Somebody forgot to tell Pinmonkey the music business isn’t fun anymore. Operating as though it was 50 years ago, the band got together – believe it or not – simply to have a good time making music. Also like it was another era, Pinmonkey was offered a recording contract the day after RCA Label Group chairman Joe Galante saw the band in a Nashville club. Two months after that, the band was in the studio, and barely six months later, it was on the charts with its debut single, “Barbed Wire and Roses.”
What happened to all the red tape, image manufacturing and corporate meetings? When you’re talking about Pinmonkey, toss all that stuff out the window. All you need to know about this band is that it makes music as striking and original as its name.
Pinmonkey’s self-titled BNA Records debut (release date October 8, 2002) is a tremendous listening experience. Michael Reynolds’ heart-piercing Appalachian tenor voice is among the most thrilling instruments to ever step before a microphone in Music City. The high harmonies and edgy drumming of Rick Schell contribute both top and bottom layers to the distinctive Pinmonkey sound. Bass player Michael Jeffers provides the country-rock “edge,” and brother Chad Jeffers’ superb Dobro playing, lap steel work and harmony vocals flesh out the emotions of the performances.
Those emotions range from the sweet, melodic passages of the ballad, “The Longest Road,” to the biting, thumping sound of “Barbed Wire and Roses.” “Falling Down” is a rolling, soaring thing of harmonic beauty. “Augusta,” featuring guest Ricky Skaggs, is the contemplation of a defeated loser, while the country rocking “Slow Train Comin’” looks at the inevitability of hopeless love and heartache.
On the tender side, there’s “Falling Out of Love With Me.” Superstar Dolly Parton was so moved by Pinmonkey’s achingly lovely reading of her 1976 song, she volunteered to add her angelic voice to it. The group chugs through the bitter country-rocker, “Every Time It Rains,” with a full head of rhythmic steam. The up-tempo, bluegrassy meditation on mortality, “Jar of Clay,” showcases the band’s outstanding vocal harmonies, while the album-closing “Stay With Us” is an all-out gospel rocker with a message for our troubled times.
Pinmonkey puts its personal stamp on an impressively wide variety of songs on its BNA Records collection. For instance, the band completely reinterprets Cyndi Lauper’s 1989 pop hit, “I Drove All Night,” as a country romp. Heck, Pinmonkey even makes the Sugar Ray pop smash, “Fly,” sound like a mountain chestnut.
Okay, okay. The name. Bear in mind that these guys were just making music for fun when this whole thing started. They didn’t have a moniker because they were just playing here and there on a lark.
“Kim Weber, who books a Nashville nightclub called the Sutler Saloon, was really the catalyst of that name,” recounts Michael Reynolds. “I’m a huge fan of The Simpsons. She called me at the house one day in early 1999 and said, ‘Okay, I’m getting ready to send the club’s listings for the week to the newspaper. If you want to be listed as a band, you need to give me a name right now!’ Well, the episode where Homer Simpson yearns to work at a bowling alley setting up the pins was literally on the TV at that moment. I said, ‘Okay, Pinmonkey!’”
And, somehow, the name stuck. What the heck, it was only for local nightclubs anyhow. But then something remarkable started to happen.
“Within a couple of months, the Sutler was full. People were coming to see us. When we noticed that people were starting to notice us, we thought, ‘Maybe we better see what we sound like.’ So we started throwing stuff on tape. That’s when we really solidified as a band.” By the end of 2001, Pinmonkey had recorded its first independent CD, Speak No Evil, and representatives from the major labels on Music Row were turning up at the band’s shows.
A Cinderella story? Not so fast. All four members have spent plenty of time “in the trenches” as musicians. Lead singer Michael Reynolds has been trying to make it in Music City since he was a teenager. A native of scenic Natural Bridge, VA, he grew up surrounded by the bluegrass and gospel music his relatives all played. To him, music was as natural as breathing.
“I was probably about 13 when I announced to my family that I never wanted to work a real job. Therefore, I was going to be a musician. To which my mom said, ‘Get ready to do the hardest job you’ll ever do in your life.’ She was right.
“I came to Nashville right out of high school. I had no contacts. Didn’t know a soul. I didn’t even have a car. The very first job I ever had in my life was at the McDonald’s down by Centennial Park. Then I got a job at a record shop. One night after closing, some of us were sitting around in the back room, just passing the guitar and playing songs. I played a couple of songs I wrote. This girl I worked with asked if I was doing writers’ nights. I said, ‘What’s a writers’ night?’ I was really green. I didn’t even know how to approach the business.
“She literally went home, sat down the next day, went through the paper and found every club that had a writers’ night -- when it was, who to contact, how to audition. She’d get on the phone and say, ‘Meet me at 6 o’clock. We’re going to a writers’ night.’ She’d pack me up and take me there.” For a number of years, Michael Reynolds performed in an endless and fruitless cycle of such evenings, one after another.
Meanwhile, brothers Chad and Michael Jeffers were growing up performing in a family band near Kingsport, TN. Their father had once tried his luck in Nashville and had come tantalizingly close to success as a singer and songwriter. The boys shared his dream.
