This weekend's Black Dirt Music Festival in Bloomington is tailor made for The Record Company’s Chris Vos. The vocalist and guitarist experienced much black dirt under his fingernails growing up on a dairy farm just outside Milwaukee.
Ahead of the band’s performance Saturday night in downtown Bloomington, Vos spoke with WGLTs Jon Norton in this lightly edited interview about growing up on a farm outside Burlington, Wisconsin and how a move to Los Angeles jump-started his music career.
WGLT: You’re the perfect person to ask this. What images or ideas does the term “black dirt” evoke in you?
CV: It evokes a plow going into the ground. It's where the money is made on the farm. It's life, it's a mystery. Without dirt, there is nothing … we're not here. You can't live on a planet that's just all rocks or water, you need to have some dirt.
And you had a lot of that growing up on a dairy farm just outside Burlington, Wisconsin. Was farming something you considered as you were growing up?
My dad was my hero, you know, so is my grandpa. And I definitely considered farming as a kid. But as the years went by, I was kind of ‘rolling okay’ in school, and I made the deal with my mom that if I went to college, that I can do whatever I want, and they'd never say anything twice about it. Because what I wanted to do is what I do now. It's not exactly what you say, ‘hey, I want to go play rock and roll for a living.’ It’s not the most stable plan you know. But then again, when you come from farmers … farmers are, no pun intended, salt of the earth. So, I did consider it as a kid. I do love it. But dairy farming is a way of life. It's not a job. You're there every day. My brothers and my dad, they're still there.
Speaking of your grandfather, and your father, especially your grandfather, probably back in his day, tons of kids grew up on farms and in small towns. It's not so much anymore. Do you feel fortunate in a way to have had that experience?
Absolutely. Especially now that I live in Los Angeles, like growing up on a dairy farm in southeast Wisconsin, where you know, in my grade school class, there were three other boys and me. It was kind of a time where we didn't get cable till later on … way past when anybody else didn't, we certainly didn't have the internet till I was in high school, and we didn't even care.
The thing that it did for me, besides the work and everything, is it implanted inside a belief. And you have a lot of time out there to think and reflect. And it curates a fantastic imagination. If you ever get time to speak with a farmer, they're very peaceful people, generally very quiet and unassuming. But if you get them talking on a subject that they're really interested in, they're very, very prolific at what they see and feeling about themselves, their lives, their family, whatever hobbies they're into. And it's I think a big part of that is all that time spent alone in the quiet. It curates a fantastic imagination; they're bringing it all back home … the soil in which you grow your artistic abilities. That part of you that played and thought in those terms never goes away, it just gets the baton handed off right to the moment the guitar goes in the lap. That's where all that went.
I want to segue into talking about your bands. Burlington was just outside Milwaukee. So, I'm assuming the bands that you were in were basically in the Milwaukee area. And you have said that you were in a few bands where basically nobody came to see you a whole heck of a lot. And then as you alluded, you moved out to Los Angeles, I understand your wife got a job at the LA Times, then The Record Company happened. What made it different from nobody coming to see your bands in Milwaukee to The Record Company kind of blowing up?
I'm not sure. I just know I found Alex (Stiff) and Marc (Cazorla), the two other guys in the group, where it was a perfect musical alignment. Our souls and our hearts were completely in the same spot. And it worked. It's more like in the college days, you have a band and you're doing good around town, and everything feels great. And then you start taking that band on the road and you start getting outside of your hometown and you go from where you were playing in front of a couple hundred people to nobody. You're playing original music, not necessarily the easiest role to be in as far as getting people's attention on song they've never heard on a Friday night when they just want to forget about their cares and hear something they recognize. You're like, ‘now we're gonna play two hours of original music you've never heard before.’
So, what changed? I don't know. You just get better at what you do. It certainly didn't hurt that I was in L.A., and it certainly didn't hurt that I stuck out like a sore thumb out here at first. When I moved here, there was an alt-country/Americana scene, but there really wasn't much in the rock or blues influenced rock. And I would show up with a lap steel and harmonicas and old cantankerous guitars and talking about Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and all that stuff. It wasn't necessarily what was hip. But sometimes being uncool is the coolest thing you can be.
Did you have that growing up in your house or maybe your parents or somebody was listening to blues records? Where did you come to that blue sound?
It was an accident and the fact that I grew up with ZZ Top and Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jimi Hendrix. That was my dad. My mom was into Motown and the Beatles. My dad loved the (Rolling) Stones. So, it was in there, but it wasn't as deep as when I think it was like when I was 14 or 15, for some odd reason I got the Muddy Waters album 'Hard Again.' It just tore my head off. I didn't care when it had been made or who had made it. This was the most important thing I've ever listened to. And it carried me from there.
And I was still in an old fashioned situation where you had to find it yourself. So, I would go to the blues bin and look for names that I liked. It's like oh, Howlin' Wolf, he's cool. Elmore James, that looks cool. Everything in America is based on those Appalachian tunes. The Carter Family eventually turned into what would be the outline for modern country. Or the gospel or the blues, and with certain exceptions, that's pretty much the formula that created what we now call rock and roll. And I don't care if you listen to Tame Impala, or you listen to ZZ Top, if you're a fan of that music and you put on Muddy Waters, they're gonna go, wow, that's cool. Because it's in the roots. It's in all of the things we listen to, even if it sounds like it isn’t, it still is.
Chris, nice to talk to you and then nice to meet you.
Hey, thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it and best to all your listeners and we'll see you soon.
The Record Company plays the Black Dirt Music Festival in downtown Bloomington Saturday night.
