Guitarist Dusty Bo started his musical career in his native Kentucky where he formed a Southern rock band, Bolt Action Thrill. In 2008, Bolt Action Thrill moved to Los Angeles and played plenty of live shows in LA. The band broke up around 2012 and Dusty Bo joined the metal band, Future Villains. Eventually, Future Villains fell apart as well. When Dusty had enough of the band situation, he decided to venture on his own.
His first solo project is The Vulture & The Fox (2022). Dusty defines the musical genre as “alternative Southern rock.” The music is best described as metal combined with Southern rock lyrics. In addition to the alternative Southern rock, the album also contains some gentle acoustic pieces. The Vulture & The Fox is also a concept album about the Fox, a gunslinger, and his horse, the Vulture.
At the time of this writing, Dusty is embarking on his first solo tour. In addition to the logistics of doing a solo tour, Dusty is playing venues he has never played before and to an audience that has never heard him before.
I had spoken to Dusty just before he started his solo tour, and in this candid conversation, we cover his concerns and thoughts regarding his solo tour. We also discuss his previous bands, Bolt Action Thrill and Future Villains. In addition, we talk about The Vulture & The Fox and the concept of “alternative Southern Rock.” I want to thank Nichole Peters-Good from Jensen Communications and Get Good PR for setting up the interview with Dusty. Most of all, I want to thank Dusty for sharing what is a crucial turning point in his music career.
Jeff Cramer: All right. So what got you started in music?
Dusty Bo: When I was seven years old, my parents took my brother and me to see Earth, Wind & Fire and I vividly remember the bass player. He was the one I had my eyes on. I can’t remember his name, but he was a tall guy with dreadlocks. And he and all the other guitarists came to the center of the stage and were just jamming on these guitars. I was thinking, That looks like a lot of fun. I told my parents that I wanted one for Christmas. And we went to this toy store, and I picked up this toy guitar where you pushed the buttons and it made noise and whatnot. I asked for that for Christmas, and then they ended up getting me a real guitar, thank God. [Laughs] So, I started early. I got the bug early.
JC: Well, it's interesting you mentioned Earth, Wind & Fire because the music you've done is very different from Earth, Wind & Fire.
DB: Yeah, things have changed a little bit. But I’m still a big fan of them.
JC: So, originally, you started a Southern rock band in your own home state of Kentucky.
DB: Bolt Action Thrill.
JC: Yeah, tell me about it.
DB: Oh. So yeah, that was about 2008 or 2009. We were just kind of a hard rock band here in Louisville and had a little bit of blues to us. We wanted to be like Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe. And then when we moved to LA, we kind of started shaping into more of a Southern thing, more of a Black Crowes, ZZ Top. There wasn’t really many people out there playing Southern rock kind of tunes, so we stood out. Girls would come to our shows dressed up like in cowgirl hats and boots and stuff. We had this thing called the Bourbon Bus. We’d have a pre-party at our rehearsal, and we’d get a keg of beer and a bunch of booze. We rented a school bus that would pick us up from the pre-party and bring us to the gig and then bring us back to the after-party. So, it was a lot of fun. [To hear Bolt Action Thrill’s “Trouble,” click here.]
JC: I understand you played in one other band before going solo.
DB: Yes,
Future Villains. That happened around 2012 when Bolt Action Thrill was kind of
falling apart a bit. I was in that band for about six years—did a few tours and
a few international tours and recorded an EP. Yeah, I also had a lot of fun
with those guys too. [To hear a Future Villains’ live performance of “Down the
Drain Blues,” click here.]
JC: So, what made you decide to go solo?
DB: I got tired of my bands falling to shit for reasons that I couldn't control. I was putting in a lot of work, and people either kept quitting or they kept throwing wrenches in the mix. Deadlines weren’t being met. And it just drove me crazy putting in all that work and then it failing because of somebody else. It’s such a sensitive entity because even if you just break it down to the simple things like rehearsals and photo shoots, it takes one person out of the four people to mess up a photo. With booking rehearsal schedules, it’s like you’re dealing with a lot of different schedules, and different personalities, and different things and there’s just drama.
So I was like, “If I do this on my own, then the only person I have to keep in check is me.” [Laughs] “I’ve always been a pretty easy guy to work with. I always wanted to be in a band, and I didn’t even want to be a singer. I started singing because I couldn’t find a singer when I was trying to start my first band. But I just like to play, man. I like to play, I like to write, I like to create. And I can do those things without having anybody getting in my way or telling me no.
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JC: Now, the interesting thing is you came up with “alternate Southern rock.” Explain how this is different than traditional Southern rock.
