The Cadillac Three Band: Rock Music, Funk and Grunge and their unique Nashville sound

Buzz Knight:

Welcome to this edition of Takin’ A Walk-Music History on Foot. If you like this podcast, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Kindly go to takinawalk.com to sign up for the newsletter to keep up on new episodes and to suggest someone as a guest for an upcoming episode. Maybe it’s even you. Today we’re virtual with a Nashville band that defies categorization, Cadillac Three. Their influences span multiple genres from country to rock, to funk to grunge, all mixed in a delectable soup that everyone can enjoy. Let’s go deep into the career path of Cadillac Three on Takin’ A Walk. I’d like to introduce the members of Cadillac Three, or in this case, Cadillac Two, to Takin’ A Walk, Drummer Neil Mason and guitarist Kelby Ray. Welcome.

Kelby:

Thanks for having us.

Neil:

Thanks, man.

Buzz Knight:

So, guys, can you take our listeners back to the beginning moments when you guys met growing up in Nashville?

Kelby:

As the story goes, we met and all came out of the same womb, just with long hair and it was quite a wonderful day. But we’ve been friends since high school. I first met Neil, I feel like before Jaren. Jaren and I went to the same high school. Neil was at a rival high school, just on the other side of town. But we had a lot of mutual friends and just met through playing music like you do in high school with some of the first bands that you start when you’re 15, a garage band, literally in the garage or in the basement of your parents’ house trying to just trying make noise. And really we’ve come a long way from there and managed to stay really close and just happy to still be friends and still jamming.

Neil:

Yeah, my biggest recollection of meeting Kelby was where I remember seeing him for the first time. I don’t know if we met this day or not, but I remember being at this little pizzeria that my band used to play at called Guido’s, and Kelby was a pretty memorable guy at 14 years old because he had a giant Afro and he was wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt that I kind of want to say went down to his knees or something and that was Kelby. And so you don’t kind of forget that, especially if you spend the next 25 years hanging out with him. So that’s my recollection of meeting Kelby.

Kelby:

Just a bunch of hippies being kids.

Buzz Knight:

Do you guys remember the first time you played music?

Neil:

I’m guessing it was probably in my mom’s basement or in somebody else’s garage or basement, but being the drummer, my mom was understanding that people were probably going to be coming over and jamming a lot, and that saved her trips of having to carry my drums to other places. So we did a lot of jamming in my basement and garages and assorted other rooms as we moved around houses. But I’m guessing that. Kelby, any different recollection?

Kelby:

No, it’s all fuzzy, but that sounds about right.

Buzz Knight:

Fuzzy and fuzz tones, right?

Neil:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

There you go. You guys are embedded with this incredible sense of authenticity in what you do with your craft. Where do you get that spirit from?

Kelby:

It’s just that common denominator of just loving music. I don’t know, it’s a deep question, but an easy answer I guess. I don’t know.

Neil:

I think it stems back to the same answer to the question before, which is I think it comes from the fact that we all kind of grew up together at the same time in the same place, experiencing a lot of the same things together. And so it was like a lot of firsts. First time seeing a band play, first time playing a certain show, first time going to a club, first time doing stuff at a party that you shouldn’t be doing, all that kind of stuff. And so we’ve been able to experience all of that stuff together and continue to all the way, now we’re 40 years old. And we’ve been doing this for 25 years of hanging out basically. And I guess if you hang out long enough, some good things are bound to happen.

Buzz Knight:

There’s a patience that has to be there that with a relationship with your craft, right?

Kelby:

There’s a patience. There’s a genuine love of just playing music and being able to do that with the same like-minded people. That’s the only way to keep this kind of thing going long term I feel like, because there’s a lot of friends of ours that we used to jam with in the garages and back in the day, and they might have had tried to go on the road, try to do the band thing, and the wrong combination of people happened, and it just doesn’t have the longevity. So we just lucked out that we all had the drive and the motivation and the love of doing it and are close enough friends to be able to do something like this for so many years, I think is the key there.

Buzz Knight:

I saw another interview with you guys. I’m not sure if it was either of you who said this or Jaren, but you said, “Not chasing something, trying to create something,” which I thought was really a brilliant way to bring home the authenticity piece.

Kelby:

Carving your own path, doing your own thing, being true to just who you are, the influences you have and the type of music you’d like to do, and just genuinely being yourself. That’s the goal there. That’s the key ingredient.

