Bill Mallonee never broke. Not really, at least. Even after extensive radio play in major markets both nationally and in the UK and critically lauded releases with guests like Emmylou Harris and Buddy and Julie Miller, the Vigilantes of Love could never break out of their small yet fervent fan base. So the Americana four-piece finally bid farewell to the dream standing in Mallonee’s kitchen in the winter of 2002.

The ’90s alt-country/Americana songwriter has kept going into this latest decade, still plying his craft and playing smaller shows as he can book them. Most recently he moved to a cabin in North Carolina after spending many years in Athens, Georgia — a place that wasn’t particularly kind to Mallonee’s music. Yet he’s content to keep going back to the fans who’ve loved him for so long and to talk to us about a career marked by so many ups and downs.

SSv: I saw a couple of private house shows on the concert calendar.

Bill Mallonee: You know, the last five years or so it’s been the bread and butter. I hate to say it, but it’s been really elusive to find a booking agent. You know the term ‘marquee value.’ Well, mine is next to nothing. It doesn’t even matter how much ink that I’ve gotten spilled on me. So I just haven’t been able to get the agent who gets the songwriter thing and can connect the dots. So what’s basically happened is that my wife Moriah and I try to book as many shows as we possibly can, but it’s been sketchy the last three years with the recession.

SSv: Do you like that intimate environment?

Bill: Yeah it might be house shows or some cafe or it might some folks who are church connected and they’ll put me in some dingy fellowship hall or some equally positive vibe like that. [Laughs] Here’s what I’ve discovered. I used to play in Nashville all the time with the Vigilantes of Love and even did some solo shows there, but now to go into some place like 12th and Porter, which is a really cool rock room, you have to pay them $250 in production costs up front. That means the security guy, the sound guy will make their money no matter what. But for $250, at the ticket prices they charge, that means at least the first 25 or 30 people who walk in the room, that’s their money and not mine.

So that’s one of the reasons why after 2001, it became almost impossible to keep the Vigilantes on the road. It was just too expensive to pay these production costs in places and live to tell about it. In some ways even though it sounds a little benign to play a house gig, the other side of it is that a lot of our fans will tap a keg of beer or two and will use it to have an anniversary party or birthday or something like that. So they become pretty festive events and I don’t have to tote around nearly as much gear.

Of course, I miss playing with the full band. I’d love to have that in the back pocket. But for the most part, it’s been house gigs that has kept us going. And I’ve seen more songwriters when I go to their own sites doing the same thing. It’s kind of proliferating.

SSv: I just saw David Bazan doing that same thing.

Bill: It works. It works, because if the fans are there, they want it up close and personal. I know Dave not really well, but I’ve seen him at some festivals over the years and when I see him, I’ll catch up with him. But I know he’s been through some changes in the last few years. But he’s great for that sort of stuff.

SSv: You brought it up already, but I wanted to dig a bit more on that topic. It’s been a long time since you were on the road with a band, but does it feel like a whole different musical career than that time with VoL?

Bill: Yeah, 2001 was the last show. People didn’t know it, but rock and roll has a plenty blunted, dim memory anyway. I put VoL back together last year and we were together for about seven months. There was a version out there called Vigilantes of Love and we played a number of shows in and around Athens and Atlanta and up at Charlotte — all really well received. But I could not find anybody out there — be it a manager, a booking agent or label — because I thought the version of the band that was playing was far more of what I wanted to do.

The old band was definitely an Americana band and this one had more ’60s pop psychedelia stuff in it. The other band couldn’t play that stuff very well. When I saw ‘that band,’ I’m referring back to the Audible Sigh band. That was the band that was on the road for about three years, pretty much the same guys. So when people say the old VoL, I think that’s what they mean, even though it’s been a revolving door since 1992. Whoever was available and happens to be a friend who can get in the truck is going to come and play became a part of the band.

But this newer band last year felt like I had 50 songs that I wanted to go into the studio with and record. But the bass player from that band died in September in a really tragic automobile accident. He was a good kid and we totally miss him. He was 26 and had a good heart. It’s just too dark or weird or something to replace the bass player and call it Vigilantes of Love again and then about the same time, Moriah and I found this cabin in North Carolina, so we just said that we needed a change.

Athens had never been a really good home for VoL anyway. Every band loves to have that hometown where they roll in after a tour and go into a club and everybody pays their rent that month. But VoL never had that in Athens. It’s really a hipper-than-thou kind of town. It’s always changing its flavor of the month and I always felt unwanted there year after year. The only reason I stayed there is that my previous wife and I met there, had our kids there and she worked for the state of Georgia, so we just wanted some roots there. But it was never a benevolent town for the Vigilantes. We did way better in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest and even in the UK prior to 2003. We did really well overseas.

SSv: Were you surprised having hotspots like that for your music so far from your home base?

Bill: Kind of. To a certain extent, but here’s the way it worked. When we got signed in ’92 and started touring in earnest, but by ’94, we had songs on an emerging radio format called AAA. It’s still around like WXRT in Chicago. You may already know that, but a lot of people don’t. But it was very listener friendly in the mid-’90s and VoL was all over it. We were on 90 of 110 stations in the top five during that period. That’s why we could go into Madison and Minneapolis and Denver and Boulder and Philly and Chicago and then do well.

