A few nights ago in Belfast, Jaren Johnston had a ‘moment’ with Hollywood actor Paul Rudd. Johnston’s band The Cadillac Three had just played a gig, and their support act, Stephen Wilson Jr, introduced them afterwards. Standard banter and back-slapping ensued, until Wilson raised a point, something these three ostensibly different men had in common: their fathers, all dead before their time.
“Stephen looks over at me and says: ‘Hey, Paul’s in ‘the club,’’” Johnston remembers. “We all became this unit, like: ‘How did it happen?’ He’s like: ‘Cancer.’ I go: ‘Covid.’ It was therapeutic for a second, and you’re talking to one of the biggest actors in the world!” He hoots with laughter. “You’re talking to Ant-Man! It brought us all right down to the same level really quickly.”
At this point, putting The Cadillac Three on a level with Ant-Man doesn’t seem as ludicrous as it once would have. Steven Tyler, Chrissie Hynde and Foo Fighter Chris Shiflett are all fans and actual friends (Johnston watched Aerosmith’s 2014 Download set holding one of Liv Tyler’s kids). The band’s status Stateside grew after an appearance on the hit TV series Nashville, and on ESPN last year.
Right now, though, we’re in the presence of the very British. From where we’re standing the Royal Albert Hall looms large and imperious. The Royal College Of Music sits across the road. A group of tourists stare as the band pose for photographs in expensively torn denim, trucker caps and vintage band T-shirts; rock-star chic with a redneck touch.
But who are they really, the three corners of this self-described ‘country fuzz’ trio, who form such a tight unit on stage and on record, most recently with their album The Years Go Fast, a mature step up that found them mixing shitkickers with the nostalgia, struggles, love and heartbreak of the pandemic and their adult lives in general? Classic Rock sat down with all three of them to find out.
Kelby Ray has plans to explore Camden with his uncle, pre-gig. It’s easy to picture The Cadillac Three’s lap steel player in London’s alternative capital. Tall and slim with inked arms, a spray of brown curls and twinkly eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, he’s the most “exploratory” of the trio. A motorbiker, outdoorsman, casual Buddhist and food enthusiast (he wrote a cookbook called Cookin’ With Kelby in 2018, which you can still buy on Kindle Books) who shredded in a pop punk band before joining Bang Bang Bang (later, American Bang). An Om pendant hangs around his neck. One tattoo reads ‘music is a universal language’ in four languages.
“Jaren calls me the mad scientist of the group,” he chuckles in animated Tennessee tones. “I’m the Zen mad scientist guy over here, just trying weird shit. I’m like that with food too. I’ll try anything.”
An avid Hendrix, Metallica and Nine Inch Nails fan who also cites Janet Jackson, George Jones and The Bodyguard soundtrack among his formative tastes, Ray has never been afraid of mixing things up. In his previous bands he played lead guitar, but switched to bass when Johnston asked him to join his new band. By chance he picked up a 1940s lap steel in Dave Cobb’s studio while they cut their 2012 debut – by now newly christened The Cadillac Three. For Ray, who’d previously played a dobro (inspired by the bluegrass leanings of Alison Krauss & Union Station), it was a turning point. The swampy secret sauce that kicked up their whole sound.
“Literally that’s the first time I played lap steel,” he says, “I think that’s one reason people love that record so much because it is kind of raw and we didn’t really know what we were doing, we were trying stuff, and it sounded cool. So we said ‘fuck it’ and left it.”
Back in the States, Ray lives with his wife and three cats in Smyrna, Tennessee. Out back they have about an acre of land, woods, hiking trails, a lake where they fish when time allows, and a Harley.
“It’s on the to-do list,” he chuckles, when we ask what big trips he’s taken it on. “Once my wife and I actually slow down. She’s a photographer so she’s really busy, and I’m really busy; we’re both the artistic, always-doing-something types. Maybe one day when we slow down and get a bigger bike it’d be fun to go do a proper road trip.”
