Stateside life
By JOHN SEAY
Birmingham Weekly
Birmingham AL
June 24, 2004

It's 9:45 pm on a Thursday night at Rojo, which means one thing to local rockers Stateside: a full 15 minutes until they can officially smoke in the restaurant. They sit politely, fidgeting with unlit cigarettes, repeatedly sneaking glances at their wristwatches and answering questions about their new album, Phonograph.

Stateside looks like a band deprived of sleep - four guys who spend money on tobacco, beer and Jack Daniels instead of groceries and dry-cleaning bills. And if they look road-hardened, it's because they are: with one US and UK tour already finished, the band is planning their next US and European outings for later this year.

Stateside, like the album they're currently supporting, is decidedly Southern in the tradition of '70s Rolling Stones and even Lynyrd Skynyrd, complete with swaggering rhythms, slide guitar and simple rock lyrics.

In the album's opening track, vocalist John Paul Keith sings, "Yes it's true I'm drunk again, but that don't mean we can't be friends," and later in the same song frets over someone "calling the law." Alcohol, broken-hearts, and run-ins with the ubiquitous "law" are the fist three chapters in the rock n roll ho-to book, and the members of Stateside are familiar enough with the text to add their own permutations.

But to Keith, bassist Greg Slamen and the Mimikakis brothers, Nikolaus and Thomas (guitar/vocals, drums, respectively), the album is full of contradictions, pulling the best of several musical styles and reinterpreting them in a way that makes the group distinctly modern.

"We're not consciously trying to be Southern," Keith says. "We just are Southern. We draw from pre-war blues to '70s rock to stuff like The White Stripes and The Strokes."

No matter what influences you discern or decades you place them in, Stateside plays catchy rock music that alternates between beautiful melodies in Mathew Sweets-style ballads, to half-yelled vocals and distorted guitar solos, to straightforward American rock songs.

In fact, it's the variety that keeps this album fresh and distinguishes it from other local releases. Stateside doesn't limit themselves to one style: Phonograph is a great soundtrack for Saturday night AND Sunday morning.

A native of Knoxville, Tenn., Keith began playing music in Nashville, making a name for himself performing with such artists as The V-Roys and Ryan Adams. He formed Stateside in Nashville, where the band recorded and released their debut album, Twice as Gone.

The band semi-dissolved after that first effort which, as Keith admits, was a "self-conscious attempt to do something commercial."

Soon after, as Keith sings in "Time Time Time", he "wound up in Alabam…[and] found [himself] a rock 'n' roll band." With all new members and a new home, Stateside made an immediate departure from their previous sound, and instead explored the more raw, more natural sound that is present on Phonograph.

Keith attributes this new sound partially to the loose scene here in Birmingham that allows artists to grow, thanks to the lack of outside influence.

"There's a smaller scene here in Birmingham," Keith says, "but the people who are involved are a lot more sincere than they are in Nashville, where everyone is so cynical."

"But Nashville is good for your chops," he adds.

The band recorded Phonograph in Slamen's house in Birmingham, and the quality of the songs reveals them as surprisingly good producers and engineers as well as strong musicians. The album boasts many different sounds, which helps keep the album fresh over multiple listenings.

Though the band attributes this wide sonic vocabulary to happy "mistakes" in the recording process, the result is an album that sounds both original and classically analog - another reason that the band comes off as heavily '70s influenced in the best of all possible ways.

Phonograph is actually a collection of demos that Stateside's various labels (Action Driver in the US, Fargo in Europe, and Wizzard in Vinyl in Japan) decided were good enough for release.

Says Nikolaus Mimikakis, "We went up to Nashville to re-cut some tracks for the labels, but it didn't turn out as well as the stuff we'd done ourselves."

The album is already out and available in many stores here in the Birmingham area, as well as record stores throughout the US and Europe, and online.

At present, the band members are as proud of the live show as they are of the latest album. Onstage, Stateside is still laid-back but also capable of energizing audiences with their particular brand of infectious rock.

"People want to get drunk and have a good time," Keith says "We're a really good band for that."

He glances at his watch. It's now 10:30 pm and patrons are pouring into Rojo. A woman at the table to our left pulls out a lighter.

"You mean we can smoke now?" asks Thomas Mimikakis.

The band breathes a sigh of relief then breathes in the much-anticipated cigarette smoke. The law will not be called tonight.