publish_date:
October 1, 2008
When the five members of the Randy Rogers Band talk about their allegiance to one another and the cause — building musical success together, all for one and one for all, like country-crossover musketeers — there’s no question that they really mean it.But just in case their words aren’t convincing enough, they’ll be happy to show you their tattoos. Each one has an indelible affirmation of his intent to stay in it for the long haul, to be making music in this band, with these brothers, for as long as anyone wants to listen. Even the crew members have ’em. Most are variations on the band’s cattle-brand-style double-R logo, facing letters divided by a broken white line symbolizing the never-ending highway of their road-warrior existence.
They were, in fact, on the road when they displayed their tats, hanging out in their home-away-from-home tour bus while killing time before their 11:30 p.m. headlining slot at the Cowboy Homecoming in Pleasanton. They spend more nights in the bus than they do in their own abodes — about 200 last year. Actually, that’s the approximate number of shows they did. Add in travel time and mid-tour, can’t-get-home days off, and it’s even more. No wonder they say they sleep so well in their bus bunks. They know them better than their own beds.
So yeah, they’re tight. Of course, they’re not the first group to get permanently linked by ink; hell, legions of frat boys and soldiers all over the world have gone under the needle to prove their solidarity (not to mention countless couples who later became exes). But these guys really are a conjoined entity; each one owns 20 percent of Room 8 LLC, the band’s corporate incarnation (named for the Joshua Tree hotel room where Gram Parsons died). Each gets an equal say-so in band decisions, from song choices to crew hirings, and an equal cut of the income. And each is equally dedicated to the music, the future, the relationship.
“These guys, more than anybody else, are truly like family,” marvels producer, collaborator and friend Radney Foster. “I’ve never, ever seen any band that spends an entire week on the bus together and then goes bowling together with their families. … The drummer and the guitar player live down the street (from each other) and play golf every day.”
Asked why this is, fiddle player Brady Black jokes, “They’re my only friends!” As soon as the resulting round of laughter — one of many — subsides, band frontman Rogers adds, “Bein’ in a band’s like bein’ a cop. The only other friends they have are cops. The only good friends we have are musicians.” Only another musician who’s gigged there could fully appreciate the irony of playing the pentagram-decorated Bar Deluxe, at 666 S. State St. in the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City, and the further irony of Rogers’ mom, the wife of a Baptist minister, sending him an e-mail saying she was worried about him playing there. (He probably read it on his iPhone — the one containing that popular program download that lets the user chug a virtual beer.)
As they pop the tops off a series of long-necked Bud Lights — their promotional contract with the brand gets them a lot of free cases; Texas-made Tito’s vodka also flows freely — they unfurl details of their extraordinary bond.
THE RANDY ROGERS BAND just happened to start out as a bunch of pick-up players Rogers collected so he could take advantage of Cheatham Street Warehouse owner Kent Finlay’s offer to give him his own weekly gig on “Stevie Ray night” — the Tuesday slot so named because Stevie Ray Vaughan had it first. (According to Finlay, who opened the San Marcos club in 1974 — before Randy Rogers was born — Vaughan often played to an empty room.) Finlay told Rogers to find himself a band if he wanted the job, so he did. The name came then, and it stuck as Rogers refined and solidified his sound, stage presence and the musician lineup that ultimately stuck: guitarist/backing vocalist Geoffrey Hill, drummer Les Lawless, bassist Jon Richardson (called “Chops” or “Chopper” because of his rockabilly-boy muttonchop sideburns) and fiddler/backing vocalist Brady Black. All are true Texans, raised on music. Even those alliterative names are apparently true; if anyone’s using a stage name, he’s not ’fessin’ up.
The band’s growth trajectory has been appropriately linear, like a plane taking flight. They’ve left the runway, they’re in the air and gaining altitude, and the bird’s nose is pointing upward at a nice angle. They know there’s a way to go yet before they get anywhere near cruising level — not that this band would ever merely cruise; they wouldn’t know how — but they can see the possibility of breaking through the clouds. And staying there.
Rogers credits Finlay with training his eyes on the sky in the first place. When Rogers showed up at an open mic night while attending Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University), Finlay, a songwriter himself, felt a familiar sensation: that gut-rush of excitement he’d experienced every other time someone with special talent caused his finely tuned ears to perk up.
