Chris Marlowe talks to Audley Freed about Cry of Love. Sometime around late 1993

Source: Reproduced in the Free Appreciation Society Magazine. Issue 59

Cry Free Done! – Chris Marlowe

CRY OF LOVE chose to record at Muscle Shoals partially because ‘60s geniuses like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones did. As a bonus, it wasn’t in a big city. CHRIS MARLOWE talks to guitarist AUDLEY FREED and learns just how appropriate this decision was.

Cry of Love hail from North Carolina, which is not generally noted as being a hot-bed of rock action. Audley Freed, the quartet’s guitarist and main songwriter, confirms, “I’m a pretty rural guy, but I steered clear of four-wheel drives and trucks with gun racks and all that sihit. We finall got our first stop light in the county when I was 15 years old. And there was one just other guy in the county that played guitar, and he was my age, so he wasn’t any better than I was. So I had to go to this guitarist who was over in an adjacent county, for like, ‘Show me Something!’ Now if you’re from Los Angles, you might meet your future band members at the Ferrari repair shop the way Sammy Hagar met Eddie Van Halen. This obviously was not an option for Audley, vocalist Kelly Holland, bassist Robert Kearns and drummer Jason Patterson. The Band has been together since 1991, but Audley isn’t too clear precisely how they first encountered each other. He explains, “We just knew each other from playing this cover band circuit, four sets a night until 4’o’clock, six nights a week. A situation like that precipitates a real community vibe. It was a real nowhere scene, trying to write tunes and make demos and shop them plus play the cover stuff to make a living. I was making $10 dollars a day literally. So we went home and got day jobs and got a practice place; the rhythm section and myself did that. And Kelly was always our first choice for vocalist, but he was in a band with friends of ours, so we just had to wait until it was sort of, as they say in the ‘90s, ‘politically correct’ to make that move. We ever did really want to steal him, but he finally made the decision himself. And once we got a line-up that really made sense, it really did come together quickly.” Quickly, in this case, means that Cry of Love have their debut album out on a major label less than two years after that final piece was placed. ‘Brother’ is essentially all new material too. “We had about 45 tunes before Kelly came to the band,” Audley says, “and we ended up throwing nearly all of them out and wrote a whole new set of songs after he joined.” Since then, with the exception of the month they spent recording at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, the band has already done shows with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bad Company and Paul Rodgers as part of a heavy gig schedule. Audley believes, “It’s real good for the band. It’s exactly what we need to be doing. And we’re going out with Robert Plant in October, so that’s going to be really fun. We’re really psyched about that. I think anybody that grew up when I grew up, regardless of what they’ll tell you now, listened to Zeppelin just like they listened to Kiss and Aerosmith and everything else. And he’s a class act, always has been. He has his integrity intact.”

This is hardly a surprising sentiment from a musician on an album which has been likened to Bad Company and Free, with bits of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding thrown in. They may not quite regret their name, which was a hastily compromise choice taken from the title of Hendrix’s last authorised album, but it has lent credence to the retro label they’re being tagged with. Audley shrugs, “Just call us neo-classical or whatever. I don’t give a shit. I mean, who cares?”

When pressed, an unmistakable note of passion somehow creeps into AUdley’s gentile drawl. He quietly exclaims, “Put it this way – I wanted to make a record that sounded the way our record sounds. And 20 or 15 years ago, that’s not really a very long period of time in the overall scheme of things. It just so happens that that was the time period that I consider the golden age of real guitar rock music.. The 50’s and ‘60s were bursting at the seams with a lot of boundless talent; that fusion of styles of music is a very exciting thing still today. Straight-up guitar rock music, Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and things like that, to me that is a sound that is highly revered. And the type of tunes that we write sound better that way. We don’t need a bunch of bells and whistles and fancy Technicolor techniques to try and mask any shortcomings in our songwriting. And you know, that’s just the kind of music I enjoy hearing. Even when listening to blues and R&B, I don’t like the real uptown slick stuff.”

Audley believes rock music is just the modern face of folk music, and as such feels Cry of Love is an honourable dot on this distinguished continuum. He would rather perfect his talents as part of an enduring heritage than grab at innovation for it’s own sake, There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of these resolutely untrendy beliefs, but it’s apparent Audley has already taken some flak when he blurts out, “I think it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs when you can make a record and it sounds like a band playing, that that has to be labelled something. When that has to be labelled, you know that things have gotten out of hand. This record is the record that we wanted to make, and it sounds exactly like we wanted it to sound. I like my record. Every night when I go to bed I can smile, you know?”

He needn’t get so defensive. Cry of Love’s purist, classic rock tunes such as ‘Peace Pipe’ or ‘Highway Jones’ reach out to all music fans whose hearts live where R&B meets rock and roll. Who knows, they may even introduce a whole new generation to their sound.