Neil:

And also just we all have influences. We’re all influenced by a number of things, but like Kelby said, trying to be authentic to all of them within ourselves to create something that’s kind of new and fresh. I think it’s not fun to just see the exact same thing again. You want to stand out in some way. One of our other mantras has always just been make people love us or hate us. The middle is boring and so try not to sit in the middle as much as possible. And because there’s enough bands out there for everybody and not everybody has to love you, but it’s good to find your audience that really, really, really loves you and then let the other people go find somebody else to love.

Buzz Knight:

Well, there’s this great sector of the Nashville music community filled with this outlaw spirit, which you guys have. Who are some of the folks in your posse? And define outlaw spirit from your standpoint?

Neil:

Outlaw spirit is just doing things your own way. We don’t necessarily do things the exact same way that Brothers Osborne do or that Brent Cobb does or that Whiskey Myers does, et cetera, et cetera. But those are all people that would maybe fall into the category of artists that we feel like we share a kindred spirit to. And so we’re all trying to figure it out, and we’re all going to have slightly different opinions on the next best step to figure it out.

We’re also all in different places in our careers, and I think that that’s one of the big things that is important for everybody to always remember is it’s like you can’t really compare two different artists’ paths because they’ve started at different times and places, and everybody’s experiences are different. But I think to your point of kindred spirits and maybe how we all connect, I think it’s just that kind of never ending desire to try and do things your own way.

Buzz Knight:

And it’s a sense of experimentation too, right?

Kelby:

Yeah, that’s part of it is experimenting, trying different… Like I said, we personally just stand ourselves out from even some of our peers. We have so such a wide range of influences from country to rock to metal to jazz to funk. So we have a lot of these influences in a lot of our songs. So, of course, why not experiment with all those? That entire Tabasco & Sweet Tea album we put out at the end of 2021 is all funky stuff that we grew up on. And there’s always that underlying heavy kind of metal and rock influence that we grew up on in the nineties and just trying different stuff and trying to stand out, but also being kind of a part, like Neil said, being friends with those guys, the Brothers Osborne and Whiskey Myers and those guys. There is that kindred spirit, that same attitude towards doing what we’re doing, and we all embrace each other and are all on the same team really.

Buzz Knight:

So let’s talk about the influences because that’s what I love about you guys among other things, is how vast it is. So maybe let’s touch every pocket if we can, and I’d love to hear within each pocket of influences, some particular bands that mean a lot to you. So first of all, let’s start among country who you mentioned obviously Brothers Osborne. Who are some of the other folks within country that sort of influenced you?

Kelby:

Kind of all over the place. Personally, just going back to when I was a kid, my mom was the biggest Hank Williams Jr. fan. We had every cassette from the early eighties to the late eighties when he was just the biggest thing on the planet. That still resonates with me. I’ve still got a bunch of 45s with Alabama and Waylon and all that eighties country stuff. I know, speaking for Jaren, he was a huge Garth fan when Garth came out in the nineties, big fan of the theatrics and the songwriting and everything. Really all that kind of stuff. Neil, you want to add in there, any of our current peers? We named a few of them already.

Neil:

I think growing up, for Kelby it was there. I know for Jaren, his dad played at the Opry and so he was coming up getting to see all kinds of artists come through there, and he was just a kid kind of standing on the side of the stage getting to see Garth Brooks or Linda Davis or Reba or whoever his dad happened to either be playing with or standing on the side of the stage waiting to play with the next one. And so there was a lot of that, which I think really fed into, especially the songwriting side, just being in Nashville and studying country music and the storytelling and whatnot.

That was a big thing I think for all of us growing up in Nashville that maybe we didn’t even necessarily realize as kids because you’re just there, but looking kind of back on it now, it’s really easy to be like, “Man…” Both, meeting all of us at the time that we did as teenagers when we were being influenced by all of the music that was going on around us, and then also being born in Music City and doing music ourselves. It’s like I can’t put my finger on exactly whether the fact that we were in Music City had anything to do with the fact that we all played music or not, but it sure is convenient that it kind of happened that way. And that’s on the country side.

Kelby:

Yeah, and to wrap up that kind of country side, I remember being… We went to high school with John Prine’s son, Jaren and I did, and he used to throw parties when his parents were out of town. And I remember going over there and I didn’t know who John Prine was when I was 17, and there was this room full of guitars and lyrics on the wall and stuff. And somebody told me, and I was like, “Oh, okay, John Prine.” I didn’t know who this was. That was part of just growing up where I didn’t know any better. It was just what the way I grew up,

Neil:

He had one Grammy sitting on the shelf and I’m pretty sure that somebody drank beer out of it at least a time or two.