Even so, he knows all the roads in Middle Tennessee. He’s biked in the desert outside Vegas, and along the Pacific Coast Highway. Last year at The Cadillac Three’s two-night Country Fuzz Fest in Maryville, Ray led a charity motorcycle ride. “That was about fifty bikes,” he says, “we’re doing it again in August. And it’s right in the Smoky Mountains over there so that was a lot of fun.”
Ray’s outward-bound leanings began early. He was raised in Nashville by a quiet father who took him fishing and camping, and a “boisterous” mother who bought him his first guitar (“she loved the classic rock stuff, the Stones, Zeppelin, Traffic…”). They separated when Ray was 13. He became close with his stepfather, who’s watching the show tonight.
After high school he got a business degree but quickly fell into rock’n’roll, living with Jaren, smoking pot, playing gigs and loving it: “I was playing lead guitar and I had an Afro and I acted like I’m Jimi Hendrix.”
He put up money for The Cadillac Three’s first van with the insurance payout from his mother’s death, her heart having “just stopped one night” after complications with arrhythmia. She was 54. Ray was 25.
“That’s a weird time in life anyway,” he says, shaking his head. “And we were real close. We talked every day. So I feel like that was ripped away from me really suddenly, at a young age, and it took me a few years to sort through all those emotions.”
Nineteen years on, he has a more “matter-of-fact mentality”. A quiet awareness that we’ll all meet the same fate someday. That living now matters. That his mother – who pushed him not to sell that first guitar, back when he briefly doubted his future with the instrument – would be extremely proud.
“Oh she would be, and in some spiritual way she’s here. She did come to a couple of Bang Bang Bang shows, our first iteration of the band, and she had a loud pink shirt with black letters that she’d made herself, and it said: ‘I Am Kelby’s Mom, Bang Bang Bang’. We cremated her in that shirt. That was my mom.”
Neil Mason refutes every lazy drummer stereotype going. He’s a ‘lyrics guy’ who loves Tom Petty and Neil Young (who he was partially named after). He was the first of his bandmates to get a record deal, at the age of 16. He’s written singles for Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert and Keith Urban, among others. He manages his own band, and several others. Juggling creative and business matters, he says, comes relatively naturally.
“I think I’ve always liked it,” he muses in a deep Johnny Cash murmur, part cool dad, part stoner in his Aerosmith T-shirt, long poker-straight hair under a backwards cap. “My first band got a record deal and I found this piece of paper last year, that was the short form of the offer, and there’s all these notations of me marking it up as a sixteen-year-old, what I think the deal should be and all this stuff. When I saw that I just laughed. I was like: ‘Oh, I guess I’ve always sort of liked the business side of the music industry, even when I didn’t know what it was.’”
It’s all ramped up quickly. In a fast and furious couple of years, Mason got engaged, married, became a parent and label co-owner. All under the growing shadow of the pandemic. “We found out we were pregnant and got married, in that order,” he chuckles. “All that happened in, like, six months, and then covid hit. But it was kind of an awesome thing on a personal level, because we were forced off the road and I got to be home with my first daughter for the first year and a half. But it did all feel very ‘grown up’ all of a sudden.”
In that time he also started managing The Cadillac Three. Soon after, he and Jaren set up War Buddha Records. With years of band life, business choices, writers rooms and mistakes already behind them, they were well-equipped for it. Mason is quick to credit his upbringing in Nashville for much of this.
“Once we started travelling, I started to realise there’s not really a thriving music scene in a lot of these other cities,” he remembers. “And also the bar is really high in Nashville, musically, so you have to be pretty good to stand out. And ‘good’ is a lot of different things – we’re not technically as proficient as a lot of the players in Nashville, but we found our own sound.”
Mason grew up surrounded by words. The voices of Tom Petty, Paul Simon, Neil Young and The Beatles filled the house. Meanwhile his Alabama-born mother edited college students’ theses (“my mom’s vocabulary is amazing, I’ve learned a lot from her”) while his father, originally from Illinois, played folky acoustic guitar in the vein of John Prine and James Taylor.