DB: That’s a really good question. When you think of Southern rock bands, you think of ZZ Top, Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, Black Crowes. And it’s usually pretty organic. There’s guitars and a little extra instrumentation here and there with key. And I guess it’s more kind of bluesy. A lot of the structures of the songs and the progressions are pretty simple and similar.
Some of mine are simple, but some of them are kind of complicated or kind of complex where there is bluesy singing on top of a heavy-metal kind of progression or guitar riff. Also the way we made it sound sonically on the record.
JC: Well, it’s interesting because when I listened to the album, The Vulture & The Fox, and the first few tracks—“Throw It All Away,” “The Conductor,” and “Bandit,”—I was immediately drawn to the metal guitar in those songs. Your guitar playing reminded me of Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine.
DB: Oh, wow. [To hear the live versions of “Throw It All Away,” click here, and a performance of “The Conductor,” click here. For a video for “Bandit,” click here.]
JC: Yeah. But it was almost like where Rage would be doing their own political lyrics against a metal background, you were singing these Western lyrics against a metal background. So I guess in a way that was how I saw it as alternative Southern rock. How did you come up with the concept and that sound?
DB: I was hanging out with one of my good buddies who actually cowrote the song “No One Else” that’s on the album. My friend’s a big fan of Spaghetti Westerns, and I like them too. One night, we were watching Tombstone and I just had this idea: “What if we wrote just a batch of songs that kind of told a story about a Western town or something? And it had a crime syndicate.” He loved it. We never really got around to sitting down and writing all those songs together.
But one day, when I started writing “On With the Ride,” I was like “Okay, this feels like something, like it would be setting this very Western-sounding story.” So, I was like, “Okay, this is kind of what the concept’s going to be. It’s going to be about this gunfighter moving out to the Wild West, but it’s also stories that are about me.” Because when I was twenty-one, I moved out to California with my band because often two guitar players are referred to as “guitar slingers,” so it’s kind of like gunslingers. So, that’s kind of what I was going for there. [To hear “On With The Ride,” click here.]
JC: What’s interesting about the album is “On With the Ride” is the opening track, and songs similar to “On With the Ride” are the next few songs. At that moment I think, “Oh, I know where this whole album is going.” Then all of a sudden, a different musical direction takes place, and I say to myself, “Wait a minute. This isn’t the alternative Southern rock I’d been listening to.”
DB: [Laughs] Yeah. It takes a turn. I was budgeting for a comic book, or a short graphic novel to go along with the record, but that’s having to get put on hold for good reasons because we’re going on tour, and that’s what we’ve been wanting to do for the last few years.
So I’ll tell the concept in a nutshell. The
story is this: the Fox is the gunfighter and his horse’s name is Vulture. Hence
the title, The Vulture & The Fox.
But then Fox moves out West, and he gets caught up with this crime syndicate that wants him to work for them. They end up turning on him, and the conductor is one of the guys that they hired to kill him. He gets into this gunfight and is shot down. His horse, Vulture, finds him and gets him to this girl, Mary Lou. And that’s where “The Red” kicks in. And then she kind of aids him back to life, and then he goes and scores his vengeance on the guys who tried to take him out.
And after that, he falls in love with this woman, and then he kind of gets caught up in a different kind of trouble with drinking and drugs. Eventually, he finds his way home at the end. I think it’ll speak to a good amount of people because it does touch base on some actual real-life issues and lessons to be learned.
JC: I want to discuss “The Red.” You had mentioned Spaghetti Westerns, and with the whistling on that song, I definitely hear the Spaghetti Western influence. [To hear “The Red,” click here.]
DB: Yeah. And it’s funny because that song was written before the concept came along, but it fit. That song was actually written with my friend Jamila Caro, who used to live in LA. “The Red” is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written because it’s so different from anything I’ve ever written. That whistle at the beginning was a melody [sings melody] that Jamila came up with. I thought it was going to be a guitar part. I was kind of working on the arrangement a couple years after the song was written, and my buddy Luke said, “What if you whistle it?” And then I started whistling. I was like “This fits perfectly.” But I’ll tell you what. Whistling into a microphone in a studio is one thing. Whistling in the microphone for a show is so difficult without just getting a [blows air] into the actual microphone. And so I’m like “Damn, man—it’s such a big part of the song, and it’s so difficult to get it done and to do it properly.” It’s also tricky to do it live because there’s three guitar parts, not just the whistling. It’s one of my favorites on the record for sure, but unfortunately that one’s not going to be on the live set list.
JC: You had mentioned “No One Else” earlier, but I don’t hear anything about a Western in that song, but I do hear a lot of Hendrix influence in that one.
