Dirty South
While rock has always cultivated an outlaw image, Southern rock outfit Maylene and the Sons of Disaster turned to real-life criminals for source material. Vocalist Dallas Taylor — who was Underoath’s original singer — says he was inspired by stories his grandfather told him about the legendary Ma Barker gang of the 1930s. Barker purportedly ran the notorious Barker-Kapris Gang during the Great Depression, committing a series of bank robberies and kidnappings across the Midwest. Barker was killed during a FBI raid in a cottage she was renting in Taylor’s hometown of Ocala, Fla.
These violent tales of the “public enemy” era left a strong impression and inspired the songwriting on the band’s latest release, II.
“I used to go to reenactments of this lady named Ma Barker and her sons in Central Florida where I grew up,” Taylor says. “It always intrigued me [to be] eating cotton candy and reading re-enactments about her and her sons getting gunned down. So when we started the band, we tried remembering stories of her past. Things when you’re younger, you may respect or don’t look into as much. The older you get, you wished you paid more attention to it.”
Taylor eventually relocated to Alabama where he formed Maylene. The band is named for the town where the band practices.
“Instead of ripping it off exactly, we wanted to make our own little story of [Maylene] and have it inspired by something like The Goonies,” explains Taylor. “We thought ‘Maylene’ sounded cool.”
The band should sound cool to this year’s Warped crowd.
“I like [the Warped Tour] because everyone’s open to anything,” he says. “People respect a lot more bands. There are bands from all different kinds of music. You also get to become friends with a lot of people. It’s almost like summer camp, meeting a lot of good guys. Out of all the summer festivals, everyone there’s open to any kind of music.”
Maylene toured with Clutch, Underoath and The Devil Wears Prada. But while most responses are positive, Taylor encountered his share of misconceptions over the band’s sound and what they are about.
“Since we’re from Alabama, we get stereotyped,” he says. “There will be people at concerts wearing overalls and flannel, thinking they’re fitting in with us. They think everyone in Alabama is an inbred redneck that wears overalls and flannel, chews tobacco and shoots guns constantly. Sure, we’re laid back and I own guns and barbecue a lot and go into lakes. Other than that, [people believe] since we’re from the South, it is a super backwoods, killing-our-own-meat-type of deal sometimes.”
On the web: mayleneandthesonsofdisaster.us
No comments:
Post a Comment