He is always to be addressed as 'Reverend.'
Or, when in a hurry, “Rev, what my mom calls me,” said Reverend Peyton.
And from here on out, an additional courtesy title of “The.”
Typical of a musician who plays what The Reverend Peyton estimates as 250 gigs a year, he’s on the road. For this phone interview, he is calling from a chain truck stop and convenience store.
Where, exactly?
“Man, I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea,” The Reverend said, though he is aware the question concerns geography. “Halfway between Albion, Michigan, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.”
While we’re talking geography, note that The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – an exaggeration, it’s just a trio – originates from the lower midsection of Indiana. Apparently, the actual name of the town is Beanblossom. Not too far from the Bill Monroe Music Park & Campground.
This Sunday, the band turns up in Fairport for a 6:30 p.m. show at Iron Smoke Distillery.
We must be aware that “Where are you?” can also be a question of state of mind. A state of being. In The Reverend’s case, that’s rural country blues.
A state of being solidified with the release of the band’s first album in 2004. It’s always been The Reverend on guitar, an acoustic at first. More recently, a 1954 Supro Dual Tone electric guitar. In keeping with the admittedly deep-rural look of things, The Reverend also has a guitar fashioned from a working shotgun. His wife, Breezy, plays washboard. If you’re a good audience, she’ll set it on fire. Max Senteney is the latest in a line of the band’s drummers, playing an appropriately spartan kit.
“We first started doing it, no one cared,” The Reverend said. “Now we show up, and there’s people at the shows.”
In his mind, that beats the dozen albums the band has released.
“The experience that you get, when you are in a room full of people, enjoying a live music show, cannot be streamed or downloaded,” The Reverend said. “There’s nothing that can replace it. You know what I mean? For a band like us, our bread and butter is out there doing this, playin’ live.”
It’s been an evolution, and “we’ve gotten too much better,” The Reverend said. The Big Damn Band isn’t a trio of hillbillies blowing on corn likker jugs. It has crafted this sound. This American sound.
“I have spent every day of my life working on it,” he said. “Being a better writer of songs, a better singer of those songs, a better player, a better musician, better at putting on a show, even our artwork has improved. I have always been working on it.”
As a young songwriter, he said, “I was more obtuse.” Now, he gets right to the point.
“Wherever the inspiration takes me, that’s where we’re going to go. I’m not afraid to take chances," The Reverend said. "It's real, hand-made, from-the-heart music. They haven’t found a way to AI that, or illegally download it, or stream it, or whatever.”
No, Artificial Intelligence would not be the end of The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band. Although it has faced other threats, like COVID. The answer for The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band was to shelter in place, write and record new music. Livestream some performances.
“I realized that if we didn’t continue being a band, then everybody was just going to go and get a job doing something else,” The Reverend said. “And there wasn’t going to be anything left when we came back.”
So, dipping into his savings, and selling some of his guitars, he continued to pay his band and crew. The Reverend mused he might be the only band leader to go that route. “I might have navigated things differently,” he said, “if I knew it was going to be three years.”
It was a time when The Reverend sought the solitude of a quiet fishing hole. Nothing unusual there. When the band was on the road, he traveled with fishing rods. He estimates he’s fished in 23 countries. Marlin in the Bahamas, mountain trout in Canada.
(He is silent on the issue of Genesee River carp.)
During the COVID shutdown, there were even people who paid The Reverend as a professional fishing guide, “mainly fans and stuff,” he said. “A little extra money, something to keep myself from going insane.”
Yet he was always ready to set aside the fishing poles. “I wanted to get my guitar back,” The Reverend said. “It was what I was put in this earth to do.”
Out of this enforced break from the road came what he called a metaphysical crescendo.
“I found out it wasn’t the financial hit,” The Reverend said. “It was actually just the attack to my mental health. To be able to be out there doing this, I didn’t realize how important it was to me.”
So he’s on the road again, fueled by new songs from a new album created during the COVID homesteading, "Dance Songs for Hard Times."
“There’s a song on the record, ‘Too Cool to Dance,’” The Reverend said. “That song, really, it’s about myself. When I wrote it, I said to Breezy, 'when we’re able to get out there again, I said I don’t want to be too cool dance. I don’t want to be too cool for anything. I said I just want to get out and do this.'”
The Reverend has always written music that he defines as from “a timeless space.” Songs that could have been written in the 1950s. Or songs that could have been recorded yesterday.
“In 20 years,” he said, “when COVID is kinda forgotten and is a history thing, you know, I don’t think people would hear the record and say, ‘Oh this is a COVID record.’ Just an interesting footnote. It was definitely born of the time.”
Do the times define us? Or do we define the times?
The Reverend tells of a conversation he had with a former Green Beret, who told him, “Rev, you gotta figure out who you are, if not this.’”
This being handcuffed by COVID.
And The Reverend did figure it out. “Man, there is no me, if it’s not this.”
This being his music.
“That may not be the right answer, it may not be the Zen answer, but that’s all there is to it," he said. "That’s what I have learned.”
Jeff Spevak is the senior arts writer for CITY Magazine.