It’s Good to Be the Kings
BACKSTAGE BEFORE A LATE-SEPTEMBER KINGS of Leon show in St. Louis, nerves are running high. “I’ll bet at least a hundred people showed up just so they can boo us,” says singer Caleb Followill. “Maybe I’ll pretend to run off stage crying.” The Kings are here to make up for a disastrous gig in July – a flock of pigeons in the rafters rained down so much excrement that the band quit after only three songs.
The incident became an immediate source of widespread ridicule – the group was mocked by everyone from national magazines to Rush (who played the amphitheater a few days later) – as detractors accused the Kings of becoming prima donnas who had lost touch with their roots as a hardworking Southern rock band. By the next morning, the story had gone global. “It was on CNN, it was on Reuters,” recalls drummer Nathan Followill, 31. “It felt like that’s gonna define us: ‘Four-time Grammy-winning, pigeon-shit-on band Kings of Leon.’ It’s crazy that pigeon shit made me realize just how big of a band we really were.”
Less than an hour before the gig, a friend says he spotted a pigeon under the awning. “You saw one?” asks bassist Jared Followill, 23, who had bird shit land on his face. Nathan teases him, “It was just one, but he had some Taco Bell bags with him.” But pigeons aren’t even the Kings’ principal concern right now. The bandmates are religiously loyal fans of University of Oklahoma football – the Sooners are up two points against the University of Cincinnati Bearcats with one minute to play. There’s a TV set up in the fluorescent-lit dressing room and a spread including hot wings, beer, wine and artisanal cheeses. “This one smells like if a foot could fart,” Nathan says of one particularly ripe wedge. After a trip to the bathroom to puff on one of the pre-rolled joints (“PR’s”) a Kings crew member keeps in a smell-proof container in his pocket, Nathan cues up the Sooners’ fight song on his iPhone and does a little jig. “If OU loses,” he says, “pigeons are gonna be the least of this venue’s problems.”
The Kings’ fifth record – Come Around Sundown, out October 19th – follows the album that turned their world upside down and made the Followills (three brothers and a cousin) the biggest young band in America: 2008’s Only by the Night has sold 6.5 million copies worldwide. That record, fueled by the radio smashes “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” brought the Kings to a mainstream audience, about which they expressed Nirvana-style ambivalence. (Earlier this year, Caleb, 28, had to apologize after saying their new soccer-mom fans were “not fucking cool” and calling “Sex on Fire” a “piece of shit.”) They batted away requests to be on soundtracks and even turned down an offer for one of their songs to be performed on Glee. “We feel really blessed and really popular,” says Jared. “But now it’s like people are looking for any reason to hate us. And I think that’s partly because people had to hear ‘Sex on Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ 8,000 times a day. That would make anybody hate anything.”
At the same time, the Kings’ LSD-gobbling, groupie-bagging years are fading away. Nathan married his longtime girlfriend, singer-songwriter Jessie Baylin, last year (they met by the Porta Potties at Bonnaroo in 2006: “It was love at first shite,” he says); guitarist Matthew Followill, 26, and girlfriend Johanna Bennett wed around the same time. And in mid-September, Caleb proposed to model Lily Aldridge. Jared is the only bachelor left in the band (he split from his fiancee more than a year ago), so he spends more time partying in New York than in Nashville. “It’s not the best place for single people, at all,” he says.
FEELING OVEREXPOSED AND EXHAUSTED from more than a year of straight touring, the Kings planned to take an extended break at the end of 2009. But by February, they were bored out of their minds. “We can’t really sit on our hands,” says Caleb. “After you’ve cooked dinner and you’re sitting there listening to Townes Van Zandt and you’re drinking whiskey, when you see a guitar in the corner you’re going to go pick it up.”
With a batch of new songs written in Nashville and on the road, the Kings moved to New York to record Come Around Sundown. “We needed a change of scenery,” says Nathan. “A shock to the system.” They bought condos and settled into a regular working routine – Caleb became obsessed with the roast chicken at a favorite Italian restaurant, Nathan dug walking uptown to the studio. They’d get there around noon, battle each other at darts in the lounge between takes, and end at whatever time the alcohol-to-creativity ratio made it impossible to get any more work done. “Some days we’d end early because somebody had gotten to that point too early,” says Nathan. “There were a lot of five-day weekends on this album.”
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