“He had a song called ‘Lost and Found’ that knocked me out right away, back in 2000,” Finlay recalls. “He sang with a great deal of soul, too.”
In the halting way Texans sometimes talk, Finlay tries to describe how he got involved in Rogers’ career. Of course, it goes back to his desire to bring music to a college town that didn’t have a venue for real artists, and to showcase and develop new talent. But it goes deeper than that.
“It’s my job in life — part of my job — to help find people and try to encourage them to keep writing, and writing better and doing whatever it takes,” he says thoughtfully. “We had lunch one day and I told him I thought he ought to be real serious about writing, that he could really make a career of it if he wanted to. And I’d help him get started.” That’s when he offered the gig.
Rogers certainly was aware of Finlay’s track record. George Strait, the singer Rogers dreamed of writing songs for when he started penning them as a kid — was Finlay’s first discovery after he turned the now 99-year-old former warehouse into a honky-tonk-styled songwriters’ haven. Terri Hendrix, James McMurtry, Todd Snider, Bruce Robison and Hal Ketchum are also on the list of world-class artists who played that little joint next to the railroad tracks when they were still, Finlay says, “tryin’ to figure out how to make words rhyme.”
But Rogers did more than get a band together to play the rickety, yet comfortable club. He made sure they rehearsed, and he built an audience by calling friends and reminding them to come out each Tuesday night. (After majoring in public relations and interning for two years at Propaganda Media Group, a San Marcos-based music PR company, he knew a little something about how to generate buzz.)
Two months after Rogers grabbed Stevie Ray’s night, the Randy Rogers Band released Live at Cheatham St. Warehouse. For a guy who had originally intended to write country songs, not perform them, it was some achievement.
“(Kent) taught me so much about … starting a band, actually fronting it, getting out there and having the courage to do it,” Rogers says of his first mentor. Two years later the band, by then containing guitarist Hill, recorded its first studio album, Like it Used to Be. Compared to the much more assured records still to come, it was a modest offering, though it showed promise. Rogers’ voice was strong and his songs displayed a keen sense of melody and charm (even on the cheeky country ditty, “Friends with Benefits”), and though the current lineup — and much more muscular sound — wouldn’t be cemented until the follow-up, the album sold briskly from stages across the state and online at LoneStarMusic.com.
It didn’t take long for Rogers and company to accumulate bigger crowds, hit bigger venues and gain high-profile supporters — like Radney Foster, who produced 2004’s ultra-confident Rollercoaster, the album that officially debuted this cemented quintet and attracted the attention of Mercury Nashville, a Universal-owned label. Foster, who earned his first flash of fame as half of Foster & Lloyd, produced their Mercury debut, 2006’s Just a Matter of Time, and the self-titled new one, too.
AS IF THIS FIVESOME DIDN’T spend enough time together, when they recorded Randy Rogers Band, they chose a “destination spot” that would free them from the happy distractions of friends and family in Austin or the temptations of nightlife in Nashville. Louisiana-born singer Marc Broussard is credited with tipping off album engineer Justin Tocket about Dockside Studios in Maurice, La.
“They showed us pictures of it and we just fell in love,” Rogers says. The guys describe the total-immersion experience at Dockside as “country-music band camp.”
“In the 10, 11 days we were there, we went out the one Saturday night,” says Black. “We had that Sunday off, and we went out for a Mardi Gras thing. I think that’s the only time we really ever left.” They even had lunch catered so they didn’t waste precious work hours finding parking spots and perusing menus. But they did have some time to play; the oak-covered 14-acre “camp” had a pool, tennis and basketball courts and a stocked fishing pond, and the golf course wasn’t far. Private bayou boat tours were also available.
That’s what being on a major label gets you.
That, and the opening slot for John Fogerty and the Eagles at the Stagecoach Festival, the biggest country music festival in California. Even their 2006 tour with Dierks Bentley and Miranda Lambert couldn’t beat that on the list of Randy Rogers Band career highlights.
Rogers attributes that May gig directly to Luke Lewis, “the coolest dude in Nashville,” who’s also their label head and founder of Mercury’s Lost Highway Records, the boutique Americana imprint that Rogers proclaims “the coolest label.” (It’s home to Lucinda Williams, Ryan Adams, Ryan Bingham and Hayes Carll, not to mention Willie Nelson, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello.)
