Vintage Trouble

It’s the new big thing: pairing a soul-singing frontman with a hard-driving rock outfit. Vintage Trouble may be to blame (in part) for the success of the trend. They’ve been strong ever since they went pro in Venice Beach, California, five years ago. Vintage Trouble call themselves retro, and they dress like a History Channel special about Prohibition, but make no bones about it — this is a rock band that does R&B. There’s a huge difference, the first among them being instrumentation and amplification. They are your basic loud rock-and-roll trio with Nalle Colt on guitar, bassist Rick Barrio Dill, and Richard Danielson on drums. Ty Taylor fronts the band with sweeping theatrics borrowed from another era — larger-than-life in a way not unlike a 1980s David Lee Roth.

That they went to England to get famous was a no-brainer. Vintage Trouble did the reverse British Invasion on the world at large, and it paid back dividends. In L.A., they only played nightclubs; post London, Vintage Trouble suddenly found themselves on concert stages in support of major rock tours. Later, they got the stamp of approval from on high when the Stones asked them to open for them in 2013.

A musical plaything, Vintage Trouble is a crowd-pleasing curiosity that steps on no toes and that plugs right in to the void left by a much-loved hard-rocking R&B act of days past called the BusBoys. This year, Vintage Trouble went out on tour in support of AC/DC, an even bigger résumé hit than when they played Kiss rocker Paul Stanley’s private 60th birthday party. The band’s got presence to burn, and they generally peg the high-energy meter throughout a set largely due to the efforts of Taylor, who, just like Roth, could make a sports arena feel like a very small and intimate space. Finally, a band that surpasses even the most fatuous of hype that precedes them.