Rock Dons |

The Parlor Mob
w/ guests. July 4 (8pm). The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Tickets: $13, available at Ticketmaster, Blackbyrd, and Megatunes.

Rarely do a band’s fortunes increase after their label drops them, but that’s the lucky hand The Parlor Mob was dealt. After getting signed to Capitol Records in 2006, the rock act from Red Bank, New Jersey had just laid down their debut EP when they got caught up in the torrential merger of Capitol and Virgin into the Capitol Music Group.
“We had been flown out to Los Angeles and we had recorded four songs in a studio,” explains guitarist Dave Rosen. “Then we came home and sat around for nine months. Eventually, we [got the news that] ‘Capitol is merging with Virgin, they’re dropping a bunch of bands, and firing a bunch of people. You guys are out of your contract.’ Which we were happy about at that point, because we’d literally been sitting on our asses, asking ourselves, ‘What are we doing?’ We just made this EP that we feel very strongly about and we want to be out there touring, yet we’re sitting at home. So we were relieved.”
Even after being tossed off their label’s bridge with a pair of concrete shoes, The Parlor Mob avoided sleeping with the fishes. They released the EP for free online, and generated enough buzz to convince Roadrunner Records to scoop them up last summer.
“When that whole thing went down, we had a different manager,” Rosen says. “We had fired our manager, we had fired our lawyer, and we had been dropped by our label. When we went to the South by Southwest music festival two years ago, we were just starting to work with our new manager. Then, by the time we signed to Roadrunner, within a couple months, we were in the studio and we had picked the producer that we wanted, Jacquire King. A couple months later, the record’s out, and now we’re on the road.”
Their first full-length, And You Were a Crow, came out in March. It combines the swagger and charisma of vintage Zeppelin with a tinge of southern Skynyrd and modern rock revival flair. To capture this classic sound, the band hit the highway with King (sometime producer for Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, and Kings of Leon), and shacked up together in Asheville, North Carolina, recording at the Echo Mountain studio.
“It wasn’t just another thing for King,” Rosen says. “We all got that feeling—he really became a part of us. We literally slept next door to each other, and we’d hang out at nights, and watch movies and Twin Peaks together. He was coming home and hanging out with us and having to deal with us on his days off.”
The band members are used to living in close quarters. They were friends throughout high school, bonding while playing gigs with the scant number of disparate musical acts in their towns. Eventually, the Mob infiltrated the New York rock scene, starting out at “small little shows at places like the Cake Shop, jam-packed with 30 people,” Rosen remembers. The band eventually made NYC their base of operations. The city doled them out some tough love, Rosen says.
“We play in New York so frequently now, it’s like a second home to us. But it’s one of the hardest places to stand out and have a sense of who you are, as a person and as a band. It’s really easy to get caught up in it, but New York has embraced us and we love it for that.”
Judging by the upbeat background noise on their tour bus, such exuberance characterizes a band that almost derailed before they got started. Rosen could barely contain his enthusiasm about the summer, which will see them playing Lollapalooza on his birthday, as well as making their first foray into the Great White North, a place of scenic vistas and Tim Hortons franchises on every corner.
“Donuts, you say?” Rosen inquires. “Really. Well, our drummer will be happy to hear that.”