Lewis apparently called Eagle Don Henley, who lives in Dallas — a market where the Randy Rogers Band gets a fair amount of airplay. “‘Don was, ‘Yeah, c’mon, bring it,’” Rogers recounts. They didn’t meet the notoriously temperamental headliners, but Rogers says hopefully, “Maybe he knows who I am, because Luke was at the show and I asked Luke, I said, ‘Dude, c’mon, did you really call up Henley and say Randy Rogers Band and he knew who we were?’ And Luke was like, ‘Yeah.’”
If Henley pays any attention to country radio or CMT, or iTunes or the Billboard charts, for that matter, he should have Randy Rogers Band on his radar. Just A Matter of Time debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard Country chart and spent a week as the most downloaded country album on iTunes. The band set a sales record at a Wherehouse Music in-store, moving 2,200 units in a single appearance. And Rolling Stone gave them a shout-out as one of the top 10 must-see summer acts of 2007.
If he watched from the wings or a live feed to his dressing room, Henley would have seen an act so alive, they’re all over the stage — particularly Black, who’s like the Keith Richards of fiddle. His dark curls clamped tightly under his ever-present cap, he hops around the stage like he’s in the gym — except he also holds a lit cigarette in his bow hand half the time. The instrument is such an extension of his body, he doesn’t even grasp its neck sometimes — just sandwiches it between his chin and shoulder. The girls scream. And try to slip him phone numbers.
Not that he uses them. But fan interaction is a big part of what these guys do. The night of the homecoming, the meet ’n’ greet autograph line got so long, it threatened to cut into their show time. (They’ve pretty much built up immunity to the cleavage on parade, except when flaunted by near-preteens. That, they find a little spooky.)
“Brady’s never met a stranger,” Rogers says. (A natural ice-breaker, the first thing Black says when sitting down for the interview is, “Should we watch Almost Famous?” The almost-classic Cameron Crowe film recounts his experiences hanging out with decadent bands as a still-teenaged journalist for Rolling Stone.)
Describing each band member’s style of interacting with fans, Rogers says, “Les does a great job, too, havin’ his own fan club. He’s got people who follow him around. Geoffrey’s always a man of the people. He could be mayor.”
When Rogers gets to Richardson, he says slowly, “Chops is … really … good with the ladies.” He is, after all, the only unattached member of the band.
“Even if I did settle down,” Richardson demurs, “I don’t think they’d let me. I don’t think I’m allowed to settle down now because I’m the only guy who gets to be single and go out and be crazy.”
Cracks Hill, “We root for him. We live vicariously through him!”
But Rogers says Black “stays up later and parties harder and is more talented than anybody else.”
Black, who actually comes off as a pretty modest guy, practically blushes as Rogers adds, “Typically, the most talented person in the band is usually the hell-raiser.” (Rogers neglects to mention he is the apparent reason why there’s now a bus rule prohibiting brown liquor on board. But in time-honored country tradition, he managed to get a song out of one of those experiences: “Whiskey’s Got a Hold on Me,” which appears on Just a Matter of Time.)
“ORIGINALLY, I THOUGHT we were just gonna have a lot of fun and get to do a little travelin’,” says Hill, who was still in college when he joined the group. He has a master’s degree in accounting, but he’s never even put together a résumé, much less crunched numbers for a paycheck. “I did graduate,” he clarifies, “and then I kept on doing what we were doing, which was travel to any bar that would have us in any city that would book us.”
An assured guitarist who knows just when to economize and when to kick it, Hill permanently squelched any errant urges to sit in an office with a calculator the day the quintet “drew the line in the sand.”
The band likes that phrase; three of them use it to describe the moment when each member had to decide whether he believed in their singular union enough to jump in with both feet and head for the big time — all for one and one for all. For real.
The decision was unanimous. They quit their other jobs and bands, gunned the ’88 Chevy Suburban, and headed down the highway. The Suburban turned into a 15-passenger van, then morphed into a tour bus, and here they are.
As so many unions do, this one formed in a college town. San Marcos, a river burg situated halfway between Austin and San Antonio on I-35, is a haven for students, hippies and creative types looking for lots of space and tiny rents. It’s also populated by students who stalled out, graduates trying to delay that leap into reality and those drawn from less hip locales, like Levelland, which the bandmates in the Dub Miller Band left behind when they made the move. One of their friends, Les Lawless, was just finishing up at Texas Tech and planning to start grad school at Texas State. But when Dub Miller fired his drummer, Lawless was summoned, and joined a lineup that also included Black. He grew weary of it after a while and had started taking classes again, occasionally doing gigs with Gary P. Nunn’s band, when he got to know Rogers.
