**The Howdies and The Pink Stones live at Eddie's Attic!**

Howdy. That word is a cowboy greeting, loose and casual, something you’d say to a friend you see on the street. But in Athens, Georgia, a howdy is something more. Order one at a local bar and you’ll get a half-shot of your particular poison. It’ll treat your head and your wallet kinder than a full shot, even if you get a generous bartender with a heavy pouring hand. “I think it’s a service industry thing,” says Shoni Rancher, who sings, writes songs, and plays guitar in a band called the Howdies. “You just got out of the weeds with your crew. You want a drink to celebrate, but you don’t want to get too messed up. So it’s howdies all around.”

Howdies are an Athens custom, an unheralded aspect of life in this small college town with a big music scene. “That’s why we took the name,” says Austin Darnell, who also sings, writes songs, and plays guitar in the Howdies. “It’s a wink and a nod to something that feels so specific to this place.” Their debut, Howdies All Around, was inspired by and created for long nights in local bars, but they are a different kind of Athens band, one that specializes in a rambunctious yet thoughtful brand of honkytonk—a style not typically associated with this place. They’re barstool philosophers who fill their songs with tangy guitar licks, loose rustic grooves, and a scrappy optimism. “Sometimes staying standing is the best you can do,” Darnell testifies on “Staying Standing,” as the band fight gravity with a two-step rhythm and a sympathetic guitar lick. “Look at me, I got the whole world underneath my feet.” For the Howdies, the shotglass is always half-full, never half-empty.

Its two frontmen have taken very different paths to the Howdies. Darnell has been playing around town for more than 20 years, first as a teenager in basement punk bands and later as frontman for the country-leaning Darnell Boys. For most of his life, he thought country music didn’t have much to show him, but then he heard Hank Williams and the Carter Family. “It’s stories about life,” he says. “It’s stories about hardship. That’s the most interesting part to me—those real-life stories, those laughing-to-keep-from-crying songs. As a child of the South, maybe that’s just baked into me a little bit.”

If Darnell gravitates toward classic country of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Rancher loves the outlaws of the ‘70s: Willie and Jerry Jeff and especially Waylon. Even as a teenager in Arizona, he heard something special in their songs, something that resonated with him. “That’s what spoke to me—all those falling-in-love songs and heartbreak songs. I hadn’t done any drinking or honkytonking at that point, but I could still identify with those tunes. I got the heartbreak.”

The duo met at a fish fry, but didn’t get close until they worked together at a pizza shop Darnell managed. During the pandemic Darnell would host guitar pulls in his backyard, and that’s where they discovered they both shared an interest in classic country songwriting. Rancher recalls the arrival of one of the very first Howdies songs: “We were hanging out at my house and drinking way too much whiskey, bitching about politics or whatever. Around 2 in the morning, my wife comes out and yells for us to shut up and go to bed. The next morning I felt like absolute shit, but Austin texted me a song he’d already written called ‘Quitting Time.’ He’s a wordsmith. He just breathes this stuff. He’s been at it a lot longer than I have, even though I’m older than him.”

Rancher, a philosophy professor (most recently at Georgia State) had never been in a band or even played a live show when Darnell floated the idea of the Howdies, but the 48-year-old newcomer took to it naturally. “I think we contrast each other nicely,” says Darnell, who works as a lab technician. “Shoni has such a unique voice, and we’re coming from these two different periods in country music. Between us, we get this weird thing that’s neither this nor that. It’s old, but it’s new. It’s Athens, so it has a little bit of weirdness to it. It gives us more versatility.”

The Howdies coalesced around the pair, eventually adding a who’s who of great local players to its ranks: bassist Seth Barham (LeeAnn Peppers), guitarist Rob Hibbs (Hibbs Family Band), multi-instrumentalist Tyler Key (Tyler Key & the Strangers), and drummer Johnny Watson.

In the summer of 2021 they played their first show—an outdoor gig in the parking lot of Buvez coffeeshop in Athens. In the crowd were Mayor Kelly Girtz, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, producer David Barbe, and T. Hardy Morris. “We were drinking PBR tallboys on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and their songs just fit the moment and vibe,” recalls Morris. “The songs really stuck with me, too—good lyrics and great stories. They were doing classic country and were having a good time. It was something different for Athens at the time.” Morris and Barbe immediately offered to co-produce a Howdies record, and soon the Howdies were holed up at Chase Park Transduction. They tracked live in the studio, with a minimum of overdubs, all with the idea of showcasing the band’s stage dynamic. “I think that a great recording—a truly great recording in any genre—you can listen to each individual person and can hear everything they do,” says Darnell. “They’re all making interesting things happen individually, but they’re all making those sounds together. That’s what we wanted to capture.”

Despite being a relatively untested band, the Howdies knew their songs well and knew what they could do together, which meant they had to loosen up and let in new ideas. On Rancher’s song “Buddies,” the band had always jammed the intro, slowly building it up before breaking into the song. It was a way to stretch themselves out and add a little drama to its tale of tragedy and perseverance. In the studio, however, Morris suggested another line of attack: “He came up with this opening lick, which wasn’t even close to how we normally played the song,” says Rancher.

“But now I can’t hear it any other way. He found the way it needed to be.”

Soaked in bluesy harmonica and riding a bucking-bronco rhythm section, “Buddies” is ostensibly about Rancher’s hero, Waylon Jennings, who suffered extreme survivor’s guilt after giving up his seat on Buddy Holly’s doomed plane. “His last words to Buddy were something along the lines of, I hope your plane crashes,” say Rancher. “Afterwards, he moved out to Arizona to clear his head, met his wife, and decided not to give up on his recording career.” It becomes not just a story song, but a rumination on why you play story songs in the first place. “If you want it to live forever,” Rancher sings in his bone-deep baritone, “you gotta have a lotta soul.”

