St. Paul & The Broken Bones, known for soulful and powerful live shows, will perform tonight at Track 29. Band members include Paul Janeway (lead vocals), Jesse Phillips (bass), Browan Lollar (guitars, vocals), Allen Branstetter (trumpet), Andrew Lee (drums, percussion), Ben Griner (trombone, tuba) and Al Gamble (keys).IF YOU GO• What: St. Paul & The Broken Bones.• When: 9 p.m. today, Sept. 18.• Where: Track 29, 1400 Market St.• Admission: $17.• Phone: 423-521-2929.• Website: www.track29.co.
Bands don't normally do soundchecks at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn., but 15 minutes before their 12:30 p.m. show this past summer, the guys in St. Paul & The Broken Bones were in position on the Other Stage, giving the audience the impression they might start early.
Lead singer Paul Janeway emerged to a huge roar, walked to the front of the stage and just smiled as he took everything in. Eventually, he stepped to the microphone and gave the sound engineer a few short vocal snippets.
The band will perform tonight, Sept. 18, at Track 29, and Janeway says that Bonnaroo show was especially meaningful to him because it was at the first one 12 years earlier that he began seriously considering music instead of preaching as a career path.
"Onstage I'm very loud," he says. "I'm a very loud singer, and we needed to get the sound right, but my manager was just like, 'They [the audience] are going crazy at the soundcheck.' She had tears in her eyes.
"That was the most emotional show I've ever done."
Janeway's first trip to Bonnaroo was in 2002. He was working at a tanning salon in Birmingham, Ala., and says he spent his entire paycheck to buy a ticket. In later years, he worked security to attend.
"That first one shaped a lot of my musical taste. I got out the church music, but the main thing was I got to see all these people live. I'm a big live person, and that came at a developmental time for me."
Looking out at the audience this summer and seeing the same looks on fans' faces that he saw as a fan watching Radiohead or Mars Volta in previous years, was "very surreal," he says.
St. Paul should be familiar to Chattanoogans. The band played the inaugural Scenic City Roots at Track 29 in February 2013, then at Rhythm & Brews in November the same year.
Relative unknowns, with only enough original material to do an hourlong set at that first Track 29 show, the band has since exploded on the music scene. They've played the festival circuit, done television and become everybody's "favorite new band," in part because of Janeway's big, soulful voice and the fact that he just doesn't look like what comes out of his mouth.
He loves proving to new audiences that you don't have to look like Otis Redding to sing like him.
"It's been crazy, and it's gotten crazier," Janeway says. "You can't control this stuff. You just try to hold on and make sure you don't make any stupid decisions."
Janeway grew up in church and thought that is where is career was headed. He was always involved in the choir but as a backing singer. In fact, he never quite understood why the pastor insisted that he, and not Janeway, sing the lead.
"I always felt that I should be out front, but that felt like [I was] being arrogant, and in the church humility is taught as a virtue. Even now, I struggle with that. Now I look at it as a lesson in humility, but to be honest, I still begrudge the pastor, but it taught me to step back and be humble."
The musicians made an early name for themselves doing Redding and Al Green covers, and shows still end with Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness," but more and more fans enjoy the originals.
"Nothing beats an Otis or Al record, so we aren't trying to beat that," Janeway says. "If what we do lends itself to someone else picking up an Otis Redding record, we've done a great job. If we can be a gateway drug, I'm totally cool with that."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6354.