“His drummer left, and I told him, ‘I’ll come fill in and do all the gigs until you can find somebody else,” Lawless says. “And he just never really found anybody else.”
Richardson learned about the band via a roommate. He’d been gigging a few times a month in various outfits, but wasn’t earning a living at it, when his roommate came home one night and said, as Richardson recalls, “‘Man, you need to get a gig with these guys. These guys have got it goin’ on. They’ve got a fan base goin’ on, they’ve got a good scene happenin’.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of interesting.’” Just days later, he spotted a bar-wall ad posted by an alt-country band looking for a bass player.
He went over to Rogers’ house, a large white structure rented from the band’s former steel player (and the site of many after-hours jams and parties), and met the band. He was impressed by their professionalism. They were impressed by his gear.
“He had this humongous bass cabinet,” Rogers says. “And we had some stairs in front of the house. I remember havin’ to lift that bass cabinet and saying ‘… You’ve got a humongous bass cabinet. You must be good.’” He is, and he’s content to hang in the background, with an occasional step to the forefront or the microphone to sing one of his own songs.
Black, the band’s kinetic sparkplug (he jumps around so much onstage, it continually bounces underneath him), hung out at the house before joining the brotherhood. “Randy actually tried to get me a job, I think with Hank (Williams) III, and somebody else. He was like my little booking agent,” Black says. When the steel player left, Black “slid right in.”
For him, crossing that line in the sand meant giving up his University of Texas at Austin scholarship and dropping out of school his senior year. But that one small step for Black (well, not so small, according to his mother) was a quantum leap for the band.
They no longer sounded like another country band with a steel player. They sounded like the Randy Rogers Band, a kick-ass quintet with a country heart and a rock ’n’ roll attitude.
“THEY’RE THE ONES PLAYING on the record. And as a band, they always bring that to bear,” Foster says. “That’s sort of a rock band mentality in that respect. It’s not like, ‘Let’s go cut with these session players.’ … Someone should know that it’s a Randy Rogers Band record before Randy ever starts to sing.
“They should have a sound, and they do,” he continues. “It’s borne a lot out of Jeff’s guitar sounds and Brady’s fiddle playing, and trying to interweave that together. And then the other is the essence of Randy’s voice, both as a singer and a songwriter. The guy sounds like Fogerty to me. But it doesn’t seem to ring false. He has all that toughness, but there’s a sweetness to his attitude and what he does. That’s the reason he can pull off a love song when a lot of other guys can’t.’”
Even though most of USA Today’s review of Just a Matter of Time was right on the money, the writer, one of the nation’s preeminent country music journalists, made one huge faux pas by sticking a “southern rock” label on these guys. Having a fiddler in your band does not “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” make. As many Texas and Oklahoma/Red Dirt artists do, the Randy Rogers Band definitely hybridizes country and rock. But it’s an entirely different animal than Southern rock; it can be edgy, but it’s not as jagged, not as in-your-face. There’s a certain catch in its voice. And honky-tonks in its history. As Black would say — and he does, frequently — “Absolutely.” No question.
This band has far more affinity for Nashville than Georgia. It’s also part of a subgenre of Texas music, something a shall-remain-nameless observer called “Texas college country.” There are lots of songs with references to partying, but also a literacy in the lyrics that elevates them far above any Hee-Haw stereotypes. That’s where the Pat Greens, Jack Ingrams, Cross Canadian Ragweeds and Reckless Kellys fit as well. College kids form the core of these bands’ fan bases, and college kids relate to their good-time and gone-wrong songs.
“We look at ourselves as a genre in country music, in the Americana world,” says Rogers, still baby-faced at 30. “I think we’re all about creatin’ music and makin’ records. Wherever people decide to put us, that’s fine with us.” Except for the occasional pearl-snap shirt, another endorsement perk, there’s nothing that screams “country” about their appearance or demeanor. The only “look” they wear is that of guys who, when being groomed for photo shoots, might let someone choose a different T-shirt to go with those jeans. As casual as college students. Rogers doesn’t wear shorts and flip-flops onstage anymore, but he sure doesn’t wear a cowboy hat or pointy boots, either. If any of them own a tight pair of Wranglers or a belt with a CONTINUED ON PAGE 68
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 52 giant buckle, it’s most likely buried deep in the darker reaches of a boyhood bedroom closet. Maybe next to a Kiss outfit or a thrift-store sweater like Kurt Cobain’s.
