What makes a band huge? What turns a group of people into not just musicians but Rock Stars? This question has occupied the minds of record label executives since the inception of the medium but I don’t think there’s ever been an adequate answer. Sometimes, record sales are an indication — as is hype in the music media — but there are plenty of exceptions to both of those rules. That band that you read about in everything from Spin to Pitchfork to TV Guide could well have only sold 800 copies of their massively over-reviewed record. A prestigious label isn’t necessarily a litmus test either, as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has brazenly demonstrated.

It’s a hard thing to quantify, fame. In rock n’ roll, the stakes are often so small or bizarre that no one really knows where a band stands in the pantheon until long after they’ve arrived, or departed, as the case may be. As pretentious as it may sound, I’d argue that it boils down to some surge in the collective subconscious. One day, everybody wakes up and just knows that a band is blowing the fuck up.

At that moment, a band has made it to The Cusp. They exist in that space between obscurity and fame. This is a precarious stage of a band’s career, with one of only three possible outcomes following. Scenario one: The band never quite breaks into the mainstream, is resigned to critical acclaim and ekes out a living from a small but rabid fan base. Scenario two: The band crumbles under its own weight and implodes from the pressure of trying to sell a shit ton of records. Scenario three: the band becomes huge. Absolutely fucking huge.

Lucero is on The Cusp. The fuse has been lit and is burning, from state to state, city to city, rabid crowd to rabid crowd, inching towards an explosion. Since the band’s beginning, fans have watched as Lucero’s relentless touring schedule garnered first a regional and then a national following. Each album achieved a greater momentum than the last, seeing them sign with increasingly larger labels. This past December, my band, the American Princes, got to go on the road with them and witness, firsthand, some of the hysteria surrounding the group. Sure, I’d seen them play to massive crowds in Arkansas and Memphis, but those were hometown shows. Normally, those are the biggest shows a band is going to play. To see similar or even greater numbers of people throughout the United States, however, gave me a new perspective on the band.

Being at a Lucero concert, you witness a past-capacity crowd react with a mixture of typical rock n’ roll enthusiasm and something else that borders on a religious ecstasy. One of the more intense shows I saw them play was in Austin during this past South By Southwest. It happened at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday, in a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of the festival. It was packed, elbow to elbow, with absolutely no room to breathe, much less move. I arrived midway through the first song and couldn’t hear the band, as they were overwhelmed by the screams of the crowd. These weren’t just the typical woos that someone shouts out because they’re psyched. These were from the It’s-1964-And-We’re-Seeing-The Beatles-Oh-My-Fucking-God-It’s-John-and-Paul-and-George-and-Ringo school of shrieking. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought that people were really capable of making those sounds. I thought that they had disappeared, a victim of evolution just like some vestigial organ. Not so. Those kinds of hysterical wails were just waiting patiently in the wings for the next saviors of rock n’ roll.

Soundtrack of our lives
Pop music’s greatest strength is its ability to let an individual take a particular song and incorporate it into his or her own experiences. Irrespective of the songwriter’s original intent, the music becomes bound to the narrative of the listener’s life. When Natalie Portman’s character, Sam, in Garden State made the grandiose claim that The Shins would change Andrew Largeman’s life, the implication is that “New Slang” will worm its way into his consciousness, running through his head at significant moments in his life, augmenting them with an internal soundtrack and adding a layer of meaning. This statement is pretentious, but it’s also true. In American culture, reference after reference is made to the idea of having our own, personal soundtrack that plays as we go through our daily lives. Items like the Walkman or the iPod or the car stereo only serve to reinforce that impulse in contemporary music listeners. You work to Social Distortion, drive to Kanye West, fuck to Björk, drink to the Pogues.

Though I am now in the ancient demographic of the late-20’s-early-30’s set, I still remember that there are few things in the world that are better then being teenaged and shouting along with a band that speaks to and for your heartache. So much of that period of life is wrapped up in not having anyone to relate to or an adequate way to express yourself. Thus, those few bands that get it right – the ones who say what you’ve always wanted to say and say it in a way that let’s you know they feel exactly like you do – will fill you with an incredible, profound joy. Though I see myself and my friends growing older, and certain aspects of our tastes changing profoundly, I notice that we still rely heavily on music to express our feelings, to get us through hard times, and to augment the good times.

Lucero is great at giving their audience this gift. Their songs resonate with their fans in a way that few other artists are able to manage. A testament to the universal themes that run through their body of work is the fact that people from all walks of life are hit equally hard by songs like “Sweet Little Thing,” “Bikeriders,” or “My Best Girl.” On tour with the band, I saw audiences comprised of crust punks, tattoo artists, secretaries, dentists, frat boys, lesbian bikers, hippies, magicians, et al. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top is a fan, but you can also spot a Lucero shirt being rocked in Hustle & Flow. The band is becoming ubiquitous in all corners of pop culture. This is a direct result, I would argue, of the depth and breadth of their songwriting. Like any other great band, they’re able to make people from all ends of the spectrum feel directly spoken to. When asked about this phenomenon, Lucero frontman Ben Nichols breaks it down to the common denominators.

