Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers might be one of the best rock bands you’ve never heard of. Fact is, they just don’t get a lot of publicity from the major music magazines, despite putting out albums that consistently rank on Billboard’s Top 10 Internet Sales chart.

While people may not know who Clyne is, they have more than likely heard him before. He was the front man for the Refreshments, a rock band that enjoyed success in the mid- to late ‘90s with “Banditos.” They also play the theme song for the television show King of the Hill.

After the Refreshments dissolved in 1998, Clyne returned to the Phoenix area, where he played gigs with former Refreshments drummer P.H. Naffah. Later that year, the two formed Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, which, after a little bit of turnover, now features Steve Larson on lead guitar and Nick Scropos on bass.

The Peacemakers have a devoted legion of fans willing to travel around the country (and even to Mexico twice a year) to see the band play. It’s for no small reason, either. The band’s high-energy shows routinely run for more than two hours.

The Peacemakers are currently on tour to support Turbo Ocho, an “experimental” album the band took just eight days to write and record. Impressive.

Clyne recently spoke with Casino Connection about the new album and the tour.
Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers come to the House of Blues August 30 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25.

What is the philosophy you take on stage? Is it to just go out and have a great time, or do you feel that you owe something to your fans when you are playing?
It’s a little bit of both.

Everyone in this band operates from a position of gratitude for having an audience that supports us and wants to hear what we have to say. For goodness’ sake, people sing our songs, and I don’t know how to describe that feeling. I’m doing exactly what I want to do with whom I want to do it, and that includes the band and the audience. I’m just in a really wonderful position, and it’s hard not to be really exuberant about that when you’re on stage. I think we just let the natural, positive contagion out, and it spreads pretty quickly.

I saw you play at the House of Blues last Labor Day, and the show ran for more than two hours. Now that you’ve got a new album’s worth of material to play, is it safe to expect the show to run an extra 40 minutes?
We’ve been going way over. I engineer set lists every night, and I never do the same set list twice. Since we’ve created Turbo Ocho, our sets have gotten longer. Even on a weeknight now, when we start at 10, I find we’re not getting off the stage until 12:30 or 1. On Labor Day weekend, I would say have the audience pace themselves, because we’re probably going to play a long time.

What goes into creating the set list every night? How do you keep things fresh for the band, as well as the fans who follow you from venue to venue?
We have a lot of songs—somewhere around 90 originals plus our covers—and on any given night, a 2 1/2 hour show is probably 26 or 27 songs, so you really could pick 7 1/2 hours from our body of work—it’s just really sort of rearranging the combinations of songs. There are some songs I like to have at certain points in the show, sort of a beacon of where we are in the set.

For example, I’ll put “Mekong” near the middle of the fourth quarter so everybody knows that we’re going to be doing a few more songs, and then it’s like, if you want to keep going we can—it’s the encore moment. But for the most part, it’s about combinations. If we start with a song like “Contraband” at the beginning of the set, it really shapes how the set will go, whereas if we start with “Banditos” it really creates a different flow.

It’s fun for me. Every night I probably spend 40 to 45 minutes making a set list. I’m usually the last one off the bus because of it.

Are there any songs that you are sick of playing?
(Laughs) No. Occasionally… not consistently, but occasionally I’ll find that I can refresh a set and the band’s idea of a song by omitting it. But I would never characterize my feeling of a song as “sick of it.”

I have on occasion omitted very predictable songs, ones that are usually contained in our set, i.e. “Banditos,” “Mekong,” “Girly,” “Americano” and “Counterclockwise” just to see if anyone misses them. What I really like is that just by omitting a couple of songs, I find that we get to put less commonly played songs in their place and nobody ever seems to leave wanting for the ones we omitted.

so you get to play some of your deeper cuts?
For our deeper cuts, I rely on audience input.

I’ll ask from the stage for requests or after any given show, we’re usually out by the bus meeting people and talking about the show. I’ll get requests then usually write them on my hand with a Sharpie or go in the bus and put them on the white board.

For example, last night we played a lot of requests, and some were really deep. One was “Psychosis,” a Refreshments song that appeared on the American Werewolf in Paris soundtrack—we hadn’t played that for a long time—played a song called “Never Thought” which we don’t play that often; played another called “Loco to Stay Sane.” It’s fun to throw those in. It keeps us sharp,, and if it’s been a month or two since we played a song, it sort of re-reveals itself to the artist, too.

By Greg Jones

Greg Jones is managing editor of Casino Connection Nevada, as well as associate editor of Global Gaming Business magazine.

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