It’s 4:30 in the afternoon the day after Thanksgiving, and Cyril Neville is hard at work.
Photo by Stephen Maloney
Neville has spent most of the day insulated, along with the rest of the Royal Southern Brotherhood, from the Black Friday shopping sprees in Mike Harvey’s NOLA Recording Studio near City Park.
As bass player Charlie Wooton, drummer Yonrico Scott, and guitarists Bart Walker and Tyrone Vaughan file into the control room along with Harvey and band manager Rueben Williams, Neville quickly and quietly gets down to business.
Clad in a black vest and round black hat rimmed with feathers and sporting a yellow “Poppa Funk” button in honor of his older brother Art, Cyril wastes no time.
Seated on a rolling office chair next to Harvey, Neville leans forward intently after quietly asking for a playback of the song demo they were just working on, “Poor Boy,” written and sung by Vaughan, son of the legendary Texas bluesman Jimmy Vaughan and nephew to Stevie Ray.
The band all agrees the demo is starting to come together. They plan to use it as a basis for the final album recording session at Muscle Shoals in Alabama in early January.
“Now that we are all grooving on this song, I think it will work out well,” Neville says.
But Vaughan thinks he can do something different.
“Why don’t I play that part a step down?” he asks.
After a short conference, the band agrees that the idea may work, and Neville propels his tall thin frame back to his seat at the very front of the studio, which, having been built in one half of Harvey’s shotgun house, doesn’t offer much room to stretch out.
But the band, backed into corners and doorways and gathered around a massive grand piano, falls right into gear.
Photo by Stephen Maloney
“I think the band is getting a lot funkier, and a lot more centered around Cyril,” Williams says. “Now it’s less of a compilation of artists getting together. You still have five artists in this band that all put out their own records, but now they’re looking for that central sound that incorporates a little bit of Neville, a little bit of Meters, a little bit of soul, a little bit of rock. It’s a little bit of everything that Cyril’s been about.”
This new core dynamic that’s propelling the band through the current recording sessions comes just after Mike Zito‘s and Devon Allman’s departures, which Williams characterized as a matter of timing rather than bad blood.
“Mike and Devon really are leaving to do their own thing, and it was a good time for it, for them and for the band,” Williams said. “There were no hard feelings or anything. It was just time for things to change for all of us.”
Williams searched the internet for replacement guitarists, landing Bart Walker and turning his sights to yet another scion of a legendary Southern music family.
“When I saw Tyrone, it was like he fit perfectly,” Williams said. “It was a little weird, because I didn’t want to make it appear that I was looking for these sons of famous artists, but those are the guys who have learned show business from their family. The music runs in their blood, and it seemed like Tyrone was just going to fit so well.”
As Vaughan strums out the song demo in a lower key, it’s hard to imagine anything about him not fitting into Royal Southern Brotherhood.
“Tyrone is such a Cyril fan that I knew him and Bart playing together – now we were going to get down to the music that this band had the potential of making,” Williams said.
Up at the front of the studio, through a tangle of guitar necks and shimmering cymbals, Neville’s hat can be seen nodding up and down in time to the song, which is really coming together now.