“One thing that our crowd has in common is that most of them like to drink heavily,” he says. “Beyond that, the lyrics in Lucero are pretty straightforward stuff. There’s not a lot of hidden meaning. I think the lyrics center around relationships, for better or for worse, and drinking, which, no matter if you’re a frat kid, a train hopping hobo, an indie rock kid…there’s something in there that’s pretty plain and common to everybody.”

Night after night during that December tour, I witnessed people yelling the words to the songs at the top of their lungs. They weren’t singing along simply because the songs were good. They were singing along because the music had become incorporated into the fabric of their lives.

Lucero Has A Posse
To a small-yet-growing core of devotees, Lucero’s music is more than a means of entertainment; it’s a means of existence. Though the band operates, by and large, within the realm of indie rock and its punk-originated ethos, the fans are a different matter in one regard: they follow Lucero from show to show, Grateful Dead style. For a growing number of people throughout the country, these shows are to be taken in night after night, town after town. They plan road trips, piling into cars with friends, and drive for hours to see the band. In Louisville, I talked briefly with a girl from Madison who had met a group of other Midwesterners via Lucero’s message board and decided to fly down, en masse, to the Louisville show.

“Aren’t they playing in Wisconsin soon, though?” I asked her.

“Yeah, but it in, like, months,” she replied.

As the night progressed, I met some of the other people in her group. What amazed me was that, by and large, these people didn’t appear to have very much in common. They were from Minneapolis, St. Paul, Chicago, Madison, and the outlying cities throughout the Midwest. Apart from liking Lucero enough to shell out a few hundred dollars to see them play a show, they seemed like strangers. A few nights later, I met a kid from Kentucky who couldn’t get off of work for the Louisville show, and instead flew down to Virginia Beach so as not to miss the band on that tour.

A growing number of Lucero fans are taking it on the road. These days, they aren’t the only familiar faces at any given show. One will overhear conversations of people who compare shows from Jackson, Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, etc. At a show in Chicago, it seemed like there were as many people from Tennessee and Arkansas as there were from Illinois.

With Lucero’s fans, as in any community, some members stand out more than others. One of the perks of being in a touring band is the ability to meet interesting people from all over the world and, concurrent with your touring schedule, keep up with them on a fairly regular basis. As mentioned before, Lucero attracts some characters and, in the process of going on the road with them, I was fortunate enough to meet a few. My favorite night was in Wilmington, NC. It began with a guy named Magic Mike doing card tricks in the band room that left all of us clapping and cheering like a group of kindergarteners.

“Oh shit, then this must be your card,” he’d say as he pulled the Jack of Diamonds out of his mouth with (Lucero bassist) John Stubblefield’s name written across the front in magic marker.

Shortly before Lucero took the stage, a man covered head to toe in tattoos, wearing nothing but a thong and a captain’s hat got up on stage and introduced the band to a cheering crowd.

After the show, we all went back to the motel for a night of drinking. Around 5 a.m., I crawled into bed, only to be woken up five minutes later by Collins, a guitarist and singer in my band.

“Dave, you really need to see what’s going on in the next room. A guy walked in, laid down a bunch of surgical towels, and busted out a tattoo gun. Free tattoos in the next room.”

Even drunk, I couldn’t imagine getting inked up at 5 a.m. from someone who might be as perilously wasted as I was. Plus, I figured Collins was joking. Sure enough, however, Lucero guitarist Brian Venable walked out of his room the next morning with a magnolia flower on his forearm and a banner that read “Far From Home.”

I’m sure that the experience of being tattooed in a hotel room might evoke a lot of different feelings in people, not all of them complimentary. However, for me at that moment in the parking lot, I had never seen anything more magnificent.

Cult of Personality
Lucero operates in the Tom Waits sphere of rock n’ roll. When a person listens to their music or sees their show, he or she feels a sense of identification and as a result, the listener starts feeling a little tougher, and a little more rock than he or she might otherwise be. The psychological phenomenon that makes Lucero a great rock n’ roll band can also explain why Robert De Niro was a good choice for Raging Bull and why Corey Haim was a terrible choice for Blown Away.

One other aspect that contributes greatly to a band’s inherent magnetism is their availability to their audience. To be able to talk with your hero will further enshrine the hero. Night after night on tour in December, I watched kids come up to Ben, their faces masks of trepidation and excitement, wringing their hands as they waited for the right moment to break into conversation.