Texas native Foster says of his proteges, “Certainly, those guys write songs that, if you heard George Strait do it, you’d go, ‘Gosh, that’s mainstream, absolutely stone-cold country.’ And yet they write and do things that could never in a million years get played on a country radio station, that would be much more at home on a AAA or a modern rock station. I think the uniqueness of them is that they can do that and pull it off with aplomb.”
As songs like the new album’s “Better Than I Ought To Be,” with its chimy guitars and high-note fiddle strokes, indicate, the band knows how to rock. But boy, do they also know how to craft a poignant love song, whether they write it or not. More often than not, they do.
Rogers has written or co-written nearly every song in the band’s catalog — except for those contributed by Richardson or Hill, or friends or collaborators. Occasionally, they’ll do something like “Kiss Me in the Dark,” a can’t-miss track and the first single (and sexy video) off Just a Matter of Time, that was written by someone else (Foster and George Ducas, in this case). But that tune was still their own; no one else had recorded it yet. And it sounds like something Rogers could have written.
The only song on the new one that no band member had a hand in writing is the album closer, “This is Goodbye,” by Heather Morgan and Clint Ingersoll. It’s a breakup tearjerker, filled with Black’s mournful bowing, that Rogers calls “probably the saddest song I’ve ever heard.” But he relates to it because he knows Ingersoll and understood the root of the pain coursing through it. Rogers says he won’t do outside material unless he can feel a personal connection to it. His own songs are frequently based on personal experience, or events in the lives of people he loves.
Which means there are a lot of songs about love. Or the loss of it. “In My Arms Instead,” the new album’s more-or-less honky-tonk-styled first single, was composed with Sean McConnell while the two were holed up in a Nashville hotel room. “I almost didn’t write it,” Rogers admits. “We’d been on the road for, like, 25 days in a row or something, and I had a trip booked to Nashville and I didn’t want to go. I left the gig at 4 a.m., went to the hotel, slept for like an hour. I got up, I flew at, like, 6:55 a.m. from Austin to Nashville. Landed, couldn’t sleep, walked across the street, had a beer at the Mojo Café, came back and Sean McConnell came over and we wrote two songs in two days. … It was one of those days in Nashville where it just rains all day and it’s nasty and cold and I just didn’t want to be there, and it’s just one of those sad, lonely, honest songs about bein’ stuck somewhere that you don’t really want to be.”
It’s a song of longing for the woman he loves; Rogers is great at declarations of love, like the one he co-wrote with Stephony Smith about his then-future wife. It’s called “One Woman.” He says it was a wedding present to his beloved — an expression of how much sweeter life is when you choose to devote yourself to one person.
But he’s equally adept at the “she left me because” songs, like “Lonely Too Long,” or “he ain’t right for you; you oughta be with me” tunes, like “Buy Myself A Chance,” a terrific melody that hits a homer with the chorus, “Well, if things don’t work out by the next song, and you’re lookin’ for someone who can dance, I’ll be right over there by the jukebox, a quarter in my hand/Tryin’ to buy myself a chance.”
Sounding tailor-made for country radio — or that jukebox — it’s a classic story, another relationship song. He’s got ’em by the dozen. But they don’t ever sound stale or trite; that’s what helps Rogers stand apart as a songwriter. It’s a talent that Lee Ann Womack and Kenny Chesney sure noticed; both have recorded Rogers’ tunes. Guy Clark, Gary Nicholson, Bruce Robison and Finlay have written with him; Foster and Rogers are practically a composing couple, they’ve done so many songs together. Three showed up on Rollercoaster; on Just a Matter of Time, there’s four, not counting the Foster/Ducas collaboration but including one Nicholson contributed to.
“I think Randy has a unique voice and I think he’s a great writer,” says Foster, who made sure Rollercoaster hit the right Nashville ears, including Lewis’. Though the new album contains only one song they did together, and he may not even produce the next one (it’s a little early for that discussion), he declares, “I’ll write songs with Randy Rogers till the cows come home. He and I write very well and I have tremendous respect for him.”
