OTIS is a talented, young, four-piece band whose music is a mix of classic rock, heavy blues, roots, and southern rock. They have a new single released entitled “Last Fool in the Line” that came out in July, and they are a band with a story to tell.
OTIS are:
Boone Froggett: lead singer and guitars.
John Seeley (bass),
Alex Wells (guitar),
and Dale Myers (drums)
OTIS is new musical blood for a new day with heavy, melodic blues-rock riffs, soaring guitar work, a pounding rhythm section, and raw, soulful vocals from Boone Froggett.
The band embraces Southern rock’s hallowed past while charting their own future. With some of the legendary Southern rock bands winding it down or no longer in existence, OTIS is a proud, new torchbearer of the Southern rock/blues-rock heritage.
The band’s debut album, 2014’s “Tough Times: A Tribute to John Brim,” is a raw, groove-oriented, blues-drenched masterpiece that got rave reviews and was a blueprint for things to come for the band.
The blistering “Eyes of the Sun” was released in 2018 on Cleopatra Records and more than lived up to the promise of the band’s debut album.
The new single was recorded in a live full-band take at The Rock House in Franklin, Tennessee. The single was produced, engineered and mixed by renowned Grammy Award-winning musician Kevin McKendree (Brian Setzer, George Thorogood) was mastered by Ty Tabor of the acclaimed US rock band Kings X.
We sat down with Boone Froggett to find out about these guys, whose Spotify now has over 21K subscribers and whose new single has already hit over 27K listens. This is a band starting to gain momentum again, and we are excited to be a part of it all.
They also draw inspiration from some of the all-time blues/soul greats like Muddy Waters, Leadbelly and various artists from the classic heyday of Motown Records, and this was where we began the interview. We began here because we did a feature piece a year or so back on the wonderful Leadbelly and are currently researching a piece on Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. So we just wanted to talk about Leadbelly!
Boone: I think that in these modern times, these old blues men and women are even more important than ever they were at their height. That was some of the most creative guitar playing and singing that was ever recorded. I listened to the blues backwards because I was born in 1990, I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Thunderbirds, and then I traced the roots back to Eric Clapton, and then I had to trace the roots of that back to Muddy Waters. Then a couple more steps and you are finally back to Robert Johnson and the likes of Leadbelly and then you are at the roots of where the blues come from. Then, when you go back and listen, you are ready to make your own creation in the blues world. But until then, until you reach the originals, you won’t get authentic. It won’t feel right. There really aren’t many of those original blues guys left, even here in the States, that you can go and see. There’s Bobby Rush, who is 90, and Buddy Guy, who is a few years younger, but he’s getting ready to retire from touring. So there are a lot of links missing from the music of today and the folks that we are talking about. So if we young guys go back and study that music and pick it up, then that helps put a few more links in the chain and keep it alive. But, what these guys were doing was really radical because they were using the influence of gospel music to create something new, that wasn’t always acceptable. If you study Howling Wolf, then he really struggled with this, as did Ray Charles; people were not always accepting of them. When some hear this music today, they don’t think that it was radical trailblazing music, but at the time it really was, there was nothing else like it.
We have always felt here at the magazine that Elvis, at heart, was a gospel performer. Elvis was really black gospel; that’s where his roots were. He became other things, but that was what he always wanted to be.
Boone: I agree with you absolutely; he was a gospel singer first, then Sam Phillips (founder of Sun Records) began presenting songs that he already had the publishing rights to, songs like “That’s All Right,” and suggesting that Elvis record them. Then that just changed the course of history and I love Scotty Moore’s guitar playing on the old stuff, but being from the south, I feel Little Richard has a shout at the king of rock n’roll title; he was the man.
One of the keys to knowing a band, we think, is to track back to a band you love and see who they were listening to. So if you love The Beatles, who were The Beatles listening to? Then go the extra step and build up the chain of sounds and ideas by taking a step further. So what is Boone listening to today?
