It's Business Time

The road and J-Roddy Walston are well-acquainted.

Constant traveling and sharing close quarters has been rough on the leader of the Business — delightfully tough, because that’s how his hard-charging rock band has built its fan base from scratch. But the frontman of the Baltimore-based rockers J-Roddy Walston and the Business was so harried for the past year — about 140 shows were played in the 365 days between June 2007 to June 2008 — that the band put off writing.

Walston and company played three shows in Louisville during that period. There are Louisville bands that play here less often than that.

“Building up our audience is the only thing,” he said. “The only way to really make it. Radio’s a joke, CD sales are down, and it’s not like Pitchfork is going to crap its pants for a band that actually writes songs. The live audience is everything.”

Walston’s respite from tour vans and sleeping on air mattresses in strangers’ living rooms was necessary for the band to create more music. The energetic four-piece — a mix of Jerry Lee Lewis and the Black Crowes — just wrote the last song for a future album which will probably be recorded this winter. (Possibly at Kevin Ratterman’s Funeral Home studio.)

“There are other bands that were on the road as much as we were, but we were booking ourselves and trying to hold down day jobs,” Walston said. “Plus, you just need to smell something other than another dude.”

J-Roddy Walston and the Business — quite ironically, when considering the name — has struggled with the music biz. The stellar 2007 album, “Hail Megaboys,” was released on the band’s own label in hopes of being picked up by a larger label with actual resources. But despite prolific touring and epic shows, the band could never get the disc much more than a cursory glance from the bigger boys.

Not that Walston is all that concerned about labels. “Any day now, I kind of expect labels to not exist anymore or at least not exist as they did before,” he said.

His to-hell-with-them attitude isn’t as self-defeating as it sounds — the Business has managed to cull together all the elements of a signed band. In the past year, they’ve acquired a manager, a booking agent and a publicist.

Walston has struck out on his own before. In his native Cleveland, Tenn., he played in the obligatory ’90s post-rock band, spending two years writing three long songs that were supposed to change everything.

They didn’t.

Walston opted to ditch his friends and to start making music alone.

“I just wanted to write good songs,” he said. “I felt like I was rebelling by writing pop songs.”

He briefly played solo, but eventually joined a band for which he’d previously opened. But that version of the Business was short-lived. Walston’s fiancee went off to school in Baltimore in 2004 and the band came along — only for most of the members to quit just months into their new lives “up north.”

Walston reforged the band with a carousel of new members (bassist Zach Westphal is the only other original), and over the course of two years inserted his band into Baltimore’s established scene. From there, J-Roddy Walston and the Business began its long road trip, growing into a truly grassroots favorite. Much like Louisville’s Wax Fang, it’s a band that you’ll love — and tell your friends about — once you get a chance to see them.

“That’s going to be more powerful than a sticker on a urinal, or even this story,” Walston said.