Billboard Magazine: Avett Brothers Travel Their Own Independent Road

Billboard Magazine

Charting A Path

The Avett Brothers have chosen a fiercely independent career path that other indie acts that don’t fit into a perfect niche should take note of. The tactics they’ve settled on—comprising a boutique label, endurance-test touring and fiery performances that recruit loyalists one show at a time—go a long way toward leveling the playing field.
 
Musically, the North Carolina-based trio blends rootsy instrumentation, revival-meeting intensity, sibling harmonies, ambitious themes and catchy melodies with the odd screaming guitar solo and a pervasive rock attitude. Brothers Scott (banjo) and Seth Avett (guitar), with bassist Bob Crawford, have forged a brilliant onstage alchemy and an effective business model that is now starting to pay off.
 
The brothers began their musical journey in the hardcore rock and punk worlds. “At that time, we felt that if you play somewhere on day someone’s just going to show up and say, ‘Hey, here’s a bunch of money, let’s take some pictures of you and you’re on your way,’” Scott Avett says, calling from a tour bus somewhere between a stop at the Wakarusa Festival in Lawrence, Kan., and the next gig in Pittsburgh.
 
“By the time that all got chewed up and spit out,” Scott continues, “we kind of took an overzealous attitude of, ‘Nobody wants to help us, so let’s just do this.’”
 
So the band created Avett Brothers, Inc. in 2002. “We don’t know any other way to do it,” Scott says, “Bob, our bass player, booked our first tour, a three-week-long run up the East Coast, over to Chicago and into the Midwest. We just day by day pushed it, pushed it, pushed it.
 
Not that they didn’t give the “system” a shot. “We had meetings with large labels where the person we played for in the conference room would sit there and say, ‘I think you’re great and all, but I have no idea where you guys fit into some radio category.’ We realized quickly that that was another obstacle that we would have to overcome,” Scott says.
 
In 2003, the band signed to manager Dolph Ramseur’s Ramseur Records, where the Avett Brothers and the members’ various side projects pretty much make up the label roster. “We really partnered up [financially] right down the middle, and it works really well with us,” Scott says. “We really just share responsibilities and I’m starting to be convinced that when you’re going independent it means find one guy, one label, on band per label, and get out there and you both focus on it.”
 
Veteran agent Paul Lohr of New Frontier Touring, instrumental in breaking the Dixie Chicks before the trio moved to Creative Artists Agency, began booking the Avett Brothers in 2003. Lohr set out to make the brothers a solid hard-ticket act in major markets, and now they’re seeing their best sales ever.
 
Lohr says the Avetts are putting up their best numbers “specifically in markets where they have performed four or more times, as their success is commensturate with the number of appearances in each market.” He adds that and AB show is similar philosophically to a Grateful Dead show. “They never play the same show twice, they let the mood and the environment dictate the content, and they let the passion of the moment take the song where it will, so that there is a very real, very personal interpretation for each fan attenting.”
 
Capacities range from 450 at Starr Hill in Charlottesville, Va., to a sellout of 2,700 at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.  Lohr says the Avetts sold 850 tickets—with another 150 comps—at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York.
 
Scott is feeling the heat the band is generating. “All of a sudden we’re seeing these rooms in obscure places like Lancaster, Pa., on a Sunday night and it’s slammed,” he says. “That’s a good sign. We’ve worked hard for it, and it makes the shows just a much better exchange.”
 
Lohr adds, “We still have work to do in markets they haven’t been able to play as much, but they should have much of that under their belts by the end of 2007.”
 
Asked what he has learned about the self-guided path, Scott muses, “I am reminded constantly that we have taken a little bit longer than it would take if we had a big machine behind us, but if you get that success and that reward too quickly and you don’t have the substance to back it up, you really set yourself up for an extremely stressful career, at least in the beginning. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. For us, we’ve covered our ground, we’ve paid attention to our songs, put everything we have into the art and the craft, and from there the business stuff has come along, and we always had faith that it would.”