Boone: It’s all over the board! But perhaps it hasn’t changed that much over time. If we are on the road traveling with the band, then we love the blues and southern soul, some Atlantic from the 1960s, and Motown. We listen to some modern blues rock; we listen to Black Country Communion, and you can’t go wrong with Glenn Hughes; and we love Deep Purple and Trapeze. But we also listen to cultural stuff where we’re from. There’s a band called The Kentucky Head Hunters and they were big in the late eighties, early nineties, and rockabilly and blues rock and country music. They were huge on the country scene, they won awards—they won a Grammy for Best Country Performance. We grew up in the same town as them, and that was something for us—that we could use our cultural upbringing from where we are from and use that to launch ourselves into the world rather than having to go to a big city and launch from there. You can make it in a small town, so they were influential. But I listen to all those blues guys still, and I cut my teeth on that. It’s great American music and we are proud of where we are from.
We think that our great bands in the 1960s—The Beatles, The Stones and so forth—basically took black American music that was arriving through the docks in Liverpool and then repackaged it and resold it back to the US.
Boone: And we are grateful to them for that, as that got people like Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and ‘Shindig’ along with the musical variety shows; it gave them a new lease of life as the blues thing had been kind of dying in the US; no one really knew how to market it. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and the early rock scene took off, and then the soul scene took off and left the blues market in the slip stream. It was turning back into an underground music scene again. The story of the blues is amazing; it comes to prominence and then dies up again. And there are wonderful side stories, like how Eric Clapton paid for Howling Wolf’s gravestone (he paid for the tombstone and to have a guitar and harmonica etched onto it). It is what that music meant to them. For us, being a younger band, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers were just as big to us as the American bands such as the Allman Brothers. Then there are the great guitar players, Peter Green, Mick Taylor and Clapton; they all had such a great understanding of the blues. These greats knew all the old songs and pulled back on the stories for the forties and fifties music. We have a great appreciation for the British blues.
Turning to OTIS now, we listened to the last album “Eyes of the Sun” (2018) and enjoyed, especially, the last song “Let Your Love Shine Down.” The track has a lovely vocal harmony. We wondered if it was the double harmony of Boone’s vocal, like John Lennon used to, or was it backing vocalists?
Boone: There was some doubling of my vocals on the chorus and then the rest of the guys were singing in harmony with me. Then we brought in two ladies who sang in a local church and those are the big voices in the background. We were trying to go for the gospel influence mixed with southern rock and I think we got very close to what we set out to achieve.
Is it still part of the live set, or has it fallen by the wayside?
Boone: We still play it often. If it’s a headliner show and we have a ninety-minute set, then we will play it, but it is a longer format song, so it’s hard if we are opening for someone and doing a thirty-minute slot, then it’s too hard to work that one in there.
The last album was in 2018, and we now have a new single in 2024. That is quite a big gap between releases. So what happened?
Boone: We were going full steam ahead around 2018-2019, we went over and did the UK and Europe. Then the pandemic hit and our original drummer decided he wanted to stay home and do the family thing. Then our guitar player decided he wanted to head off and play bass for a rock band. So that left just John Seeley, the co-founder of the band, with me. While that was going on, I had thyroid cancer and I had to get my thyroid removed, take radiation and so forth. Just health-wise alone, it took me a year to get the green light. Once that was seen as safe, there were two new guys to bring into the band. We brought in Alex Wells (guitar) and Dale Myers (drums). With those two on board, we started touring again last year in 2023 and we did about 20 dates. We have been just building up again. We have released two singles this year. We first released a Betty Harris cover for “There’s a Break in the Road.” It came from her album “The Lost Queen of New Orleans Soul,” and that was such a cool song. We are at a point in our career where we really resonated with the message of the song and then we just released “Last Fool in the Line” about three weeks ago and the reception has been great. We have had as much attention from that single as we have from anything in our whole career. Joe Bonomassa has just added it to two play lists. We have had track of the week in music magazines and we are at over 22k streams over at Spotify.
Absolutely, it seems to be momentum-building.
