It was the death day of Arthur Lee and White Whale guitarist Dustin Kinsey paid the Love front man his respects while the band warmed up before their set at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga. The response from the audience, however, wasn’t a somber applause or anything remotely forlorn.

“White Fucking Whale!” someone screamed. It seemed a little early in the lifespan of the band to have people this frenetic, especially so far away from their Lawrence, Kan. home. This show, with Athens-own Elephant 6-inspired Dark Meat and Philadelphia’s Man Man, was one of their first performances since the release of their debut record, WWI, which was just a few days old.
In the fan’s defense, the reputation and catalog of frontman Matt Suggs no doubt precedes him, and the early returns on WWI were already gleaming.

Since releasing Crumble with the lo-fi outfit Butterglory in 1992, Suggs has been a tenured member with the seminal Chapel Hill, N.C. label Merge Records. White Whale is technically his third band and WWI is his sixth full-length release with Merge.

“Suggs is blue-blood deep,” says Kinsey of Suggs relationship with the label. Now, after a couple of mini-tours and a horde of hosannas over the album, White Whale is swimming in smooth seas. And Suggs is now at his best with a band as equally as pedigreed as himself, and one with the chops and ambition to pull off his brand of expansive and anthemic classic rock.

In Kansas, where the closest thing resembling seawater is the Great Salt Lake over in Utah, July 25 is White Whale day. In a state that has lately become more well-known for Sam Brownback and ultra-conservative politics than for its rock bands, this is quite a coup.

“I literally thought it was a joke,” says Suggs. On the official document acknowledging the band’s record release date, which was requested by state representatives Barbara Ballard and Ann Mah, it reads: “Be it hereby known to all that: Sincere congratulations are offered to Rob Pope, as a member of the band White Whale with release of their debut album, WWI, with appreciation for your dedication to the musical arts and the Lawrence community, and best for success on this new venture.”

Stamped at the bottom is the gold embossed official seal of the state of Kansas along with the signatures of the two representatives and the Chief Clerk of the House.
Despite the commendation (Suggs says Reps. Ballard and Mah were approached by Merge) neither he nor Pope or anyone else has yet to reap any real rewards.

“I haven’t really figured out what I’m getting out of it yet,” Suggs says. “I’m hoping to get a break on my taxes or something.”

But it’s not a stretch to assume the members of White Whale have over the years been good ambassadors for the area, at least in music circles. Suggs has called Lawrence his home off and on since Butterglory; Pope, the bassist, was a member of Kansas City’s famed Get Up Kids; drummer John Anderson was in Kansas City’s Boys Life, and along with Kinsey and guitarist Zach Holland, was also in Lawrence’s short-lived but revered Thee Higher Burning Fire.

Shortly after recording his first solo record, Golden Days Before They End, so named after the Roy Orbison song, Suggs was hunting for a back-up band for the subsequent tour. He called on Anderson, who had played at times in Butterglory, and was currently with the ambient and orchestral Thee Higher Burning Fire.

“We fancied ourselves as neoclassicist baroque pop,” says Kinsey of THBF, whose debut record, In Plain Song, was released by Second Nature Recordings, a Kansas City hardcore label.

Though obviously mislaid with their label, THBF’s polychromatic arrangements of strings, piano, brass and banjo mixed with scorching guitars and accomplished vocals made the record a critical success and an underground favorite.

“I thought of us as the antithesis of the indie rock, which had become so stale. So we had to look back for change,” Kinsey said, noting the band called Love, the Zombies and the Left Banke influences. Thee Higher Burning Fire never toured and seldom played live around Lawrence, Kinsey said. But they were still excited about the music and the energy generated by In Plain Song, so they moved to Brooklyn and recorded their second record with noted engineer and producer Thom Moynihan of the Pernice Brothers.

“No one has ever heard it,” Kinsey said. “It’s a rock record and I’m still trying to pay for it. One of my great regrets is that I haven’t paid him off.”

But the demise of THBF was Suggs’ gain, and Anderson, Holland, Kinsey, and a rotating cast of bass players stepped right in and became the backing band for Suggs’ tour.

The lineup stuck, and they recorded the follow-up, Amigo Row, as Matt Suggs and Thee Higher Burning Fire. A tour followed Amigo Row, and then the band took a break. With Suggs in his hometown of Visalia, Ca., Kinsey and Anderson in Lawrence and Holland in Little Rock, Ark., geography began to take its toll. But the band stayed in touch, and the idea to reform was always at the forefront.

“For a couple years we’ve talked about whether we could actually do it, that we could actually form a competent ensemble, one that wouldn’t dissolve,” Kinsey said. “It took us a while, but we finally did it.”

Suggs has now been in Lawrence for around a year and a half, and Holland is the only member not a permanent Kansas resident. But logistics still pose a problem for White Whale.

“The whole point of me being here is so we can work more steadily,” says Suggs. “But everyone’s got other things going on.”

Kinsey is a full-time member of the New Amsterdams, which features another ex-Get Up Kid, Matthew Pryor. The New Amsterdams played this year’s Lollapalooza the day after White Whale’s Athens show, and Kinsey had to be scurried to Atlanta early that morning to catch a flight to Chicago.

Pope also is in another major musical project: he’s replaced Spoon bassist Joshua Zarbo who recently left the band.

“So yea, we still have to schedule things even when though we’re in the same town,” says Suggs. “But we worked pretty intensely from January to this summer when we recorded. We got together quite a bit. And we tried to play the songs live before we recorded.”

One of the early shows they played was at the Merge showcase at South By Southwest with Superchunk, Robert Pollard and Camera Obscura. There, the band was called what could be the best ever classic rock mixed metaphor by a distant relative of Kinsey’s.

“My dad’s cousin lives in Austin, and he was kind of hip back in the day,” Kinsey said. “And he came out and heard us, and afterward he came up to us and said: ‘Hey, you guys sound like a shotgun wedding between Roxy Music and Black Sabbath. Like Roxy Sabbath!’ And so it stuck.”

And Roxy Sabbath seems to be a pretty apt description. The record also recalls Badfinger and Big Star, and Suggs’ vocals and melodies have long been likened to Ray Davies and the Kinks. In the beginning, however, the band had no intentions of creating a concept album.

“The songs just started interrelating, but it wasn’t like we set out to make a rock opera,” Suggs said. “It’s not really like a linear thing.”

Kinsey says the idea got planted during their first practice together when someone started playing a conch shell. From there, Suggs said his lyrics began to wrap around a fictional character he invented named Admiral Yummyman. “I don’t really know what the hell that means,” said Suggs of the character, which formed the basis of the epic track “The Admiral.”

“I usually write these kind of character driven songs, I always have,” he said. “And when we were working on these songs, these characters starting popping up when I was writing lyrics and the whole thing just kind of took shape.”

“It made him laugh,” said Kinsey. “So from there, the record, the lyrical content, started to shape itself as some kind of nautical story.

Though the record and their name conjure up Melvillian imagery and life on the high seas, no one went overboard.

“The record has ships and fucking battles,” says Kinsey. “But no one went out and got a parrot or an anchor tattoo.”

William Inman is editor of Dry Ink. Write to him at william@dryinkmag.com