In school Mason wrote set-lists and ideas for gigs, instead of taking notes. After class he played drums for three or four hours. “And then a couple days a week we would have band practice there in the basement. So that was most of every day. It was almost every day.”
During this time, he and his future TC3 bandmates were in different groups. For Mason it was Llama, a ‘sort of jam-band’ with strands of Dave Matthews and Phish: “that was a connection for all three of us at that age, we got in various states of trouble at Phish shows in those days.”
Still in their teens, Llama signed a record deal off the back of a packed show at a tiny pizzeria in Nashville. Suddenly they were on a plane to Los Angeles, where they wrote songs, smoked weed and learned a great deal. They played the Viper Room and House Of Blues. Mason met Little Richard in the elevator at Hyatt House on the Sunset Strip. “He, like, lived in the penthouse of that hotel. I think he was wearing all white. That’s what I remember, like a white suit.”
Even so, they were young and it didn’t last. After Llama broke up Mason worked at a Smoothie King for a couple of years before teaming up with Jaren and Kelby. It was a move that would shape the rest of his life.
“When we plug in and play,” he says, “it feels just as fun and exciting as it did when we started with any of the bands we’ve been in before, to me.
“I just think with life…” he pauses, then laughs weakly. “It’s really [about] trying to find ways to make more people have a good day, in whatever way I can. So many people are so stressed out, there’s so much shit going on in everybody’s lives right now. I think anything artistic is as important as it’s ever been, because it allows people an opportunity to escape all that.”
Cutting a lean, wiry figure in torn jeans and a Black Crowes T-shirt, Jaren Johnston has changed since we last spoke – early on in the pandemic, when he, his wife and son were laying low at their Florida beach house (paid for by the No.1 US single Beachin’, which he wrote for country star Jake Owen).
It’s not a total transformation. He’s still friendly, still naturally funny. But he has a shadow, carried over from his father’s sudden death in January 2022. A long-serving Grand Ole Opry drummer, song plugger and music fan, Jerry Ray Johnston was his first inspiration and one of his biggest supporters.
Sitting at the other end of the dressing room sofa, Johnston leans forward, slightly on edge. Less eye contact than we’ve had before. For a few minutes now he’s been staring ahead at the upright piano across the room.
“I don’t play piano, but I could probably go there and write you a song in, like, two minutes,” he says, relaxing. “I mean, it wouldn’t be great, but I could probably do it. I’m very lucky because I got blessed with this thing where I’m like: ‘Cool, I can sit down and do this and it’s fun’, and at the same time make a living out of it. There’s a lot of hard work too, but to a point where your job is something that you fucking love... Like, I love sitting down and writing a song.”
Songwriting has been in Johnston’s sightline from an early age. His parents had him young – they were barely out of their teens – and his father pitched songs for country singers alongside drumming work. The whole song-based ecosystem of Nashville became familiar to him. As a teenager running around town with a skateboard, Jaren had posters of Dinosaur Jr, Led Zeppelin and Smashing Pumpkins on his bedroom wall. Country melodies were everywhere.
He has a younger sister, Texa, who still lives at home. “Just a ray of sunshine,” he smiles – really smiles. “She’s a gorgeous, awesome person. A lot of church, you know, the Southern Baptist kind of thing. We talk every couple of days.”
A naturally gifted drummer, he was earning cash playing in rock and metal bands when he was just 13. It was then that his father gave him his first two guitars, telling him that if he really wanted to “do something” he should play them and write songs.
“I was terrible at school. I was pretty good at athletics, and then music always came easy. I had a knack for turns of phrase and that kind of thing. Hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time, it’s like: ‘Wow, there’s hooks everywhere, it’s so friendly to the ear.’”
Moving in with Kelby in Murfreesboro TN, after high school, he wrote his first song and never looked back. Since then he’s written ten No.1 singles for major country stars, but it’s his work with TC3 that crackles with personality. That lyrical sparkle that lends lightness, surprise and humour to rock’n’roll songs about beer, fights and fucking.
