“I had that English feller Plan B on the tour yesterday. I asked him what Plan A was.”

The tour guides at the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee (population 361), aren’t just great at their jobs, some of them are also celebrities in their own right. The rotund and affable ‘Goose’ – real name Randy – has been conducting tours for more than 20 years, and has previously featured in billboard and magazine advertising campaigns for the world famous corn mash whiskey. So it’s little wonder that he’s not especially impressed by any pop stars.
As it happens, there’s another fledgling star on today’s tour. Chicagoan hip hopper K-Flay – real name Katrine Flanagan (she’s of Irish descent) – has joined Hot Press and other media types as Goose steps us around the distillery started by Jack Newton Daniel more than a century ago. From relatively humble beginnings, the distillery now produces 23 million gallons of amber gold – about a billion dollars worth – every year.
K-Flay and Plan B are two of the acts who’ve travelled to Tennessee to celebrate Mr. Jack’s birthday with a special gig on nearby Barbeque Hill tomorrow night. The records are sketchy so nobody is exactly sure what age he would’ve been, but it hardly matters. It’s an annual marketing ploy, but a damned impressive one. Previous years have seen everyone from Hugh Cornwell and Tim Wheeler to Frank Black and the Flaming Lips play special shows in Lynchburg. The 2011 celebrations are shaping up to be just as special – as well as Plan B and K-Flay, two of the girls from Warpaint and the legendary guitarist and songwriter Steve Cropper will be joining the New Silver Cornet Band for the birthday show.
“It’s a really diverse grouping of artists,” K-Flay explains the following day. “There’s kind of a bluesy feel to the whole thing because of Steve Cropper and the New Silver Cornet Band so that’s kind of interesting, that everyone has their own take on a sort of blues sensibility. I grew up in Chicago, which is a blues town, so that’s what I was exposed to as a kid growing up. Obviously hip hop has a lot of roots in blues music, and there’s an interesting way I think – and I’m not sure I’ve got it yet – of trying to mesh electronic with kind of more organic blues.”
Hip hop is a predominantly male musical genre, but K-Flay is holding her own.
“The genre is getting more and more diverse,” she explains. “There’s sometimes a little bit of scepticism, but there’s a lot of really talented people involved now – guys and girls from all sorts of different backgrounds. For the most part, it’s more in the production world. There’s not a tonne of female producers out there. But it’s been cool and everybody’s been very supportive. The nice thing about hip hop is that if you’re coming to it with an authentic voice and a real perspective, people respect that even if it’s not their cup of tea.”
While she’s still an underground phenomenon, K-Flay’s profile will be boosted in Europe with the November release of a new EP co-written with Liam Howlett of The Prodigy.
“I worked with Liam on two of the songs on the EP. There’s definitely an indie rock element to a couple of them. Thematically, it’s about the perspective of a jaded, mid-20s girl wandering around the world. There’s not any love songs or relationship songs on it – not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s trying to talk about and explore things like identity.”
Soulful Londoner Ben Drew – aka Plan B – laughs when told about Goose’s ‘plan A’ question.
“No, he didn’t ask me that,” he smiles. “That’s just part of his show. He’s a lovely guy, Goose. A proper character. It was amazing doing the tour. Coming here and seeing the set-up and how the process hasn’t changed in all the years, and seeing that Jack Daniel was a real person. That kind of thing means something to me.
“It makes Jack Daniel’s more than just a brand. It is a brand, obviously, but it’s a drink that I’ve always drunk. It’s something that me and my friends will give to each other at Christmas and birthdays – a bottle of Jack. We’ll try and find the most exclusive bottle. Recently my friend paid almost £100 for a bottle of Green Label Jack. Which I got here and realised it’s the least expensive bottle you can get!”
In addition to performing songs from his number one album, The Defamation Of Strickland Banks, Plan B reveals that he’ll be doing a couple of old classics as well tonight.
“I was worried that it could be glorified karaoke because I’m singing classic songs and I ain’t the original person who sung them. I felt the last year-and-a-half I’ve been in the voice that I used to write the album. I found this strong voice, it sits lower in my diaphragm and is more powerful than the voice on the record. So I wanted to approach these songs in my own way. And I was worried I wouldn’t have enough time to do that. But the New Silver Cornet Band are amazing.”
A few hours later and quite a crowd has gathered in the barn-like structure on Barbecue Hill. In addition to about 50 media representatives, Jack Daniel’s have flown more than 200 Irish and UK competition winners across the Atlantic for this exclusive gig. Appropriately enough, there’s a delicious barbeque served before the show starts. Lynchburg being in a dry county, it’s totally illegal to sell alcohol. Fortunately, they are allowed to give it away for free.
Once everybody is fed and whiskied, the gig kicks off with a four-song set by K-Flay. Her machine-gun like delivery works most effectively on two of her originals (‘Stop, Focus’ and ‘Doctor Don’t Know’), but, brilliantly backed by the New Silver Cornet Band, she sings the two covers – the Zombies’ ‘Time Of The Season’ and Glenn Miller’s ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ – with real passion. Her heart may lie in the underground, but mainstream acceptance can’t be far off. It’s easy to see why the likes of Liam Howlett and The Beastie Boys wanted to work with her.
LA indie act Warpaint are next up (well, two of them, at least). Alternating the harmonious and ethereal vocals, Wayman and Kokal deliver stunning reworked versions of ‘Undertow’, ‘Burgundy’ and ‘Elephants’, made all the better for the rhythms of the house band. The New Silver Cornet Band have an awe-inspiring collective CV. Fronted by Jon Tiven (producer of Frank Black and Alex Chilton), its members have played and recorded with everyone from The Rolling Stones and Paul Simon to Alice Cooper and Steve Earle.
Steve Cropper comes out on stage brandishing a tiger-striped guitar for their superb cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, and stays for renditions of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Do Right Man, Do Right Woman’ (confusingly, Wayman’s intro gives the impression that Franklin is dead) and The Shirelles’ ‘Dedicated’.
A suited and booted Plan B comes out to wild applause. ‘Recluse’ and ‘Welcome To Hell’ from The Defamation Of Strickland Banks sound like warm-ups, and it doesn’t help that his mic starts hissing. For a moment it looks like he’s going to storm offstage, but instead he teams up with the backing singers and freestyles it on their mic until the problem is fixed. A true pro!
Things pick up considerably from that point, and ‘Writing’s On The Wall’ finally gets the crowd going. Cropper comes out again for his covers of ‘Knock On Wood’ and the Warpaint girls also re-emerge to sing backing on ‘Soul Man’. The USA is the home of soul, but Plan B more than holds his own tonight.
Cropper takes over lead vocals to perform two of his best known songs. ‘Midnight Hour’ goes down a treat. “Here’s one I wrote with my friend Otis Redding,” he says before launching into ‘(Sittin’ On The) Dock Of The Bay’. The crowd whistles an entire verse, prompting him to remark, “Damn, we should’ve put that in the original recording.” It’s a special moment – and every camera-phone in the house is raised aloft.
Plan B returns and joins him for the closing number, ‘Big Bird’, and then... that’s it. There is no encore. Still, the audience is happy, the night is young, and we’ll all be back in Nashville for midnight.
Happy birthday, Jack Newton Daniel! Whatever age you would’ve been, it was a mighty fine party...