On a sweltering afternoon in late June 2003, the eight or so members of Sugar and the Raw, then known as Sugar in the Raw, were looking out over a less-than-capacity crowd at the Riverfront Amphitheater in Little Rock. They were playing in support of classic rock staple the Doobie Brothers, which meant that the crowd wanted not much more than to hold five-dollar Bud Ices high above their heads and scream along to “Jesus is Just Alright with Me,” and few had ever heard of the band they were now seeing. The band had been allotted only about thirty-five minutes to play its set (pretty much the standard for an opening band), but in the burning afternoon sun, those minutes began to drag on. Soaking in sweat, they played through about ten of their characteristically danceable songs, moving their bodies just enough to meet the general standards of stage presence, but no more than was necessary. Sorting themselves from the regular Doobie fans, Sugar and the Raw's small crowd had made their way to the front to support them. So they too were dancing, sweating, and generally trying to have as good a time as possible at a Doobie Brothers concert. Drummer Mark Lierly, who had already been feeling a little ill, had the regrettable task of pounding out beats large enough to fill the amphitheatre—where the distance from the stage to the crowd on the field is further than the entire length of the show space at Vino's, a more typical haunt for the band. Somewhere toward the end of the set,Lierly started to turn pale, and in the last few measures of their final number he began to vomit all over his drums. Without losing the beat, he managed to turn his head over his shoulder and to the stage behind him, but the head of his snare had already been covered. To the crowd this may have looked like some kind of stage stunt, which is sometimes Sugar's M.O. (a friend had made tee-shirt and confetti cannons, but they ended up not being used). At the time, bassist Luke Hunsicker thought someone had thrown glitter on the drums. Lierly valiantly played through the last notes of that final number, doing his best to avoid his own mess.After obliging the bewildered applause, the band, exhausted, cleared their equipment from the stage and made their way to the backstage area. Sugar and the Raw tried to relax backstage and enjoy their part of the imaginable spoils of a large rock concert (which really only meant maybe a couple Evian bottles and a place to sit down), but a stage manager approached them and snapped, “Look guys, we just need you to get out of here.”
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Sugar and the Raw might be the biggest band in Arkansas. Playing the state for more than five years, they've earned the respect of the largest fan-base that any local act could hope to muster around here. When you go to a Sugar and the Raw show, you know that you're going to be packed in with a hundred young fans, dancing furiously. The band earned their respect the long and hard way: by playing lots of shows over a long time, and by evolving continuously, appealing to an ever-widening audience. They grew by word-of-mouth, and if anything about them comes off as “manufactured,” well then it was manufactured by them. Sugar and the Raw has managed to weather a few significant changes as a band over the years. They've changed members, changed their name, and changed their sound and style a couple of times. The band (in its current form) includes singer Mason Mauldin, keyboardist Michael Motley, bassist Brandon Brewer, Mark Lierly still on the drums, guitarist Conrad Burnham, and Lorenza Harrington and Luke Hunsicker playing brass. A lineup that size means there will invariably be seven different viewpoints for any situation, seven different ideas for the song they are working on, seven different people who need to ask off work for a show or a tour (a complication exaggerated when a few of the members work at the same restaurant), and so on. Yet the band has lasted for years now, and has continued to develop their sound. Originally, the band had no vocals. Mauldin, who is now at least the visible leader, and who along with Conrad Burnham writes most of the band's material, was not even a member yet. The band also once included Justin Collins and Shawn Goodin, a.k.a. “Little Shawn,” who are no longer members (Collins now plays for hard rockers Go Fast, and Shawn moved to New Orleans where he playedwith the now defunct Latelys). Sugar and the Raw was mostly a dance band, and their popularity grew quickly as they drew crowds of people who enjoyed moving to their funk-rock instrumentals. After Mauldin joined, they still had the party-band vibe, but the lounge-style vocals he added gave the crowds simple lyrical themes to latchonto. The audience would yell right along with his subtly scratchy voice as he repeatedly wailed, “Are you ready for more?” Mauldin's costumes are almost vaudevillian at times, and sometimes he sings with a velvety cape draped from the mic in an affected display of flamboyance. Burnham's guitar lines, too, are always impressive, and his large, black sunglasses make him look like some blind, young guitar legend. Everyone loves the horn section, a rarity in local music, at least among the younger outfits (and although the horns now have a diminished role, they never go unmentioned in press reviews). In addition, the band has rolled out at least four different t-shirt designs for their merch table, contributing to a nearly ubiquitous presence in the fashion of central Arkansas' youth, unrivaled by any band.