And he gets it all from rock’s wordsmiths: Steven Tyler, Nick Drake, Hank Williams Jr, Jeff Buckley, Fiona Apple, Tony Lane, Rage Against The Machine’s Zack De La Rocha and Silverchair’s Daniel Johns are some of the big ones. “And Janet Jackson, Mariah [Carey]. I don’t care what anybody says. Big influence. My first CD was probably Vanilla Ice. And me and Kelby were both big Michael Jackson fans.”
Perhaps it’s the more introspective side, though, that you hear in his most recent songs. Love Like War was about a fight with his wife. This Town Is A Ghost came from grieving for his father, who died following complications with covid. He was 65. To his son’s despair, he had refused the vaccine.
“It was fucking truly heartbreaking, it’s hard for me to even talk about it,” Johnston says. “With The Years Go Fast, Neil and Kelby had to pretty much sit me down in the back of the bus in Missouri or wherever we were in the States and be like: ‘We have to finish this record, you have to stop sleeping all day.’”
How are you doing now, at this point? “Good,” he says, nodding. “You know, I’ve been starting to write the next Cadillac thing and I don’t think we’re done with the dad/pain era, writing-wise. There’s a lot of pain there, so…”
He pauses, considering this. Then, for almost the first time today, he turns his head and looks me straight in the eye.
“I don’t know how I am, to be honest with you. Some days I’m really good. Being over here has been a great thing, because I’m walking around seeing things I don’t see in the States, meeting people that are completely different, the accents are awesome. When I get back home I’ll have to deal with it, but luckily I have my family there, my wife, my kid, so that’s fun. But yeah, it’s…”
He shrugs, nearly smiling. There’s deep-set sadness there, something almost like acceptance but not quite.
“You know, how does anybody get better after something like that?”
Come showtime the foyer is dotted with stetsons, trucker caps, cowboy boots and floral dresses. It’s not quite the Grand Ole Opry crowd, but there’s definitely a whiff of that world – something the band never expected to find in the UK, but have continued to thrive on as they’ve flourished on tours here.
“I didn’t have ‘Royal Albert Hall’ written in my little journal or whatever,” Mason says backstage, as crowd volume increases and crew members start to move a little faster, a little more urgently. “On many levels, if this was the last show we ever played, I’d be like: ‘That was a pretty good run.’”
It’s not their last show, but it is “pretty fucking good”. The raw, fulsome blend of country, metal, grunge, 90s alt.rock, pop stars and rock’n’roll that’s all theirs sounds enormous under the Albert Hall’s vast domed ceiling. Flanked by what must be one of the meatiest amp stacks the room has seen, they hop between albums and vibes, from early definitive hellraisers like Tennessee Mojo to the smooth, martini-drinking funk of Tabasco & Sweet Tea, on which Kelby plays lead guitar. After final bows, Jaren and his guitar tech – who’s leaving to work for Lainey Wilson, after 10 years with TC3 – embrace on stage.
“To be honest, I’m a pretty happy guy,” the frontman said earlier, when asked about what he still dreams of. “I mean, shit, we’re headlining the Royal Albert Hall tonight. We travel like we want, we’re three best friends who grew up together. That just doesn’t happen, y’know?” He looks down and grins, a flash of the steel that’s brought them this far.
“But I’d love… whatever you’d call a ‘hit’. I want some sort of situation for the band that is so confusing to the rest of the world. Some fucking Grammy, a nomination, anything like that. I think when we get something like that for Cadillac, that would be fun.”
There’s a burst of laughter, the old Jaren – the one who sings clever lines about beer, girls and the South – creeping back into his face.
“And then I’ll buy all three of us Cadillacs, and then probably we’ll quit!”
On September 17 The Cadillac Three announced the cancellation of their remaining 2024 shows, allowing Jaren Johnston to begin treatment for his mental health and well-being.
