Matt Lichtenwalter
Eric Clapton lit the fire. He was the first hero, the sound that made Matt want to pick up a guitar at all. Two more things landed about the same time. Neil Schon of Journey, who could make a guitar phrase like a singer, melodic and smooth one minute, fast and fluid the next. And Stevie Ray Vaughan's first record, which hit like a downed power line and never let go. Then Schon said in an interview that the phrasing came from the blues, and that put a name to the thing Matt had been chasing all along. He wanted a guitar that could sing. So he went looking for the source, and it led him right back to where he started, the Beano album, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. He wore it out.
He got on the blues train figuring it would make him a better rock player. Forgot to get off. Truth is, the blues had become the first thing he ever really loved, a sound that moved him the way nothing else did. In his first blues band the bass player was a walking professor of the music, with a record collection deep enough to open Matt's ears to every player worth knowing, a man who'd go on to host a blues show on Dallas's KNON 89.3 under the name Sonnyboy Mark. The circuit did the rest, the blues fests and the festival stages and a few names you'd know if you came up on this music. He shook Stevie Ray's hand at a mall pizza joint at thirteen, got told to keep practicing, and did. Years later he brought all of it to Salt Lake City, and the roadhouse finally had its lead guitar, and a few of its lead vocals besides.
Dave Thomas
Dave plays bass the way the good ones do: he leaves things out. Bass players have a rule for it, play like every note costs you a dollar, and Dave spends carefully. The rests do as much work as the notes. Find the pocket, lock arms with the drummer, and lay them down low and slow so the whole room leans in and waits. That's the Motown school. James Jamerson on a worn-out Fender, the man whose basslines moved more dance floors than his name ever will, where the groove lives and the funk gets made.
He is also the lead singer, which is the part nobody sees coming from the man holding down the low end. It is a big voice with real feel in it, one that can go sweet or tear the roof off depending on what the song is asking for, and Dave always knows which one it wants. He fronts the room from behind the bass.
Dave came up around it. His father had perfect pitch and played piano for the Governor of Utah, so the house was never quiet. It took a while for the bug to really bite, but the music was in his blood the whole time, and when it caught him for good in his forties, it stuck. Now he holds down the bottom end of a roadhouse band like it's the only thing he was ever meant to do. Took the long way around. Worth the wait.
Evan Smith
Evan was four years old, playing along to "Love Is Blue" on the family upright, when his mother caught him and demanded to know who showed him how. No one had. The ear was just there, and it never left. He trained classically, then fell in with the prog heavyweights, Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, the kind of players who could make an organ pick a fight and keep perfect time doing it.
That's the thing about Evan: he can play darn near anything you put in front of him, and he does. A roadhouse runs on blues and grit, but it's the trained gun who came up somewhere else entirely that hands the sound its unexpected flair. He hears the changes before they land, sits deep in the pocket, and colors outside the lines while he's there. He sings harmony most of the night and takes a lead of his own. He set the keys down a while to raise a family. Turns out the bench was always his.
Tom Hurley
Tom wanted to play rock and roll and nothing else, which is exactly why his mother, a concert pianist, pointed him at anything but. He got his way, and a teacher who actually gigged for a living, and then he got six months of rudiments and sticking technique and a blue sparkle kit he wasn't allowed to touch yet. That's the part most kids quit over. Tom didn't. By fourteen he'd saved every penny for a Tama, and before long he'd built it out to ten pieces with double kick drums, chasing Neil Peart through the garage with Rush and Pink Floyd turned up loud. He can still play anything he hears, the knottiest parts and all. But the long road has been the blues, learning to sit back and let a shuffle breathe, and that turned out to be the harder trick.
Here is what all those rudiments bought him. He stopped counting and started listening. Out in the open stretches, where the song quits being written down and starts getting made up, he and Matt read each other off a sheet of music nobody handed out. A solo gears up for one more time around the block, and Tom feels it coming, builds underneath it, and gives the band no reason to think it's ending. Consistent, in the pocket, still learning every week. You never have to look back to know he's there.