Drawing on a love for their plucky city, and sharing in its sense of solidarity and overcoming, Baltimore’s Charm City Devils are powering through to new audiences and growing critical acclaim with the recent release of their evocative new EP, 1904.
Comprised of lead vocalist and primary songwriter John Allen, guitarist Ted Merrill, drummer Jason Heiser and bassist Rick Reynolds, Charm City Devils have a powerfully compelling rock sound that is hard-hitting, no-nonsense, but one that display equal parts musical and compositional virtuosity and grimy, unpretentiousness, for a stellar combination that can take in music fans throughout the rock, hard rock and metal spectrums.
The 1904 EP is actually a kind of a comeback for Charm City Devils, as the group took a bit of a hiatus. During that time, Allen had a side project that saw him do some original music and tour, but there was always a desire to get back and do some new Devils music. In fact, the impetus and energy has been so infectious that another EP is expected to come around February of 2020.
It was also a deliberate decision to put out EPs as opposed to an LP, as Allen believes it’s a more logical way of building momentum, as well as logistically and economically easier.
“We were on hiatus and I was doing my side project, so the first reason we decided to do an EP was to get things going again quickly. Instead of taking the time to write and record a full length, even though there was some material still around, it made more sense to put music out there fast, tour on it and then work towards getting another EP out around the beginning of next year,” he said.
“In essence, you’re getting the same amount of music as if you were putting out an LP but we’re going to throw some extra stuff on the physical copies of the EP, so when you buy it from our website, you’re going to get more bang for the buck. And then while we’re out playing in support of the 1904 EP, we’re going to work on finishing the next one, and then we have a full album’s worth of new stuff to play live.”
Charmed City Devils began a decade ago, and within months was signed to Eleven Seven Music, a label run, in part, by Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue. Not only did Sixx get Charm City Devils a spot on the second CrueFest tour, but also gave the band its name.
“When we got signed, we hadn’t really settled on a name. So, Nikki Sixx named the band. In the 1970s the city fathers of Baltimore came up with the nickname The Charmed City as part of an attempted makeover because the city had a bad reputation back them. Nikki said Charm City reflects the city we’re from and he added Devils because it sounds like a gang, and a band is a gang. At the time, we were getting put on CrueFest and all sorts of other cool stuff, so I was like, ‘okay, cool. Done. You can call us Shit Sandwich for all I care as long as you take us out on tour with you,’” Allen said adding, that the relationship with Eleven Seven was a good, if not too short experience. The new EP, 1904, is coming out on Broken World Records, and is the band’s fourth release overall.
There is a gritty energy and sense of resilient inner strength to the music and lyrics of Charm City Devils, something that Allen believes unconsciously comes from the environment in which the band members grew up. Baltimore is a tough town, one that has often undeservedly been labelled dangerous and decrepit. There is some truth to the headlines, as Allen admits, but like most big American cities, the positive aspects of the community are often blighted by the negative.
“It hasn’t been a conscious thing, but certainly the environment you grow up in, is going to influence what you say and what you write; it’s going to shape you no matter what you do. Baltimore is a blue collar town. It’s sandwiched in between Washington D.C. and Philadelphia, so we always have had this kind of second-class citizen, this skipped over kind of feeling, this chip on our shoulder. I think that attitude comes out in the music as well. It’s a city that is in transition because of the global economy and it’s not easy to make those transitions. Especially here in the states, in places like Baltimore you have a lot of people who are like, ‘what the f*** do I do now?’ I remember when I was in grade school a teacher said that we were going to have like, six career changes in our lifetime because of the switchover from manufacturing to services and computers or whatever. I remember that struck a note for me because as I was sitting there, I was thinking, ‘no I’m not. I’m going to have one career. I am going to play music,’” said Allen.
“But my father worked for Western Electric which became AT&T, and all the other kids’ dads worked at GM or Bethlehem Steel and all three of those companies left Baltimore. So that teacher was right. In my viewpoint, throughout my lifetime, Baltimore has struggled. We’ve got crime issues; we’ve got drug issues and it’s a bad cycle. We have had a spotlight shone on the city over the last several years for Freddie Gray’s death while in custody with the Baltimore City Police and the subsequent riots. So, there are people who are terrified to come to Baltimore.