That’s the heart of the band’s driving philosophy: music as a means of connection and commiseration. “It’s about reaching out to each other and to the audience,” says Darnell. It’s about sharing a feeling and exorcising it, because there’s a catharsis in sharing. It’s not always easy to get people to put themselves in your shoes or to let them find themselves in your words, but it’s always worth trying. We’re trying to say something that’s true to us and true to them.”

“This record was me trying to take everything I love as a listener and a player and shove it all into one thing without it sounding random,” says Hunter Pinkston, former punk turned cosmic country auteur, describing You Know Who, the boisterous, ambitious sophomore album by his band The Pink Stones. Ostensibly they play country music, yet all the pedal steel sobs, the two-steppin’ rhythms, twangy harmonies, and lyrics about broken hearts and long days on the road are launchpads for wild experiments and unexpected stylistic forays. “There’s obviously a lot of country and rock in our music, but there’s a lot of gospel and soul and psych and dub. I really wanted to get all of those things living peacefully together in one record.”

Made up almost entirely of Athens musicians who play in other bands around town (including former members of the Drive-By Truckers and the Glands), The Pink Stones match their frontman’s vast musical vocabulary while adding their own twists to spacey honkytonk, pedal-to-the-metal trucker anthems, and ecstatic gospel. Together, they have the range to be whatever they need to be at any given moment, embracing the spirit of musical freedom that has animated the local music scene for more than forty years. Yet, The Pink Stones sound like no other Athens band. “We have the space to be free here in Athens and do whatever we want,” says Pinkston. “We get to do our own thing, and there are a million other really good bands doing their own things here as well. Everyone is friends with everyone else, and everyone’s doing something constantly, so you’re always hearing something new. And you always have to stay on your toes.”

The success of their 2021 debut, Introducing…The Pink Stones, took them far away from home and kept them out on tour for long stretches. That album laid out the parameters of their sound, winning accolades from Rolling Stone, No Depression, and American Songwriter and comparisons to Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead. But when they took those songs on the road, they busted right through all of those parameters, pushing their music in new directions and coalescing into a tougher, tighter live act. Very quickly The Pink Stones developed a reputation for their raucous rock shows, and the intensity, ingenuity, and unpredictability they cultivated on stages across America informs their sophomore album.

**The Pink Stones**

After recording Introducing…The Pink Stones, at Chase Park Transduction—the legendary Athens studio that has hosted sessions by the Truckers, Faye Webster, Deerhunter, and many others—this time The Pink Stones recorded miles from any professional studio. They set up at the home of Henry Barbe, son of Chase Park owner David Barbe and frontman for the Hernies. “It was way looser,” says Pinkston. “We were able to take our time and have a little more fun. Sessions went later into the night. We did the live band thing where we tracked the whole record live and then went back to do a few overdubs.” They’d already worked out most of these songs on stages across America, especially the rip-roaring “Who’s Laughing Now?” which hides its aching heart behind a big sing-along chorus. They tackled it in one or two quick takes, then passed it along to friends and frequent tourmates Teddy & the Rough Riders, who added harmonies. “We did that song on tour with them, and I always loved the way they sounded on it. I always like to bring in as many of my friends to do stuff on a record as possible.”

Pinkston put the band on the spot, however, by showing them some of the newer songs right when they were walking in Henry’s door each morning. He wanted to see how they might bring them to life, how they might expand his ideas in ways he couldn’t dream up. That approach lends “Time’s Standing Still” its ramshackle grandeur. It opens with a slow-motion boogie-rock riff, then shifts abruptly into a weird dub-waltz chorus, toggling back and forth as Pinkston ponders his own culpability in getting his heart broken. “I had never shown that song to anyone before we tracked it. I just showed up at Henry’s and told them, This is the key we’re in. Here are the lyrics. Let’s just see what happens. It’s weird in retrospect, because that song has so many feel changes. It’s maybe the worst one not to have shown to anyone, but they still nailed it.”

Heavy touring has honed The Pink Stones’ attack, giving them the ability to chase down any wild scheme, but it’s also made Pinkston more confident as a songwriter who catalogs his feelings of alienation, isolation, loneliness, and yearning with wit and acuity. “There’s been a lot of growth and change in my life since we made our debut, and I’ve been feeling more comfortable as a songwriter, more at home as a person who plays music and expresses himself in lyrics.”

Writing about a recent breakup, he forgoes easy recrimination in favor of self-examination, especially on the rambunctious duet “Baby, I’m Still Right Here.” They’d been playing the song live for a while, but Pinkston felt something was missing: another voice in the mix, another side of the story, a Tammy to his George. He asked their labelmate Nikki Lane to help him turn it into a duet, admitting, “I didn’t give her very much direction. I just sent her the lyrics and a version of me singing the whole thing. Just do whatever feels right to you. I remember being on edge while she was recording, although in retrospect I didn’t need to be. The song is all the better and deeper for her being on it.”

While Pinkston is hesitant to call You Know Who a coming-of-age album, the trials and rewards of adulthood—with all of its responsibilities and disappointments, wisdom and contradictions—animate every song. “I wanted this one in particular to be a snapshot of us in the past year or so. We’ll make more music together and record different records, but this is where we are right now in our lives. It’s fun and freeing to be able to give the songs that kind of space, to let them be what they need to be at that time, and then let them go.”

This is an all ages event.

Presented by Eddie's Attic.

The Howdies and The Pink Stones

About

Lineup

Venue

Eddie's Attic

Download the DICE app