The thing is none of those stations showed up in the Southeast. The one station was a modern rock station in Atlanta and we did have song called “Real Downtown” that had a jangly guitar R.E.M. feel. It was in the top five there for 16 weeks. But on the AAA stations, we were being played with Cracker and Counting Crows and Wallflowers. We butted up against them, but the difference was that all of those bands had major labels that were pumping huge resources into those groups. They were really good groups, too.

So they were cross-formatting those bands. They would not only have a video on MTV when MTV was still playing such things, but bands also were cross-formatting into Modern Rock stations. VoL never made it out of the AAA world. To a certain extent, I think the fact that the neo-Evangelical crowd embraced it — because there were statements of faith being made in those songs — it almost became a stain we couldn’t get off of our clothing.

In a Google world, everyone knows everything about everyone really fast. I think the reception was that this Athens band that plays Americana is really a Christian band, like we were wolves in sheep’s clothing in some minds. It was the strangest thing trying to talk to journalists who that’s what it was. It was like, ‘No, we are absolutely not. We’re not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. We’re an Americana band from Athens, Georgia.’

So it’s been a weird ride. You mention Dave Bazan and I know he’s been through that. He’s almost middle-fingered the entire group of people that originally put Pedro the Lion on the map.

SSv: Have you learned to live in that tension? Is there a part of you that looks back and wishes that label had never been applied or are you glad for it to some extent?

Bill: It’s a mixed blessing. I tell people it’s my thing and on my good days, I can be eloquent about it. But it is not my agenda when I pick up a guitar. I am not trying to change the way you think or feel about the universe. I’m just trying to tell you what it’s like from my end. That’s it. I think VoL was ahead of the curve by about six or seven years. I would never disavow anything to a journalist. I would agree that I’m a believer, but what’s that got to do with the music right now.

The funny thing is that out of the 25 records I’ve made, only one specifically went to the Christian market. That was a Greatest Hits record. We never had a hit in the world, so it was really a record of good intentions and people laugh at that. There was one song “Double Cure” and it was a 6/8 hymn-like song that was all over the map. Matter of fact, it’s been incorporated into some churches worship services here and there. That one record was just enough in this Google world to push us over.

The other 14 records I made with VoL were all secular, independent, major or smaller label releases. I do think there were some gatekeepers out there… When we did Audible Sigh with Buddy Miller and Julie Miller sang on it, we had Brady Blade who’s Steve Earle’s drummer. It was a record loaded with Americana celebrity status kind of power. I don’t know if you can remember No Depression. They were the alt-country bible and they wouldn’t review the record. They just wouldn’t.

I actually engaged with some online dialogue with the two editors and there was a conversation with Buddy Miller that they had while we were in the studio. They called Buddy and I remember this well. I was actually laying down guitar parts at the time and this was December of ’99. He said, ‘Yeah, I’m working with Vigilantes of Love.’ The response from Grant Alden on the other side of the line was, ‘Oh, yeah, they’ve got some really rabid fans. We don’t think they count.’ Buddy told me later exactly what they said, so I remember it well.

Now, they hadn’t heard the record because it wasn’t finished yet. It was based, I think, on this prejudiced sort of approach. My drummer at the time when I told him said, ‘That’s really ridiculous because those assholes will review a cassette tape from one of my friends who was literally playing in a heavy metal band three months ago and now he’s wearing overalls and playing acoustic guitar. But they won’t review an album that Buddy Miller’s playing on. Are you freaking kidding me?’ I’m serious, Matt. At some point, you just say, ‘That’s just really strange. There really are gatekeepers in the world and we’re on the wrong side of the gate.’

I think England opened up six months later, because they were playing the heck out of the record over there and we ended up spending 60 shows a year over there two years in a row. If not for that, we would have been really discouraged. But the American market, the people who were reviewing it were giving it four and five stars. I don’t know if you remember that record or not…

SSv: Yes, the one with “Resplendent.”

Bill: I hearken back to that record just because it had these kick-ass Americana songs on it. Yeah, Emmylou Harris sang on “Resplendent” that still shows up on a lot of people’s lists.

I was proud of it then. We had no label at the time. We were four guys in a van doing 180 shows a year and really just trying to make it up as we went along. So my argument to the guys at No Depression was, ‘If you want a band out there being authentic, we have no safety net underneath of us. We’re just out there doing the best that we do.’ But that record turned 10 years old last year, but I still play songs from the record in the house shows today. But if it was gonna break, it was gonna be on that record or it wouldn’t happen at all for this band. I think we all felt the same way.

The follow-up was a trippy Beatlesque pop record called Summershine that came out two weeks before the Trade Centers came down and the label pulled the plug. We worked for a full year on that album and online sites were giving it five star reviews and saying it was one of the best records they’d heard in five years and comparing it to Elvis Costello records. Our label just pulled the plug and wouldn’t re-released. We realized then it was just too hard to do it all over again.

You know, six months on the road is a long time to be out there. We all met in my kitchen in January of 2002 and everybody basically just said, ‘There’s just no reason to get back in that truck and go.’ And I totally agreed. I wouldn’t have done it if I had been on the other end as a support player in somebody’s band. There’s just not enough resources or energy out there to keep going at it.

SSv: That makes sense that you can’t stay on that same level forever.

Bill: When you’re playing in front of the same 40 to 75 people, you realize it’s not new faces and that’s when it’s time to take some inventory and think that maybe you need to rethink things. To me it just meant going out and doing the troubadour thing. I do miss the band dynamic. I’ve always been super-blessed to have such kick-ass members of the group.

*Photos by Kevin High