INTERVIEW: You better know the name of the band is … Cowboy Mouth

A common refrain when Cowboy Mouth hits the stage is “the name of the band is …” It’s normally shouted by drummer and bandleader Fred LeBlanc, a musician with boundless energy, a sharp wit and a rock ‘n’ roll soul. Of course, after the singer screams “the name of the band is…” it’s up to the audience to shout — and they better shout — the two words that have brought everyone together: “Cowboy Mouth.”

These New Orleans rockers are headed to the Northeast for a pre-Mardi Gras tour. They stop at New York City’s B.B. King’s Thursday, Feb. 2. Fans and newcomers can expect high-powered energy and selections off the band’s latest album, a greatest-hits collection that includes three new songs.

In other words, LeBlanc promises “one hell of a good time.”

“We just put out a greatest-hit album,” the drummer said recently in a phone interview. “It has three new songs, and we play songs throughout the band’s career. And we’ve been having a great time. Usually when we play the Northeast at this time of year, we start our rundown of shows until Mardi Gras, so that always puts us in a good frame of mind.”

LeBlanc and company offer rocking music that can be enjoyed on multiple levels. It can be celebrated as hell-raising fun, or longtime fans can dig deeper for more context in the tunes, which include “Jenny Says,” “Broken Up” and “Bad Men.”

“I think that Cowboy Mouth goes back to the tradition of old-time rock ‘n’ roll like Little Richard, Jerry Lew Lewis, all these guys that came basically straight from the church,” LeBlanc said. “That was kind of the stuff I was listening to because I used to work in a used record store when I was a child. I worked when I was 11 years old in a used record store, and while all my friends were listening to bad ‘70s and ‘80s garbage, I was listening to Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, things like that. And I tried to tell my friends about that stuff, and they just didn’t want to know. But that’s where my formative musical education came from. Plus growing up in New Orleans — Mardi Gras parades are a giant source of rhythm in the city because when you’re a child you can’t help but be exposed to marching bands all the time, and that rhythm just gets in you. The rhythm, the music, the feeling — it’s very unique to New Orleans and the people who are from there. But once it gets in you, you just can’t get it out, man.”

Cowboy Mouth might be classified as a rock ‘n’ roll band, and surely they meet the requirement. But LeBlanc said the music of New Orleans is much more diverse and emanates from the same place: the human heart. He feels that jazz, blues, rock, funk are mere expressions based on time and trends, but at their core are eight notes that everyone plays.

“I was on Bourbon Street last week with a friend of mine who was in town, and he’s a radio commentator personality,” LeBlanc said as an example. “He wanted to go eat dinner at a fancy restaurant, so we did it. And then we went down to Bourbon Street because that’s what the tourists do, but we went into this Dixieland jazz bar where they just had this killer Dixieland jazz band playing. And they knew me, and I knew them. So they got me up on stage, and some of the songs we played were like ‘St. James Infirmary.’ But we also played ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’ I got up and played drums on those, and I got up and sang a bunch of gospel songs like ‘Amen’ and ‘I Saw the Light’ and all that stuff. There’s only eight notes; it just depends how you express them. I think Louis Armstrong and Eddie Van Halen are not that far apart when you look at it — both people who have a really unique and powerful way to express what they did with their instrument that had never been done before. So in that context, I think that music, when you separate it based on time periods or trends or this or that, you’re doing the music and the listener a disservice because it all comes from the same place. And my friend who was from Chicago, asked me, ‘How did you do that?’ I said, ‘Man, we all speak the same language.’ He couldn’t understand that.”

LeBlanc grew up in New Orleans, a musically rich city that pumps out many a musician. However, much of his musical education was self-induced. He was hungry for tunes, and he sought out rarities and traveled miles for difficult-to-find albums. These were the days pre-Pandora, Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.

“If you wanted to find something that wasn’t prevalent on the media at the time, you literally had to pound the pavement,” he said. “I remember driving a couple of hours to go buy a rare Bo Diddley album that a friend of mine’s mom had in Jackson, Mississippi. It was like, I wanted it. I couldn’t find it where I was working or anywhere else, so I said, all right, I’ll come up and buy it.”

In addition to being a drummer and bandleader, LeBlanc can now add another bullet to his ever-expansive résumé: children’s book author. His aunt, who LeBlanc described as a southern grand dame, recommended that he write a book called “Fred the New Orleans Drummer Boy.” He thought it was a good idea and contacted a friend of his in a New Orleans bookstore. It didn’t take long to find a publisher, and now Fred the New Orleans Drummer Boy is available for purchase.

“I wanted the story of the children’s book to be kind of like a Cowboy Mouth show, ” he said. “Fred, the New Orleans drummer boy, is a child’s version basically of me. Fred is like a child in the book, and his band mates are named after my two children. And so one of the kids in the band gets nervous to play his first show, and the other kids in the band tell him, well, don’t get scared. Get excited. Turn the energy around.”

Not being scared and getting excited perfectly encapsulates a Cowboy Mouth concert. At last year’s Crawfish Fest in Augusta, New Jersey, Cowboy Mouth commanded the main stage, and LeBlanc held court like a musical titan, yelling at the crowd if they weren’t loud enough, descending into the audience to pump up the energy and furiously blasting away on the drums.

“For me, the whole point is to be able to walk off stage at the end of the show and say, OK, I did my very best,” he said. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in that feeling, and the greatest satisfaction I’ve ever felt in the band hasn’t been big crowds or whatever monetary rewards we have had, or haven’t had. It’s never self-glorification or any of that b.s. For me personally, when I walk off the stage, I walk off knowing that I did the best I possibly could. I gave it my all. You can find that in any walk of life. A lot of people think the rewards of life are in tangible kinds of things like I just mentioned, whether it’s money, notoriety, whatever, but the best reward you can ever give yourself is knowing that you were able to do a job well done.”

Decades ago, when Cowboy Mouth began, the music industry looked a lot different than it does today. In fact, LeBlanc questions whether a music industry even exists anymore. Today, the band has a lot more freedom with its projects, but it’s become difficult to monetize their success. Selling music doesn’t bring in as much money, neither do copyrights. This leaves live performances and merchandise.

Perhaps this is why Cowboy Mouth continues to tour vigorously. In addition to their B.B. King’s concert, the band heads to Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi and their native Louisiana in the coming weeks. It seems that LeBlanc is staying focused on the playing, on the hell-raising.

“We’re ready to go,” he said.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Cowboy Mouth will play B.B. King’s in New York City Thursday, Feb. 2. Click here for more information and tickets. Click here for Hollywood Soapbox’s previous interview with LeBlanc.