Born in Dallas, re-born in Austin

by Kate Mackley

Slogging along in a city that barely shuffles for The Killers and winces at the label 'Britpop', The Lord Henry were doomed in Dallas. Maturity in music comes at a price, and a year after Clinton Piper and Billy Potts packed up and moved their two-man show to Austin, the band has doubled and a new album is on the way.

Formerly fronted by the disaffected vocals and manic guitar of Clinton Piper and backed by drummer and vocalist Billy Potts, two guys doing all the work of the average four-man band, The Lord Henry has grown. Literally. Piper added the talents of little brother Grant Piper on bass and friend Spencer Sharp on keys. Pretty boys making pretty music, their brand of dance rock is edgier and sexier than ever.

Grant Piper, a junior at UT, filled out their sound and added his own style of cavorting to the show. The perfect foil to big brother's snarling good looks, Grant stole his white patents and dressed like the Good Humor man at a show at Trees, complete with white belt and white sweatbands and drove the ladies wild. Or maybe it was the pink middy shirt he wore at the Red Eyed Fly? It certainly couldn't have been the red leather bomber jacket he upstaged the frontman with at the Double Wide. Poor serious Spencer on keys, the fourth man in the band and the latest and last addition, he tries to keep out of the way of the energy at the front of the stage. Potts hangs out behind the kit, but listen for his voice, angelic as it is. Shouting for a solo may just bring him up to the mic.

Austin's been good to them, but they admit they had it nice for a while in the Big D. "We found a pretty sweet deal in Dallas. We've got great friends here, we'd been playing gigs, we had a loft downtown where we could practice," said Clint Piper, in an interview they gave just before they left town. "But we hadn't really found a niche. We weren't interested in playing every weekend with the hardcore crowd. Grunge, Pity Rock, and Nu-metal are all well and good, but it died five years ago; Deep Ellum is just holding on." How prophetic!

Their first show was an indication, even then, of how things were going on Elm Street. "One of our neighbors was a singer in the R&B band, Black Star, and helped us get our first gig right after we moved here in December '03," remembered Piper. "We were booked with them at Blue Steel in Deep Ellum and we spent a month getting ready to play and invited friends in from out of town for our show. Then we got to the club and it had been closed for six weeks!"

However, that didn't slow down the band. Both Piper and Potts knew the value of a game face and they weren't about to let their first gig collapse just because they lacked a stage. "We split up our friends and scrambled for a venue," laughed Potts. "We told everyone that we were a band from Austin and we had been double-booked and had all these people in town to see us and needed a place to play. Club Clearview said OK and let us play. I felt pretty guilty because we had about six people watching us."

Piper took the experience and built on it. "That's how we started playing in Dallas. We learned pretty fast which places had more community relationships like The Double Wide, The Cavern, Bar of Soap, etc. Somehow we got hooked into playing with some very different, but very cool bands like the Golden Falcons, Mur, Bring In The Satellites, and Max Cady, all of which had been really great to us. Rob, the lead singer of The Golden Falcons, saw our first show at The Double Wide, and helped us get booked with them. We definitely owe him one."

Their first album was an exercise in minimalism, recorded entirely in on two-inch tape, never bearing more than one guitar track, one drum track, and one vocal track. "Max [Hartman] and Jon [Price], from Mur, were incredible as far as exposing us to their crowd. After Billy and I had been together as a band for only a month, Mur let us record Voila at their house with their producer friend, Jeff Halbert," said Piper. "The first sessions were a joke. We spent about six months, constantly at their house, finding our sound and producing the record. They let us wake them up at 9am on the weekends with drums and screaming guitars. They were amazing." Mur has also gone on, to the concrete jungle of LA, leaving Dallas shortly after Piper and Potts finished Voila.

Drawing The Lord Henry back to Dallas, though temporarily, was the opportunity to record with Stuart Sikes (Modest Mouse, The Walkmen, Loretta Lynne, White Stripes). Sikes is engineering their as-yet unnamed second album. "I put too many restrictions on Voila. Stuart's great to work with on this," Piper says about their upcoming LP.

Staying founded in the raw guitar-driven, less-is-more sound that got them a ripping review in the Observer ("A proud moment, reamed by Sam Machkovech, we love that review," says Potts) the new record will go above and beyond what the band can physically perform live. More of a work of art than a cleaned-up representation of the live show, the new record is a more fully realized vision of what the band is capable. They have also added a few slower, more introspective moments. Pulling the new songs off live has been a balancing act, but the addition of Sharp on keys and percussion has helped bring the energy from the album to the stage. Be prepared for a sweaty, sexy good time at their show.

Is Dallas destined to be only the starting place for good bands? Will Deep Ellum once again get it together and rise from the mire it's in right now? Depends on your perspective. This ambitious band decided that they really didn't have the time to wait it out. But The Lord Henry hasn't given up on Big D just yet, and packed gigs and recording here could maybe bring them back. Here's to hoping.

Catch the boys of The Lord Henry this Saturday, January 28th at the Cavern, as they visit their old stomping grounds. Buddies La La Land also made the trip up from Austin's greener pastures, and Dallas' own Sunward opens.

Kate Mackley is a freelance writer, photographer and supporter of the local music scene.