ROGERS HAD TO EARN that respect. But first, he had to meet the guy, which he claims he did the old-fashioned way: Stalking.
One night in Houston, where the band was opening one of a series of dates for Foster, Rogers found himself overwhelmed by a sudden sense of determination: he knew right then that he had to write a song with Foster.
“I just went up to him and said ‘Look, man, you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but I’ve gotta write with you; I’ve gotta know you. I’m a big fan and I don’t want to freak you out, but is there a time when we could get together? I would just like to pick your brain, if not write a song.’”
Foster doesn’t remember any stalking. As he tells it: “They opened a bunch of shows for me when they were first starting out. Maybe half a dozen. And every time, it was always ‘What do I have to do to get you to produce my records?’ I just kept putting him off because I was busy doing lots of other stuff, and one of the guys in my band said, ‘You know what? That’s a really good band. Those guys write pretty good songs; they just don’t seem to know what to do with themselves.’ So I eventually said, ‘Play me some songs and I’ll think about it.’ So he came and he played me 10 songs in a hotel room. And he said, ‘I think I’m ready to go. I’ve written 10 songs.’ So he got through the 10 songs and I said, ‘I think you got three, but I think you can get to 10.’
“He was stunned, and the wind went out of his sails,” Foster remembers. “But I said, ‘I think it’s a good thing. You’ve gotta get the ethic … if you’ll get the ethic that says ‘I gotta go write 30 songs,’ then we’ll figure it out. And that’s exactly what they did.”
That work ethic — that shared work ethic — is a big part of what drives this band. It’s what led Rogers, even with the original lineup, to go for the democratic approach.
“I played guitar in another band before I started this band and I hated being treated as a side guy,” he explains. “I felt that my sacrifice was the same as everybody else’s sacrifice. And I was only paid a per-gig rate and didn’t have a say-so in the goings on and doings of the band, so when I started this band, I wanted to be fair to the musicians.”
Black, who had had a similar hired-hand band experience, says, “That was the kicker for me, that ‘Hey, I’m a part of this friendship, the band, this piece of the pie that we’ve created together.’ … That was the reason I jumped on board.”
They not only share the love among themselves, they spread it around. “A big part of being in a family is having an extended family, too, that you can trust, that you love and that you take care of and that believes in you and supports you,” Rogers says. “We treat our crew probably as good as anybody in the business. Not only monetarily, but actually, the crew has a say-so. They’re given a lot of freedom and a lot of decision-making power. We include everybody in the family thing. It’s not just the five of us evil dictators saying you guys run and do this stuff for us. I feel like they’re a very important and vital part of us. I think we all have the same common goal, which is to play music forever.”
The family, it seems, continues to grow. The Texas band brotherhood gathers at MusicFest in Steamboat Springs each January, and in August, the Randy Rogers Band played for the first time at the Braun Brothers Reunion in Challis, Idaho, where they got to hang out with Reckless Kelly, Micky & the Motorcars (each of which contain two Braun brothers), Cross Canadian Ragweed, Robert Earl Keen and other pals.
While one of Rogers’ friends, Jason Boland, recovers from unfortunately timed vocal cord surgery, the Randy Rogers Band merch booth will sell Boland & the Stragglers’ new album, Comal County Blue. That’s what friends and family do for each other. Or they keep their eye on Hill’s little guy, Damien, whenever he’s toddling around the bus with Mom and Dad or trying out the communal Epiphone acoustic. (Hill’s already begging him not to be a left-handed guitarist. It’s an inventory thing.)
Those kinds of values come through in many of the band’s songs, and in their Texas-sized generosity and friendliness. When Black whispers, twice, “Just make us look cool” (a line from Almost Famous) he seems to mean it — though his concern is groundless. There’s no reason to force it. They already are. Their fans are well aware of that, and they’re continually spreading the word.
“He’s just the hottest thing going now and he’s just climbin’, climbin’, climbin’,” says Finlay of Rogers. “Just give him time. It’s still happening. The success of Randy Rogers is getting bigger all the time.”
Though he would add “band” to that statement, Rogers agrees.
“I think the sky’s the limit for us,” he says.
They’re already about to soar above third-on-the-bill altitude. Check back in a year. It’ll be interesting to see who’s opening for them.