“The first show we played at the Johnson City Freedom Hall, there were 1500 screaming girls,” Chad reminisces with a chuckle. “That was the first defining moment. That’s when I really knew I wanted to be in the music industry and play for the rest of my life. I was eight years old and Michael was 11 or so.”
Michael moved to Music City to attend college in nearby Murfreesboro in 1991. At first, he performed in a rock group called 1492, then joined the rootsier Habaneros, which quickly became a popular Nashville club band.
Chad arrived in 1994 to attend Belmont University. Like Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, it offers a music-business degree. Both Michael and Chad Jeffers earned those degrees but both continued to perform. After working at the Country Music Hall of Fame and as the mailroom boy in Reba McEntire’s company, Chad went on the road with the hit family trio, the Wilkinsons.
Rick Schell was on the road, too. A native of the upstate New York hamlet of Homer, he performed in rock and country bands throughout his junior high, high school and college years. In Syracuse, he joined forces for several years with big-voiced rocker Benny Mardones (“Into the Night”). But Rick was restless.
“I didn’t know a soul in Nashville, but one day we just decided to get out,” he reports. “My wife and I sold all we had and moved in November 1993, right before Thanksgiving.”
At a Thanksgiving party, he met Nashville pop artist Tim Carroll, with whom he soon began recording. Within months, he came to the attention of Steve Earle, who hired him for his I Feel Alright CD sessions. During the next few years, Rick Schell built a drumming resume that included either studio sessions or road work with Joy Lynn White, Buddy Miller, Elizabeth Cook, Pure Prairie League, Chris Knight and Allison Moorer.
Meanwhile, Michael Reynolds was feeling more and more frustrated. By now, he was working as the office manager for a Music Row attorney. But his music was going nowhere.
“I realized I couldn’t stand to be on stage by myself,” he recalls. “It was too unnerving. So I decided to hire some side guys to play behind me and have a natural band. The first guy I met was Chad, and for a couple of years – about 1995 to 1997 – we played acoustic shows off and on. Then we decided to expand. In early 1998, Michael stepped in. That felt comfortable and worked, so we started gigging maybe once a month.
“As soon as Michael got in there, we figured, ‘If we have an electric bass, we gotta have a drummer.’ The minute Rick stepped in, the whole thing snapped into place. But it was still ‘Let’s play music we love instead of doing it for a paycheck.’ I’d been trying to get an artist deal and I was just getting tired of it. For once, I just wanted to do something for the fun of doing it.”
The other three all had steady work as sidemen. But manager Rick Alter heard something special in the foursome’s sound and urged them to begin thinking more professionally about Pinmonkey.
“By the time the record companies came around, we had a vision of where we thought this band would go,” Chad states. “We don’t sound like anybody else, but there’s something very marketable here, something very mainstream. We sat down at lunch and went on a search for a new name. That’s the one time we thought we needed to conform to Nashville. But, you know, Pinmonkey helps describe us. Our name is so different and our music is so different. Once you get the two together, it makes sense.”
RCA Label Group chairman Joe Galante loved what he saw and heard immediately. He is an executive who has been a musical visionary time and again in Nashville -- Galante brought to stardom such platinum artists as Alabama, Keith Whitley, Clint Black, and the Judds, all of whom were ahead of the country-music curve at the time. He says it was the freshness of Pinmonkey’s approach that captivated him.
“When I listened to them perform, it was a feeling I haven’t had in a long time. Their music just wrapped itself around me,” Galante comments. “That experience is why I am in this business. I left there and went into a meeting at the label, and I couldn’t stop talking about them. I said, ‘I just left an act we want to sign -- and they are going to be a big part of our future as a company and as a musical format.’ And I truly believe that.”
Album producer Paul Worley, noted for his work with everyone from Martina McBride to the Dixie Chicks, says the Pinmonkey recording sessions were a breeze, since all he had to do was capture in the studio what these accomplished boys can do live at shows.
“Pinmonkey brings such an honest realness to the table,” says Worley. “There’s an energized goodness there that has been lacking in this town for quite some time.”
As they were completing their BNA CD with Worley, Pinmonkey took time off to perform at the massive 87,000-person Merlefest in North Carolina. They arrived as complete unknowns. By the end of the weekend, they’d sold every button, shirt, cap and CD they’d brought to the festival.
“What was really cool about it was we had kids 10-13 years old just loving it,” recalls Rick. “But then people 60-65 years old were also at our shows. It was an amazingly wide range of people.”
So off they went, in search of radio airplay and fans. But the day after “Barbed Wire and Roses” was released, Pinmonkey’s tour bus burst into flames and was completely totaled in South Carolina.
“We’re standing in the parking lot watching it burn,” reports Michael Reynolds. “It was the most stressful moment you can imagine. Rick just said, ‘I guess this makes us the hottest band out of Nashville.’ We all busted out laughing.”
Somebody forgot to tell Pinmonkey the music business isn’t fun anymore.
