New STS Article..Local Band Hammered By Real Estate Crisis..

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Local band hammered by real estate crisis ... in Great Britain? 4/9/09
By Andrew McGinn
Staff Writer
Updated 7:15 PM Thursday, April 9, 2009

URBANA — They say what happens on Wall Street affects Main Street.

So in rural Champaign County, you can’t help but wonder if that manure smell outside Small Town Sleeper’s rehearsal space — a garage made to look like Old MacDonald’s barn — isn’t just wafting in from the east.

From those pigs on Wall Street.

After all, only in this day and age could the dwindling value of commercial real estate in Great Britain delay takeoff for a band in our own backyard.

“It does spin your head around a little bit,” said Urbana native Troy Brown, who fronts Small Town Sleeper.

The homegrown group already has embarked on the kind of back-to-back summer tours that typically are off-limits to a band still rehearsing in a mother-in-law’s Champaign County garage.

The band toured with Daughtry in 2007, then opened 47 dates this past summer for Candlebox.

But it’s not so much the fact that Small Town Sleeper has had to come back home after each tour — it’s that the band has had to come back home with nothing to show the naysayers.

“You get home,” Brown said, “and it’s like, ‘Where’s the album?’ ”

Guitarist Derek Snowden, a Springfield native, is a little more forthcoming.

“Why am I not coming home to a mansion?” he wondered.

During both tours, an album they recorded in 2006 sat on the shelf while their label, Britain’s Upper 11 Records, negotiated with distributors.

And that was before the global economy fell into a greed-coma.

For the time being, according to Brown, there’s still no album out because the guy who started the label made his money in real estate — meaning the label now doesn’t have the money to release it.

“We signed our deal three years ago,” Brown explained. “Real estate was obviously doing well at the time.”

Available only at shows, the album, “Conversations,” is clearly a product of those jet-setting good times.

The basic tracks were recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York and the vocals were recorded across the Atlantic in London.

Then, sparing no expense, the sessions moved to Capitol Records in Hollywood, where arranger David Campbell put strings on the album, much the same way he orchestrated the Goo Goo Dolls song “Iris.”

“I’ll be honest,” Brown said. “Timing would sum up everything we’ve gone through.”

More than three dozen Top 40 stations across the country this past summer were starting to play the band’s lead single, “Backseat,” when money for promotion — poof — disappeared.

That’s when things started to look dicey.

“To say it wasn’t depression,” Brown said, “would be a lie.”

Musically, the summer tour with Candlebox, in which the band logged 30,000 miles in their van, was a success.

But the van had barely aired out when bassist Will Greider, the West Liberty native who’s on “Conversations” and in all the publicity photos, was asked to leave.

“When you tour, you find out what works and what didn’t work,” Brown said. “You don’t know what a person is like until you’re in a van with them for hours.”

As drummer Dann Burd put it, “It’s a serious character test.”

The band has recruited a second Springfielder, Ryan Monge, to be the new bassist.

“We came home so tight,” Brown said. “The last thing I wanted to do was come home and relearn the songs with a new guy.”

Monge knew he’d arrived when, suddenly, “I got a huge list of new friend requests on MySpace.”

But without the album, Small Town Sleeper has found itself in a position of being taken for granted at home.

Only about 750 people bothered to see the band at the free Summer Arts Festival in 2008 — yet the band drew twice that to a later show in Duluth, Minn., where Brown said the two most-requested songs on radio this past summer were “Backseat” and Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.”

“How many other bands can drive 16 hours away and have a turnout?” he asked.

But while Brown is ready to throw down with the naysayers — “I have the memories, I’ve seen the crowds,” he said — an actual, physical album in stores would be nice, too.

And he’ll soon be getting it.

While a date still hasn’t been set, Upper 11’s distributor, Fontana Distribution, has decided to bankroll the album’s long-awaited release, he said.

“We’re once again the sleepers,” Brown said. “Everybody has written us off.”

Really, though, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

“I almost stopped believing in it,” he said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.

Next show

Who: Small Town Sleeper, with openers Left Hand Hold

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, April 16

Where: Spirits Rock Bar, 2118 N. Limestone St., Springfield

Cost: $5