They’d invariably say something like “I saw you guys last April and the show was awesome.” Nichols would break into a huge smile, say “Thank you,” and then start talking casually with the fan. I’d watch as each person was immediately put at ease and genuinely engaged. The anxiety drained from their faces as they started talking. After a minute, the conversation would end and both parties would walk away, Ben to talk with someone else who was trying to get his attention, and the fan to bask in the glow.

I think that there’s an element of being in a band that’s analogous to a political campaign. Like a candidate for public office, the most successful bands are able to be a multitude of things to a multitude of people, and are able to have an entire audience leave the show feeling like they’ve had a personal interaction with the performers. The boys in Lucero don’t just let the audience connect with their music; they make themselves available as people, too.

There’s a dark side to having people identify with your art, however. After spending so much time listening to his music, people often put expectations on Ben to behave in a way that reflects the persona of the songs. The problem is, the songs are just universal enough to throw Ben open to the whole spectrum of expectation. He’s put in the position of having to mean so many things to so many people. Dangerously, the common denominators of everyone’s perception of Ben are smoking, drinking, and general hard-living.

“There’s definitely that aspect of it: we’re known as a hard drinking band and people come to the shows a lot of times to get hammered, throw beer on the stage, buy us shots, and have a good time. We don’t necessarily want to get completely sloppy drunk every night, but often we do give in to that pressure,” Nichols says. “There’s another side of that, as far as the songwriting goes and developing this personality for a band. I do, to a certain extent, keep it in mind when I’m writing the songs. I don’t know, I guess it keeps me mindful of quality control. We know what we do and we know what we do well. It definitely crosses my mind, what it is that people appreciate about Lucero, and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to fuck it up.”

The opening scene of “Dreaming in America,” a recently released documentary of the band on the road, shows Lucero onstage so drunk that they’re incapable of playing. Ben rants, the soundman pulls power from the microphone, and chaos ensues. While this isn’t a typical show, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Lucero can play for a long time and they won’t say no to shots. In combination, these proclivities can lead to a real-time lesson in entropy. When asked to talked about the opening of the documentary, Ben is straightforward.

“I usually bring it up as a preemptive thing. You know, ‘ooh, that first scene is tough to watch.’ It is tough for me. I try to diffuse that before any conversation takes place about the DVD. Remember, I was onstage for about two and a half hours that evening, and that’s not obvious when the DVD starts. I’m not making excuses. It does relate to what we do, but I’m usually not that bad off,” Nichols says. “Usually, it doesn’t bother other people as much as it bothers me. They take it as part of the band, and as part of what they appreciate about Lucero. A lot of bands take themselves very seriously, and you don’t see bands go out on a limb and completely fall off the tree. Everybody plays it pretty safe. We’ve never let playing it safe get in the way of having a good time. People accept that, and encourage it more often than not.”

What keeps me from worrying, though, is the fact that the drinking doesn’t have the dark, destructive side of rock n’ roll’s classic cases of tragic-demise-through-substance-abuse. Historically, the explosive instances of drinking and drugs were marked by either masking or exposing the artist’s demons. On the road, the band doesn’t seem like a bunch of Townes Van Zandt’s running around so much as they resemble an 80’s-era Beastie Boys.

No sure things
Being on The Cusp is an exciting time in a band’s life. Maybe the most exciting time. By all accounts, the ride to the top is fantastic, and logic dictates that you only get to experience that once. But again, at this stage in Lucero’s career, stardom is merely implied, not promised. There are no sure things in rock n’ roll, even if you write songs that matter.

But I’m hopeful. The signs are good, if sometimes conflicting. In April, I tried to sneak into a sold out Lucero show in Chicago. When I got to the venue, I could tell that it wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t even get into the club’s adjacent restaurant without waiting for people to leave, as they too were at capacity. When I did get inside I saw Ben accosted by a man in his mid-20s.

“Hey, do you have any extra tickets?” the man asked Ben, “To be honest, I don’t care about seeing Lucero. I think I saw those guys a few years ago and I wasn’t too impressed. I love the opening band, though.”

Ben took it in stride, laughing and talking with the guy. Suddenly, realization dawned on the man’s face.

“Oh fuck, you’re in Lucero. You must think I’m an asshole.”
“Not at all,” Ben said. The man was spared any further embarrassment, as their conversation was broken up by a woman who was trembling with excitement.

“I just want to show you this,” she stammered as she pulled up her sleeve. There, on her forearm, nestled in between a bunch of other tattoos, stood a freshly inked Lucero logo.

“Wow,” said Ben, “That’s incredible.”

The woman looked as though she might faint, and stumbled off to meet her friends with a rapturous smile on her face.

In the span of two minutes I witnessed Ben get inadvertently trash-talked to by someone who didn’t recognize him at his own show, only to turn around and be buttonholed by someone so enthralled with his band that she tattooed their name on her arm. That moment stands in my mind as a strong metaphor for Lucero, a band simultaneously capable of being obscured and lionized.