three venues for me.”
The Vegabonds are celebrating their fifteenth anniversary as a working band, and as part of that celebration, they’ll spend 2024 releasing reimagined versions of songs from their catalog, notably a “beach music” version of “Where We Used To Go” and a new take on their most popular song, “Shaky Hands.”
Revisiting those older songs has caused Allen to think about where the group started and where it is now.
“Some days I think, ‘Wow, this has been a long journey,’ ” he said. “And some days it feels like it was just yesterday we got started. But when I start thinking about it, I realize that we’ve done so much, and it’s been a crazy wild ride. We’ve done three European tours, played all over the U.S., and we’ve put out six studio albums. It’s been a great run, and we’re gonna keep it going.”
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