Boone: I think we are heading in the right direction, and with music, if you try and force things to happen, you will always suffer; you have to just let the universe take care of you to a certain extent. When it is your time, then you need to get out there and push, but if it isn’t your time and the stars don’t align, you will just wear yourself out.
One of our friends at the magazine is BB King’s daughter, Shirley King. She told us how the blues is a lived experience and that when you scratch the surface of any good song with emotion, you will find the blues. But she also notes how blues singers were entertainers and storytellers.
Boone: Absolutely. Playing blues music is not really a young man’s game. My dad had a tape collection and I was going through it one day when I ran across BB King. I played it and I heard this one note, and it set me off on a lifelong journey. When he plays, it is so tasteful, and there is so much life and meaning behind it that no one could ever play those notes like BB could. His vocals, guitar and the whole experience changed my life in a moment. All I had to hear was a note, and I resonated with that. I seem to connect with people older than me who have more life experience. I got to meet Bobby Rush (who won his first Grammy at the age of 83 for the album Porcupine Rush) at a blues festival last year. Bobby and I hit it off. We talked about old blues stuff and I knew some of the stuff he was talking about, and he was teaching me things that I didn’t know and then he was asking if we had ever done any of his music. And I was telling him that we hadn’t yet, but would. Since then, we have added “Chicken Heads” to our live set and people love it. I get up and tell the story of him prompting us to do that, and that’s just great for keeping his influence alive. He was the nicest of people and I have been touched by these people. Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top has been a driving force. When our first album came out, he, by chance, got a copy of it and he gave us a call. He said it was really authentic music with great guitar playing. His secretary sent us a press quote and that really got the ball rolling. He gave copies to Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy and several others; it’s like these elder statesmen of the genre are the people we connect with the most. It can be difficult to connect with people our own age because our influences go so much deeper and our mission statement as a band is to connect with people and drive home the emotion, educating them where the music comes from. We have a different attitude than many people our age; then again, the older you get, the less you seem to know sometimes!
On the new single, we loved the funky feel it has, and the drums seemed to drive that rhythm really well; they were clearly up in the mix a bit and it kept that funk feel to the track very effectively. It had a good groove.
Boone: We had that song in our backpocket for a while. We had been playing it out live and were able to gauge the audience reaction. Sometimes you can take a song out and watch the crowd, and if they don’t get into it, we will take the song back and shake it up. We had the song ready to record, and the funk and drum influences were important. We wanted to make the drums and bass the center piece of that song, as it’s a soul-inspired, funky tune. It was a great opportunity to showcase the band and blues-rock music can sometimes have the guitar overshadow everything and I don’t like that. I want to play for the song, not just show what I can do. We are not that kind of band. The song was produced by Kevin McKendree and he is a great producer, he’s worked with so many cool people. We only had three microphones for that one, so it was an old-school recording in the room, and that’s what we wanted. As far as the influences on the song, when I wrote the guitar part, I was listening to a Marvelettes song called “Danger Heartbreak,” and it had a cool looping guitar thing going on. I got ideas from there and it developed. It’s been good for us; it’s a little simpler than some of our earlier material but people are connecting to it. We are connecting with the audience through it.
With the drums, as Gene Simmons says, jungle drums are exciting. Have a listen to the drums on the music with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and you have drums that excite. Drums can lead just as much as the guitar.
Boone: Yes, and with the music we love, where would James Brown be without the drums and bass? We wanted to put that element in.
And the year ahead?
Boone: There’s lots of touring going on, and it’s been a great year for us. It is a great feeling to get the momentum back.
We really enjoyed talking the blues with Boone, and this is a band that will soon be flying high. If you go to the website, you can track their live shows and releases.
We hope you liked the feature, dear reader! If you did, please check out the other pages of the magazine; we have many great features, merchandise, editorials and even poetry! We work hard for you, and if you want to show some appreciation and support what we do, then do use the Support Us link below! Always appreciated.
The band’s website is here
You can stream singles and albums by OTIS here
By Mark C. Chambers
and
Lorraine Foley
