THE RECORD COMPANY
GIVE IT BACK TO YOU 10th ANNIVERSARY TOUR
FEATURING SPECIAL GUEST: CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE DUO
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2OTH
DOORS: 6:30PM // SHOWTIME: 7:30PM
BOARDING HOUSE PARK: 40 FRENCH ST. LOWELL, MA 01852
TICKETS:
ADVANCE: $50 + $8 SERVICE FEE
DAY OF SHOW: $60 + $8 SERVICE FEE
PREMIUM SEATING: $150 + $17 SERVICE FEE
VIP PARKING: $29 + $3.25 SERVICE FEE
KIDS 12 AND UNDER ADMITTED FREE!
The Record Company was born out of a late-night hang in 2011, when Chris Vos (vocals, guitar), Alex Stiff (bass, backing vocals), and Marc Cazorla (drums, backing vocals) spun classic blues records like John Lee Hooker’s Hooker ’N Heat and swapped stories of their favorite concerts (Iggy Pop & The Stooges, among them). Energized by the evening, the three musicians reconvened the next day for a jam session at Stiff’s Los Feliz home. Before long, his living room would become the band’s epicenter as they wrote songs, performed for friends, and, eventually, recorded and mixed their debut album, Give It Back to You.
Blending the soul of Delta blues with the power of classic rock and roll, the trio recorded much of the album live, giving songs like “Off the Ground,” “Rita Mae Young,” and “On the Move” a raw, immediate feel. They also incorporated slide guitar, pedal steel, piano, and harmonica, showcasing both their range and reverence for tradition while infusing it with modern energy.
Released in February 2016, Give It Back to You spent 42 weeks on both the Billboard Top New Artist Heatseekers chart (where it peaked at #5). Fueling its success was the lead single “Off the Ground,” which rose to #1 on Billboard’s AAA radio chart and cracked the Mainstream Rock Top 30, while its follow-up, “Rita Mae Young,” landed at #12 on the AAA chart.
Also bolstering the band’s profile were a host of high-profile engagements, including appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Conan, and CBS This Morning; a much-talked-about performance at Bonnaroo (named as one of the festival’s “5 Best Country and Americana Moments” by Rolling Stone Country); and their first headlining tour of the US. The following year, The Record Company joined John Mayer on tour, opening for the star at arenas across the country.
In addition to earning a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album, Give It Back to You and The Record Company also received plenty of accolades from the press. Entertainment Weekly hailed, “The scuzzy, 10-track set meshes the group’s biggest influences—the early electric blues rock ’n’ roll of John Lee Hooker, staccato lyrical delivery akin to The Stooges frontman Iggy Pop, and Rolling Stones-style grooves.” Paste praised the band’s “Raw emotion, dedication, honesty and hard work,” while Rolling Stone declared, “The blues may be nothing new, but the Record Company wring new life out of old traditions.”
“Give It Back To You was about the formation of a new friendship that led to the accomplishment/start of a dream we all were afraid might pass us by,” said Chris Vos. “10 years later, we’re still so grateful to have found the music we had always been looking for, and that it’s taken us from live recording sessions in our bass player’s Los Feliz living room to stages all over the world.”
In the years following Give It Back to You, The Record Company has released three more albums—including their best-selling 2018 follow-up, All of This Life (featuring the hit “Life to Fix”). Their broad appeal has led them to share stages with an eclectic mix of artists—B.B. King, Social Distortion, Grace Potter, and Trombone Shorty among them—while their music has appeared in an array of films (including the 2016 blockbuster Bad Moms), hit series (Suits, Nashville, Shameless), and video games (MLB The Show 22).
In 2023, they returned with their broadly acclaimed fourth album, aptly titled The 4th Album.
Charlie Musselwhite’s journey through the blues was from his birth in Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago and California. Arriving in Chicago in the early sixties, he was just in time for the epochal blues revival. In 1966 at the age of 22 he recorded the landmark Stand Back! to rave reviews. A precipitous relocation to San Francisco in 1967, where his album was being played on underground radio, found him welcomed into the counterculture scene around the Fillmore West as an authentic purveyor of the real deal blues.
Fifty years of nonstop touring, performing and recording have reaped huge rewards. Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age. This man cut his (musical) teeth alongside Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and everyone on the South side of Chicago in the early 1960’s. Thank your lucky stars that he is still with us telling the truth with a voice and harp tone like no other.
More than 20 albums later he is at the top of his game, a revered elder statesman of the blues nowhere near ready to hang up his harps, his depth of expression as a singer and an instrumentalist unexcelled and only growing deeper.
Charlie has been collaborating with the world’s finest Artists for many years, including Ben Harper, Cyndi Lauper, Eddie Vedder, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gov’t Mule, INXS, Mickey Hart and Japan’s Kodo Drummers, George Thorogood, Eliades Ochoa, Cat Stevens and personal friend and best man at his wedding John Lee Hooker.
Musselwhite, more than any other harmonica player of his generation, can rightfully lay claim to inheriting the mantle of many of the great harp players that came before him with music as dark as Mississippi mud and as uplifting as the blue skies of California. In an era when the term legendary gets applied to auto-tuned pop stars, this singular blues harp player, singer, songwriter and guitarist has earned and deserves to be honored as a true master of American classic vernacular music.