“And then you have [popular television crime shows, based in Baltimore] The Wire, and God bless [showrunner] David Simon and the success of that show, but certainly that also added to the nervousness of people coming to the city. It’s that kind of thinking that is a shame. There are a lot of things the city has to offer. There are different sections of the city that are thriving and moving forward. It kind of goes in phases, and unfortunately as some neighbourhoods get older, they fall into disrepair and things go awry. But then other areas pop up an either start to gentrify or get new developments, which is happening, for example, in a place called Inner Harbor East. When I was a kid it was a huge railyard, not it’s this thriving urban area with high-rises and mixed use residential and awesome restaurants and theatres. So, it’s crazy. There is still that disparity where other sections of the city remain quite poor and struggling. Hopefully we can see a way into making the city an awesome place in the eyes of outsiders, who don’t know the jewel that it really is.”
Resiliency, perseverance and rising from the ashes could be said to be the theme of much of the band’s music, but especially so on 1904. The title itself is reference to a huge fiery conflagration that tore through Baltimore 115 years ago, destroying much of the city centre. The city rose from those literal ashes, and Allen believes Baltimore can rise again through the tense racial divisions, areas of poverty and depredation and crime to become the ‘Charmed City’ that it once was.
“We actually came up with the title after the EP was finished. We were thinking about various things including the name of the band referencing a former nickname of our hometown and the bad press that we had received with people calling it a rodent-infested place where no one would want to live. It hurts when you hear that kind of stuff, and we decided to wear it like a badge of honour. Baltimore is our hometown, so the songs really have threads of survival in them. We’ve said this before that the way Kid Rock loves Detroit, that’s how we feel about Baltimore,” Allen, the band’s primary songwriter explained, adding that the analogy of a city rising to the challenge is mirrored in his own life.
Aside from the usual challenges that accompany a career in the music industry, which are both numerous and often onerous, Allen himself faced something far more earth-shaking – a cancer diagnosis. The song Skipping Stone from 1904 alludes to the concept of facing down challenges and rising to the occasion and can be interpreted to be both about Allen’s battles and those of his home city.
“To me, it’s a song about picking yourself up when you fall and continuing to soldier on. It’s something I know a lot about. I have been doing this for a long time and I have been lucky enough to have some successes and I have had some failures. When you are a performer, failures happen in public. So, it’s talking about soldiering on and also being appreciative of every day you have on this planet because you never know when it’s going to end,” he said.
“Right after we did the CrueFest tour, so this was 2010, I had a skin cancer scare. And it’s one of the bad ones that can migrate to your internal organs and you can succumb to it. A little while after getting home from the tour I saw this thing on the side of my nose and went to the doctor. She said it was probably nothing, but I asked her to cut it off and do a biopsy just to make sure. When she got the results, she was shocked and called me; I could tell she was a little freaked out because I was so young. And she told me to go have a surgeon remove it, and he did, and it’s been fine ever since. But it’s still kind of freaky when you get that diagnosis.”
Dollar Signs was crafted beginning with a killer riff from Merrill, with Allen adding in melodic and thematic elements to give the song a Who-ish, Won’t Get Fooled Again vibe.
“The music came together for this one really quickly, so I was like, ‘oh crap, I hope I don’t screw this one up’ because Ted’s stuff was amazing. I wanted to write something that was similar to The Who, so I laboured at it for a while and wen through a bunch of rewrites until I got to the point where it’s really about a person who is at the end of their rope. And there are so many people who find themselves in a situation where they are asking themselves, ‘man, I have been working my ass off, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.’ And the whole world revolved around the almighty dollar. The person in the song is saying, ‘I just can’t seem to get ahead no matter how hard I try.’ So, it’s very topical, and again, fits in with this theme of survival or this desperate desire to get ahead, even just a little bit,” he explained, noting that the song Tides Are Changing is related to Dollar Signs in that it’s built on a bedrock of classic rock stylings with a sense of frustration from being buffeted by the vicissitudes of modern society.
“That song has a really cool, interesting guitar riff that Ted came up with that’s got this sort of middle eastern or Indian sitar sounding vibe to it. He is a huge Beatles fan and you don’t hear that aspect of him coming out in most of our tunes but that’s exactly where he was coming from on that one. I think I was maybe channelling a bit of the Rolling Stones in the verse, but lyrically it’s even more topical for me because I am talking about things that are occurring in society in general and then get to my own struggles in the second verse. I am talking about how you can’t feed a family on crumbs when you’re in the music business. It’s feast or famine most times, in my experience. When it’s famine its pretty tough to keep going and take care of your family.”
Charm City Devils have a select few dates remaining on their 2019 schedule but had been hard at work not only writing and recording a follow up to 1904, but also putting together tour dates for 2020.
For more information on the band, 1904, future recordings and touring schedules, visit https://www.charmcitydevils.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for nearly three decades. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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