Zac Brown Band prefers making music over high drama

The music business has had its share of low-key stars — not everyone favors clothes made of meat or, say, stabs their girlfriend — but the Zac Brown Band might collectively take the prize for the most easygoing band in history.
 
Although the band has sold more than 5 million records, snared eight No.1 singles on the country charts and regularly tours arenas, it works hard at maintaining its down-home, rootsy origins. There isn’t a lot of star power being thrown around.
 
Brown is clearly the band’s leader, for example, but only occasionally does interviews, spreading the opportunity (chore?) among several band members. Meet and greets with fans are more like traveling backyard barbecues, with food provided and prepared by local farmers in exchange for VIP treatment at shows.

Brown also spends a lot of time working on Camp Southern Ground, a summer camp for special-needs children that will open in 2014. Mostly, however, the Zac Brown Band tours, writes and records, which is pretty much what band members have always done.
 
It’s a group of journeyman musicians who have traded bars and clubs for the KFC Yum! Center, where it performs Thursday night.
 
“Everybody in this band has a fabulous work ethic,” said bassist John Driskell Hopkins, who joined in 2005, “and I think that kind of attracts people to each other. You see who’s out there really swinging it and really going for it, and we see that in each other. It’s kind of inspiring. Everybody is industrious in their own way and makes it happen.”
 
Brown, a Georgia native, has been making it happen as a band leader since 2002, when he put together a four-piece group, started a record label, and began hitting the road. Over the next few years, he averaged better than 200 shows a year, began putting out records, and started adding band members.
 
By 2008, the Zac Brown Band had three records, seven or eight members and almost no commercial success. That changed suddenly when “Chicken Fried,” a song that was 5 years old, was re-recorded and released as a single. It went to No.1 and sold more than 2 million copies, taking the band out of the bars seemingly overnight.
 
Sometimes you can take the band out of the bar but it remains a bar band. The Zac Brown Band is famous for its laid-back, unpretentious shows, and Brown’s songs are equally down to earth. Hopkins said the band gets its share of star treatment these days, but keeping things simple isn’t hard.

“I think you end up being who you are, no matter what happens to you, but if you end up getting treated like a rock star all of the time you can once in a while feel like one, and that’s probably natural,” Hopkins said. “I think all of us enjoy putting gas in their own cars, going to Publix and living our lives.
 
“We try to live as carefully and as well as we can, and if good, happy experiences come along and treat us like rock stars we try to embrace that. And then we go back home and do the laundry.”
 
The band is out touring behind “Uncaged,” an album that went to No.1 on the country and pop charts last summer. Opening Thursday’s show at the Yum! Center will be Blackberry Smoke and Levi Lowrey, two Georgia acts that have become part of the Zac Brown Band’s extended family.
 
“Our entire organization is built on love — for what we do, for each other, taking care of each other,” Brown told Georgia’s Creative Loafing. “We work our asses off, and you can’t fake it. You can’t fake the thousands of hours of hard work it took to get us here.”
 

Reporter Jeffrey Lee Puckett can be reached at (502) 582-4160.