Buzz Knight:

And you know John Prine would’ve loved that.

Neil:

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, he would’ve been all right with it. And that was the thing is that we could always have parties over there because John was always on tour every weekend. So that was another thing that we were kind of learning about was like, “Where are your parents?” “Oh, he’s on the road.” “Oh, what’s the road?”

Kelby:

What does that mean?

Buzz Knight:

I recorded an episode of Takin’ A Walk with Amanda Shires, and she told some great stories about playing with John Prine and how special that was.

Kelby:

Oh, yeah.

Neil:

He was a legend.

Buzz Knight:

So on the rock side, first of all, thanks guys for the recommendation on the Tom Petty documentary. I really appreciate that. So I know he’s of great influence and I don’t know if you’ve caught the recent Live at the Fillmore stuff that just came out, but my God, Ain’t No Sunshine on that one. Holy mackerel. So I know Tom Petty’s in there. How about some other rock folks?

Neil:

What’s interesting, I think about the three of us is that we all kind of come at it from a slightly different place and our influences all connect, but it’s like each one of us kind of has our artist or two that are a little bit stronger and then they’ve really… With Jaren, it’s Rage Against the Machine was a really, really big one for him. And I know with Kelby it was Metallica and things like that. A little more on the metal side. Tom Petty and more of the classic rock like The Stones and the Beatles and stuff was kind of what my parents always had in the sixth disc-changer at the house.

Kelby:

Yeah, Zeppelin.

Neil:

But you kind of take all… Yeah, Zeppelin. I know Hendrix was a big one for Kelby. The list can kind of go on and on and that’s part of the reason that we sound like so many different things sometimes. But I think the big thing about it is there’s little bits that I can hear of all of that stuff in our live show and in our writing that comes out in different ways. And each of us have introduced another artist’s world to each other and then they’ve become close to equal influences as our original influences.

Buzz Knight:

There’s another band that I thought of that was always hard to categorize still to this day, and I think of you guys in that beautiful way as well. And that’s Little Feet just have so many different places, you can’t really describe them necessarily, but you know they’re really good.

Kelby:

And another one that we got to tour with a couple years ago before he unfortunately passed away was Charlie Daniels, when we went out with him in 2019. And to watch his band play, I mean they were playing jazz and bluegrass and rock and country and all of those things. So we were just sitting there in awe because that would’ve been the first time I feel like I could say that I saw him live and I didn’t realize his diverse array of influences. And that’s the same kind of thing, that same womb that we came out of too. So that was definitely more of an influence than I think I even knew once I got to watch him play and one of the coolest guys we ever met too.

Buzz Knight:

And then the funk side. Talk about the funk influences. I love that.

Kelby:

Well, one big one that we listen to after we get off stage just to chill out every night is John Scofield and Medeski Martin & Wood put out an album in late nineties I think called A Go Go. And it’s just a real chill, really cool funky album. I think another influence there that I kind of forgot about it on the rock side, but we don’t really talk about it very much, but definitely was an influence on us in our high school and college years was Phish.

We went to a bunch of Phish shows and the musicality of those guys, they were all over the map too, and funky and rock and a little bit of all over the place and all the covers that they would do. It was such an array of all the genres and everything. Don’t listen to those guys as much as we used to. But there was definitely a moment there where was that was an influence.

Neil:

Yeah, I know again, for Jaren, Tower of Power and things like that were a big influence, and I think-

Kelby:

Steely Dan.

Neil:

Steely Dan, that’s a good one. And I think all of that stuff kind of rubs off in its own little ways. Kelby mentioning Phish makes me think about, we don’t write set lists and that’s totally a thing from the jam band world of getting up there and feeling out the crowd and kind of winging it, and you’ve got your segues and your things that you kind of know how to do. But to kind of keep it interesting for us and also to keep it interesting for the audience, you try and shake it up as much as possible. And so that can sometimes be another byproduct of just an artist or a band kind of influencing you in another way that’s outside of just the music, but it’s also the culture and the spirit and the feel and how they present their show.

Buzz Knight:

So other than sharing amongst yourselves things that you hear or remember from the past, how do you discover either new things or new old things? How does discovery happen?

