Black Stone Cherry interview w/ John Fred Young

by Adam Warner – 2009

 

So, how has the tour been going so far?
Oh, it’s been going great, having a lot of fun, doing a lot of shows.

Any crazy stories from this tour so far?
Yeah, we went to the Mall of America yesterday and they thought they’d be funny and turned on the air conditioning in the van. We got in and it was like breathing ice, it was pretty hilarious.

Looks like the tour is wrapping up in March, do you have any time off coming up or do you have something else planned?
We’re planning on going to Europe and the UK on a headlining tour over there.

How often do you get fans that say that your songs have really touched them?
We have a lot of people at our shows that say their Dad, that they had an argument with their Dad, then they listen to some of our songs and they say that helped them talk to their Dad for the first time in years. It makes us feel great when our music has touched people’s lives, they’ll just start crying, it’s a great feeling to know that we can so positively affect people like that.

Are “Reverend Wrinkle” and “Floyd Collins” based on real people?
Yes sir, Floyd Collins was one of the greatest cave explorers of all time, and he found one of the biggest cave systems in the world and it’s in Kentucky, right next our house actually. And ya, they’re kind of like tributes to our local heroes back home. We like history, we watch a lot of the History Channel. It’s a lot cooler than just writing about sex, drugs and rock and roll.

“Devil’s Queen” sounds more like a summary for a novel, are most of your songs factual or fiction based?
A lot of them are fact based, and if they aren’t extremely fact based, then they are loosely based around a great story or legend. But the “Devil’s Queen” is actually our… well, we thought it would be cool if there was a boat with all of these great blues musicians and at night it comes out, and you could get aboard it and be with all these blues players; but you had to get off of it before the sun came up.

Great, well get rockin’ on that sound check and we’ll see you around.
Well thank you so much for taking the time to call, see you later.