DB: He’s my guy, but when I started writing it, it wasn’t originally like Hendrix. When I started writing the guitar riffs, I already had the words for the chorus but with a totally different melody. And it was originally almost like a Maroon 5 kind of chorus. But then I started playing that Hendrix guitar riff and weirdly those words fit right on top of it—you know what I mean? The lyrics fit right on top of the riff and with the melody. I was like, “Okay, this is cool.” I love when the lyrics and the melody match the guitar part. I think that might be the first song I actually ever recorded where that happened. But yeah, when we were continuing to write it in preproduction, it was like, “Yeah, we should try to make this a very Hendrix-y kind of tune.” [To hear “No One Else,” click here.]
JC: I want to get into “All I Can Dream.” What I found interesting is the lyrics: “I’ve played some big stages and made some big wages.” How does that fit into the Western concept?
DB: Well, in the story . . . I mean, the West is like a stagecoach and whatnot. There’re just different dimensions to it, though that lyric means something different in today’s time. [To hear a live version of “All I Can Dream,” click here.]
JC: Speaking of songs, the final track on The Vulture & The Fox, “Words Don’t Mean Much,” could fit into modern times.
DB: Yeah, that one’s actually not part of the concept. So, that’s kind of like a when-the-credits-roll kind of thing. That’s the one that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual concept of it, and it talks about stuff that’s not in the story. [To hear a live version of “Words Don’t Mean Much,” click here.]
JC: In the song, the narrator sings about three things—religion, love, and politics—that once meant something but don’t mean anything more. I felt a personal connection to it because there was a time I believed in all three of them just as much as the narrator did, and now it doesn’t mean anything to me. And I’m guessing that’s what happened here with you.
DB: Yeah, man. I’m a confirmed Catholic. When I was in high school, I went to this program called Young Life, and it was very Christian-based and it really upset me later on when I would see how much some of these religion-based organizations would really try to hammer these rules and guidelines into children’s minds. I know a lot of people find peace and warmth and happiness in religion, and I don’t want to take that away from them. But I would like people to think more outside of the box for sure.
As for love, with women and relationships, men, whatever kind of relationship you’re in—whether it’s romantically or in a band or in a work relationship, whatever—pretty much the whole song is just kind of like, “Actions speak louder than words. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
JC: The lyric that says, “I don’t listen to both sides”— I think that’s a very timely concept because I think a lot of American voters feel that way right now. As we are talking, a huge number of people don’t want either Trump or Biden to be running again.
DB: Yeah. And it’s not just them. It’s not just those two individuals, Trump or Biden. It’s all bullshit to me. It’s all to feed whatever narrative the media wants. I know personally about one company, which I can’t name or really give much detail about, that paid off the media to say that this other company is going out of business when it’s not true.
JC: Okay, now you’re getting ready for your first solo tour. Will this be the biggest tour you will be taking, or will be the same as your previous two groups?
DB: Well, the first tour the Future Villains went on was the biggest one I’ve been on so far. We did about twenty dates all throughout North America, and we were direct support for Steel Panther. So, we were playing anywhere from 1,000- to 3,000-person shows. So that was the biggest one I’ve been on.
On this solo tour, we’re not going to be
playing to crowds that big. We’re going to be playing clubs and bars and
breweries and smaller music halls and stuff. We’ve got ten shows coming up in
July. And I think another twenty-something booked for September and October.
And then, we’re going to be heading out West in November and December. We’ve
been hit with some curveballs, just right in the crunch time this year. My
original drummer can’t do the tour, so I had to scramble and call a good amount
of folks to replace him. Going live, we play as a three-piece, so there’s a few
songs, like “The Red,” that we can’t do live. “Find Me” is one we can’t really
do because that has such a big female backing vocal in it. And “On With the
Ride” has a big guitar harmony thing, and there’s a lot going on in that one and
three people can’t do it justice. And I don’t want to play the tracks if it’s
not really necessary right now. But an acoustic version of one of those tunes
might pop up every once in a while.
I like to play to a room. I’ve never played many of these venues before. And I know if some of them have restaurants and bars and there’s people sitting down. If there’s a dozen or so people having dinner and just kind of chilling, I don’t want to come out of the gates blasting with “The Conductor” when I could do stuff a little more low-down and kind of ease people into the rock-and-roll mood instead of just kicking the door down. Obviously, we’ll check with the venues to see if we should just add more dynamic to the show too. But if there’s some people who want to hear more soft country, singer-songwriter kind of stuff, then I’ve got that in my pocket too. If it were up to me, I would do that either at the beginning or the middle of most shows. I like coming out of the gates blasting with some hard rock tunes, but I love a show with good dynamics, when there’s a change in pace and it kind of gives everybody’s ears and heartrates a break for a minute.