Kelby:

Whatever I hear Jaren or Neil playing in the front lounge of the bus. I don’t know, it’s all over the place these days with streaming and everything. It’s like there might be a song that pops on and I hear something and I have to dig to see who it is because if you don’t you’re going to miss it and be like, “Oh, what was that song that I heard yesterday?” On whatever playlist or whatever radio station that popped up. So you got to be paying attention. But there’s part of it for sure.

Neil:

Yeah, and I think a big thing for me lately at least has just been asking people what they’re listening to more proactively. It’s just as simple as like, “Hey, is there one song or one band or one album that you’ve been wearing out that I may not have heard before?” And it’s been interesting. I was asking that to one of my wife’s little nieces the other day, she’s like 14 and she named this band, she was like, “Everybody at my school loves this band. I’m over it already. I was into them like six months ago.” I went and looked up the band and they were a nineties rock band that never made it. And I was like, “How is this band big in this high school right now?” But it was big to her six months ago and now she’s over it.

And so I think that’s one of the interesting things that’s going on right now is that a lot of discovery that’s happening is actually old music being rediscovered or discovered for the first time. And I think that’s maybe one of the really cool byproducts of the streaming world is that unlike when you’re at a record store and it’s like, “Well, I have to buy this to find out if I’m going to like it or not.” Now all you have to do is just go click on something. And so the opportunity to discover something is just right there at your fingertips all day, every day.

We’ve had that, this past couple years we’ve got this song called Take Me to the Bottom. And it wasn’t until four years after that song came out that it became our top streaming song and for the last two years it’s just been through the roof huge streaming song for us. And it wasn’t that way when the album came out, and it wasn’t that way a year after the album came out. And so that’s another interesting thing about just discovery right now is that it can kind of happen to any song at any time, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be something new.

Kelby:

And you’ve got the streaming shows. Yellowstone, we’ve had some luck on there too. And then you’ve got Stranger Things, talking about the throwback thing, you got Kate Bush that blew up for the first time in 25 years or whatever with that song that came out. And then actually I’ve got a friend that has a 10-year-old little boy and he heard Metallica Master of Puppets on Stranger Things, and there’s a whole big scene. And he said, “Uncle Kelby, Uncle Kelby, I want you to teach me how to play…” He doesn’t even play guitar. He wants me to teach him how to play Master of Puppets. And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I knew that 30 years ago,” whatever. You got 10-year-olds discovering a band like Metallica watching Stranger Things. So it really is all over the map between shows and word of mouth and streaming services and radio to some degree. I still listen to local radio or sometimes classic rock, whatever, in the car, terrestrial radio. So it’s really all over the place.

Buzz Knight:

Nashville is such a special place. There’s this incredible vibe there every time I’m down there that I’m left with just how great the people are and the vibe of the music community and everything. Why is Nashville so awesome?

Kelby:

That’s a good question. I think geography has something to do with it. It’s definitely a spot where… Actually, I don’t know, I was thinking more about from touring standpoint, just geographically it’s easy to get to a lot of places from Nashville. I don’t know why it’s the hub of coolness and where that came from though.

Neil:

Well, I think everything’s sort of cyclical. So it’s like LA and New York had already had their moments of being cool, I think 10 or 15 years before Nashville started to get the wave of artists and bands moving to Nashville that weren’t country artists, more of the rock and whatnot that’s happening now. Austin kind of had that. And so Austin was kind of the hip darling city there for a while. And I feel like Nashville’s been having its moment for a minute, and I’m sure at some point it’ll kind of max out just like some of these other cities do and it’ll move on to somewhere else. Seattle had its moment too.

But I think Kelby’s right about geography. Look, if you’re an artist and you’re looking for a place that is musically driven, where there’s studios and there’s opportunities in the business and whatnot, and then also is a great hub for touring. I think that’s a huge advantage and I think that that is a big reason that so many people view Nashville as a great place to be.

If you’re getting in the van from LA and you’ve got a show in Kansas, good luck getting there. It’s like you can drive to 50, 60 cities from Nashville within eight hours. And so you could really make an entire career never driving further than that if you lived in Nashville if you really wanted to.

Buzz Knight:

But is there something also if you’re a musician, that Nashville has this great sense of collaboration. So if either one of you were in need of some input on something, you could reach out to so many different people in the Nashville community for some advice. Isn’t that part of it that’s special as well?

Neil:

Yeah, I think just fact that Nashville feels like a small town, but that the majority of the town is filled with people that are interested in music or the music business is definitely an asset. I think for us as a band we’ve actually done a lot of the opposite of that in that we’ve always just followed our own lead and done our own thing and not really asked for too much opinion from anybody about what we were up to. But on the flip side of that, from a collaboration standpoint as songwriters, that’s a humongous asset I think where we’ve been able to collaborate with all these different artists on the songwriting side.

