Kings of Leon

The kind version of Kings of Leon says they are a preacher's sons who discovered rock and rebelled. The real version is harsher and explains their music a great deal better. Ivan Leon Followill left the ministry of the United Pentecostal Church in 1997, after years of problems with alcohol and after divorcing the mother of his children. Rock did not arrive as an adolescent prank: it arrived once the house had already fallen down. Fourteen years later, in the middle of a stadium, alcohol turned up in the family again, this time in the eldest son. This is the story of a band that went from the road of the church to the bar that others had already walked before them—Ray Charles among them—and that came close to breaking up just when it was bigger than ever.

The preacher who left the pulpit in 1997

The Followills grew up travelling. Their father preached in Pentecostal churches and the brothers' childhood was divided between Oklahoma and Tennessee, from congregation to congregation, with that denomination's strict rules laid over the top. It was not a picturesque postcard: it was a life with no fixed root and very little margin.

In 1997 that came to an end. Ivan Leon Followill left the ministry after years of problems with alcohol and after the divorce. Nathan summed it up in a sentence worth more than any description: the divorce shattered the whole illusion of that perfect existence. What came afterwards—the guitars, the long hair, the dirty South—was what appeared in the gap left by the collapse.

The band formed in 1999 in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. It is three brothers—Caleb on vocals and guitar, Nathan on drums, Jared on bass—and their cousin Matthew on guitar, who had been born and raised in Mississippi. The name comes from their grandfather, Leon Followill, who died in January 2014.

England believed in them first

Their first two albums, Youth & Young Manhood (2003) and Aha Shake Heartbreak (2004), are rough Southern rock, rooted in blues and garage, recorded by a band that still played as though the song were about to fall apart. In the United States they struggled to break through. In the United Kingdom and in Europe they were adopted immediately, and the British press put them in the same sentence as The Strokes, as the rural relative of that guitar revolt.

The following albums kept widening the sound: more space, more reverb, more chorus. By 2008 they had already learned to write for big rooms without losing the earthy texture of the early days, and in 2009 they opened dates on the U2 tour, which is more or less the definition of having arrived.

Record of the Year for a Southern band

The leap was Only by the Night, from 2008. "Sex on Fire" reached no. 1 in the United Kingdom. "Use Somebody" did something even less likely: on 31 January 2010, at the Grammys, it won Record of the Year, the general award, the one that pop usually keeps. A rock band from the south of the United States took that category.

That night they also added Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group and Best Rock Song. In total, four Grammys out of twelve nominations. Saying the album "earned them awards" is an understatement: it earned them the award that almost no guitar band gets.

Dallas, 29 July 2011

On 29 July 2011, in Dallas, Caleb Followill walked off stage halfway through the concert. He told the audience he was going to be sick and have a beer, and that he would be back. He did not come back. His brothers finished the night apologising. On 1 August the group cancelled the rest of the American tour.

Then two explanations appeared that seemed to rule each other out. The official statement spoke of vocal problems and exhaustion. Jared, on the other hand, wrote on Twitter that there were problems in the band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade, and the press reported that the group was asking him to go into rehab for alcohol.

It turned out both were true at the same time. A specialist told Caleb he was one concert away from permanently damaging his vocal cords, and at the same time his way of drinking had stopped being sustainable. That simultaneity is what means 2011 cannot be told as a star's tantrum: it is the exact echo of what had brought his father down fourteen years earlier, in the same family and with the same substance.

What to remember

Kings of Leon is not the story of the church pew to the packed stadium. It is the story of a house that fell down in 1997, of four relatives who put a band together from the remains and of a singer who, at the summit, repeated his father's problem in front of twenty thousand people. They survived that: they recorded again, toured again, and "Sex on Fire" and "Use Somebody" went on being chanted by people who know nothing about Mount Juliet.

What the Dallas episode teaches is that the two versions of a crisis are usually true at the same time, and that alcoholism is inherited more through habit than through blood. If anyone reading this recognises their own house in it, in Chile SENDA's drugs and alcohol line, 1412, is free and confidential. Asking for help in time was, in this case, what made a next album possible.

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Sources

Kings of Leon are an American band formed in 1999 in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, by the brothers Caleb Followill (vocals and guitar), Nathan Followill (drums) and Jared Followill (bass), together with their cousin Matthew Followill (guitar); Matthew was born and raised in Mississippi. The name comes from their grandfather, Leon Followill, who died in January 2014. Their father, Ivan Leon Followill, was a preacher with the United Pentecostal Church and left the ministry in 1997, after years of problems with alcohol and after divorcing; the brothers' childhood was spent between Oklahoma and Tennessee. Nathan Followill has stated that the divorce destroyed the appearance of a perfect existence. Their first albums were "Youth & Young Manhood" (2003) and "Aha Shake Heartbreak" (2004), of Southern rock and garage, with a better initial reception in the United Kingdom and Europe than in the United States. In 2009 they opened dates on U2's tour. The album "Only by the Night" (2008) included "Sex on Fire", which reached no. 1 in the United Kingdom, and "Use Somebody", which on 31 January 2010 won the Grammy for Record of the Year, as well as Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group and Best Rock Song; the band has four Grammys out of twelve nominations. On 29 July 2011, at a concert in Dallas, Caleb Followill left the stage halfway through the show saying he was going to be sick and drink a beer, and did not return; on 1 August 2011 the band cancelled the rest of the American tour. The official statement attributed the cancellation to vocal problems and exhaustion, while Jared Followill posted on Twitter that there were problems in the band bigger than hydration and the press reported that he was being asked to enter rehab for alcohol consumption; a specialist warned Caleb Followill that he was one concert away from suffering permanent damage to his vocal cords. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, Billboard, the Recording Academy and other press coverage.