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Since their show with the Doobie Brothers at the Riverfront, they have released a record with Max Recordings and played in front of at least two sellout crowds at Juanita's, including, most recently, their CD release party for the Translucent EP in April. The cost of admission included a copy of the record at a discounted rate, which means that they sold over 400 copies of their Translucent on its release date (sales that might earn a major label band a place on the charts). Despite their success, the band has their share of difficulties, not the least of which is trying to tour to support a record that has national distribution (thanks to Max's newly forged deal with Red Eye Distributors). If Sugar wants to sell records in Seattle, Chicago, or even Nashville, they have to play there. But it's hard to get shows in such cities if no one there knows your music, hence the paradox of playing in a rising band. Success takes a confluence of distribution, advertising, and press, which (theoretically) begets legitimacy and notoriety. These are problems that major labels solve with large sums of money (although occasionally it blows up in their faces, which, by the way, is certifiably awesome). Independent labels/bands must resort to the more subtle and tedious art of long-term development (basically, labels harass writers, bands tour their asses off, and both pull every available string at every available opportunity). Luck just so happens to be a huge factor in this equation. It isn't lost on Sugar and the Raw's members that if they were as popular in New York, LA, Chicago, London, and Austin as they are in Little Rock, then they would officially be “big.” This is because, contrary to logical reasoning, “big” doesn't at all mean that you are a band that is popular everywhere at the same time. Rather, it means that a band is as popular as Sugar is in Little Rock in at least two of the aforementioned cities (or in just New York). A hilarious side effect of this phenomenon occurs when a band achieves said status and books an extensive US tour, only to appear in front of tiny crowds in places like Little Rock and Memphis. As for Sugar and the Raw, I am certain that if they continue to follow the musical direction they are taking (more “rock,” less “funk”) that they can become a “big” band. They have proven their catchiness here, and given time and work, it will spread.
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Last June I sat down with front man Mauldin and trumpeter Hunsickerat a local coffee shop to discuss Sugar and the Raw's term as a staple of central Arkansas' “growing music scene” and also their prospects as a band attempting to break out to the rest of the country's “growing music scenes.” Luke, who came straight from where he works (an alma mater of many celebrated local musicians: The Pizza Café), was late because his Caprice was leaking radiator fluid all around the Hillcrest area. Over coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes, they told me about the ups and downs of their flirtation with success, including their bizarre run-in withthe Sugar in the Raw corporation, our nation's most prominent hawker of raw turbinado sugar (a sugar, by the way, that I find too course to dissolve in either coffee or cooking). Somehow, the company was alerted to the band's presence. According to Mauldin it was probably because of the band's website, which had gone online shortly before they were contacted. The sugar manufacturer's lawyers had deemed the band's name a conflict of interest and “suggested” that they change it. Apparently the sugar company was afraid that the band could be sponsored by some artificially sweet rival or something, not that “Sweet 'n' Low” wouldn't make a good song title. “We didn't really think that we were gonna get sued,” Hunsicker said. “But we weren't ready to take the chance,” Mauldin added. I asked them if they had considered the publicity benefit of a lawsuit against them by a major corporation. Imagine the press: “evil, relatively healthy multi-national sugar company sues sweet southern rock band.” Boom! They've instantly got publicists clawing at their door. Hello, national press. They told me that they had talked about it, but that they were afraid that they might be even more open to damages if they tried to exploit the lawsuit itself. They settled on Sugar and the Raw as an alternative, thusdooming them to the occasional drunken fan accosting them, demanding to know which one of them is “Sugar.” (They apparently now have all these t-shirts that say “in” instead of “and,” presumably gathering dust somewhere waiting for the band to get big enough to turn the outdated shirts into gold on eBay). Considering the unlikelihood of a career-making lucky break, Sugar and the Raw are left to earn success themselves. And now that they've passed that high point of releasing a new record, the band is trying to assess what the future holds for them. The next step they hope to take is to hit the road to support Translucent sometime soon. “We aren't really sure what's going to happen,” Mauldin tells me. “We want to tour for sure on this thing, but we're just not sure when that'll be. We're in the market for a booker, but it's hard to get them interested.” Although it is difficult to tour as a virtual unknown, they've done it before. The results were mixed (they came home broke and literally bruised), but they seem game to give it another try. And, at the least, it promises to be more profitable for them than their appearance with the Doobie Brothers. When local promoter Butch Stone called them following a successful show at the 2003 Arkansas Musicians Showcase, the entire band went together to his house on a snowy day that February of 2003. “He told us about a lot of old rockers that he used to hang out with,” Hunsicker told me. “He and Mark [Lierly] went out in the snow to look at an old coffee table that he said that he and Jimi Hendrix sat together at. Mark was in his socks, in the snow, because Butch Stone made us take our shoes off when we came in, and the table was out back. Mark's feet were soaking wet.” “He made us listen to Starkz,” Mauldin said, “and then he offered us the show with the Doobie Brothers.” “We said ‘yeah,' and he picked up the phone and dialed some numbers,” Hunsicker recalled. “He goes, ‘Yeah, we got an opener for the Doobie Brothers,' and just hung up. For all we know, he could have been on the phone with his voicemail.” “After that day,” Hunsicker explained as he took a drag from his cigarette, “we never heard from Butch Stone again.”
In the end, they didn't receive any payment for their performance with the Doobies. Sugar and the Raw may or may not yet consider themselves a “successful” band. They've constantly improved, and they've certainly found themselves in amazing positions. But most importantly, they've tapped into a young and energetic new fan-base in ways that other local talent only wishes it could. Rather than appealing to any “scene,” they drummed up a music market for themselves where none previously existed. It is that sort of success that appeals to independent promoters, managers, advertisers, and publicists. There is a whole industry out there that is dedicated to reining in and reproducing the sort of energy that caused Sugar and the Raw to grow. It is for this reason that they ended up in that absurd position of playing with the Doobie Brothers that day without earning a dime. But because of that energy and the band's appeal, if they continue doing what they do and succeed in taking it on the road, their best days are ahead of them. Of all the bands in the current incarnation of the local music scene showing a new promise of national success, Sugar and the Raw was the first. Hopefully, when Sugar and the Raw next gets the call, it will be to a much bigger stage than Riverfront.