Jaren just had I think his ninth or 10th number one as a songwriter. And so from that side of things it’s absolutely an advantage. And just I think if you want to have two tracks in your career, which to be honest, if you’re going to be in the music business and make a living, you need to have at least two tracks in your career probably. It’s a good place to have that.

Buzz Knight:

Are you guys still learning in this part of your journey? Are you learning new things?

Kelby:

When you’re artistic, I don’t think you stop learning. It’s learning how to be a better musician or a songwriter or what we can do better as a band. All of that plays into the same thing. I think we’re always learning. I think really everybody is. But definitely speaking from an artistic point of view, I don’t think you could ever stop. There’s always something else to try to reach for.

Neil:

And things are always changing. So as soon as you think you’ve got something figured out, you got to figure it out again.

Buzz Knight:

Favorite places to play on the road in both the US and globally? What are some of the favorite places you love playing?

Kelby:

I feel like I should have a better answer for that by now. I’ve been asked it enough. Everywhere.

Neil:

A lot of it’s by shows. My memories are more based on shows than, “Oh, I can’t wait to go to this city,” and I get excited about certain cities. I love going to Chicago. I love the idea of playing a hometown show in Nashville, but actually doing it is usually stressful. I always get excited about going overseas. We’ve been really fortunate to grow a really great fan base in the UK, and so I think that if there was one simple answer, it would probably be the UK, and that’s just because it was a concrete goal that we had that it was like, “Hey, we want to go and do this. And we think that it could really resonate,” and it actually has.

And so I think there’s an excitement to that just because every time we go, it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And from a travel and a cultural standpoint, it’s different than how we spend most of our year running around the US. And that’s not a knock on the US. It’s just it’s different which makes it exciting.

Buzz Knight:

But it’s so great when you find a new audience, right? That’s just like you sort of go, “My God, look, how did this suddenly happen,” right?

Kelby:

Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah, for sure.

Kelby:

[inaudible 00:26:57] could show up, we don’t even know, “How did they find out about us? Where did they come from?” That was the feeling the first show we played in London, it was like, “Where did these people even hear about us to show up at the show?” So that’s always exciting when you go to a new place and anybody’s there because you don’t really ever expect it. I don’t care how big you get.

Buzz Knight:

Guys, in closing, can you define why music is so important to us in our life?

Neil:

Ooh, Kelby, it’s tattooed all over ya.

Kelby:

It’s something that everybody needs. I feel like it’s that simple. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t listen to music for some reason or another. If you don’t, you’re weird. It’s something that it’s just ingrained into part of who all of us are and it makes you feel a certain way depending on what you’re listening to, how you’re feeling that day. You find something that resonates with you, and it’s just something that has to be there. It’s something that is there and something that everybody absorbs, and it’s just part of life I think.

Neil:

It’s like a good friend. It’s like if you need a smile, it’s there. If you’re upset, it’ll kind of hang out with you. My four-month-old baby was crying in the car the other day and my two-year-old daughter was yelling, completely oblivious to the crying. And I was like, “Lou, can you sing Teddy Mae a song?” Just because I wanted her to stop yelling. And she started singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and 30 seconds later our baby was just smiling and listening to her. So I think that when it comes down to it, it’s also a great neutralizer, but it’s the thing that it allows people to congregate, happy or sad, and they can each have their own experience with it, but also feel connected in a bigger way, which I think is the thing that is maybe hard to put your finger on about music, but also makes it so special.

And from our perspective, the amazing thing that I just marvel at pretty much every single day is that we’ve been able to take the idea of a band that we just made up out of thin air, and then every day we make up new songs that are out of thin air. And then we go play shows that are out of thin air and somehow 20 years later you’re still doing that, and you can still have a roof over your head and put gas in your car and whatever else. And so it’s been a real blessing to just get to do it, and hopefully we just get to keep doing it. If we don’t get in our way and think about it too much, you kind of just get to keep doing it.

Buzz Knight:

Well, I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to talk to you and have you on the Takin’ A Walk podcast. You put a smile on my face, and your music gives me and your fans great joy, and I want to thank you for that.

Neil:

Thank you, man. Sorry we couldn’t walk in person. Maybe we’ll do that next time.

Buzz Knight:

Sounds good.

Speaker 4:

Takin’ A Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.