Naked Gypsy Queens are rooted in amplified blues, hard-charging grooves, and dual lead guitars, keeping the flame burning for old-school hard rock while adding their own 21st century fuel. Formed while all four members were still in high school, they built their audience the blue-collar way: by plugging in, turning up, and playing out. They cut their teeth on the classics — the Rolling Stones, MC5, the Allman Brothers, and Pink Floyd — and funneled those influences into their own songs, creating an original sound that was loud, aggressive, and filled with supersized hooks. After developing a loyal following in their hometown of Franklin, TN, they set their sights on Nashville, quickly becoming one of the city’s premiere rock acts before any of the bandmates had turned 20 years old.
The band’s new EP was recorded in Detroit with studio veterans Marlon Young, Al Sutton, and Herschel Boone. Legends like Alice Cooper and MC5’s Wayne Kramer stopped by the studio during the tracking process, strengthening the bond between Naked Gypsy Queens and the rock icons who came before them. We were immediately hooked after one listen to “Down to the Devil” and we knew we had to explore this band even further. Their Georgiana EP is full of goosebump moments for me as I just can’t get enough of it! I had the privilege of sitting down with bassist Bo Howard for a crash course in Naked Gypsy Queens 101.
Bo Howard/Naked Gypsy Queens: Hey Johnny, this is Bo Howard from Naked Gypsy Queens.
What’s going on, buddy?
Nothing much, man. How are you doing?
I’m good. I didn’t know who I was going to be speaking with today. That was the tricky part.
Yeah. You got the bass player today.
Gotta show all of ‘em some love. Well, dude I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I do want to get a little bit of info. John sent me this press release and I listen to so much music, but man “Down To The Devil” just after one listen of that and I was like “I need to talk to these guys. This shit is crazy.”
Hell yeah!
And then I listened to the EP. The first time I listened to it start to finish. You guys are not a one trick pony. Music is no different than painting from the palette because you can choose these different elements and different influences when you’re creating music. You guys, you can hear the influences, but you’re not a carbon copy. You’re doing your thing. You can hear the influences, but you guys are like all jacked up on steroids and making it sound modern. I could hear a little Stones, I could hear a little Zeppelin. It was crazy reading about you guys that MC5 was an influence. That’s my fan boy part getting that stuff out of the way in the beginning.
I love to hear it. I’ll tell you what, I was so nervous. I knew the songs are strong and solid. But when we recorded them and everything, I had a lot of faith in our producers. Marlon, Al, and Hershel up at the Rustbelt Studios in Detroit. They did it fucking justice. They made it way better. A lot of it stayed the same as how we came in the studio with. Their production was so good, but it was nerve-wracking for sure. We’d never been in a legit studio with producers. I mean, we had Greta there before us so we saw their Grammy on the wall. We’re like “Oh my God, we gotta be on our game.” You know?
That’s crazy. Hopefully you guys will make it through North Carolina, because I saw Greta early on in the game and they played a sold-out 250 occupancy little club that’s one of my favorites. I saw Greta there and Goodbye June opened up for them. I love those guys too. They opened up, it was sold-out, 250 people, it was elbows & assholes up in there. You could barely move. It was so packed.
(laughing) Hell yeah, dude.
Then within a year, they just blew up. Speaking of – how was the decision made to go with these producers since you guys were in Nashville?
That’s a good question actually. I never really thought about it. They kind of knocked on our door in a weird way. This is how I remember it, I’m sure there’s different stories out there from the other band members. But how I saw it, we wanted to get a lawyer and everything going. Kevin, our manager, did a really good job at just pulling people in. We ended up getting in touch with Greta’s lawyer. He came by and we sat down and we played him our songs. He loved it. Then from there, he connected us with Marlon Young, Al Sutton, and Herschel Boone. They flew down to Nashville and we played a show. The show was a big show, but it was mainly for them so they could hear it. All 3 of them came and apparently their minds were blown. Within a month or two they were sending us details on when we’re gonna go up there and record.
I know it’s kind of spacey, but that’s just how I remember it. It was very quick. Very quick, dude. I’m talkin overnight. And we were just incredibly excited because they recorded Greta’s EP and their first album there. So we knew they were legit. We were just so blessed for them to have liked us so much. So we went up there probably a month or two after we met them.
Wow. Being the first time in a studio, that’s gotta be pretty damn intimidating I would think.
Yeah. Well it wasn’t our first time. We’d been in some studios before. On our Spotify our first album we still have up and that was in a studio here in Nashville. That was pretty cool, but it wasn’t like how they ran their studio. The way they ran their studio was more professional, hands-on, “hey we’re going to change this part and that part to see how it sounds” type of thing. We never really had that before.
So I’m gonna start out – I have two music nerd questions.
That’s fine with me!
Number 1, sometimes there’s a story behind the band name or sometimes it just a randon name that’s chosen. I freakin’ love the band name, but I kept going “could it be this or could it be that.” Is there a meaning behind it?
When we started the band, we wanted it to be a blues band. We wanted it to be a blues/rock type of thing. We were all heavy into Hendrix and Santana and we noticed that both of them use “Gypsy Queen.” That kept coming up in their songs. Those two words. It kinda just stuck. We kept hearing it and it just stood out for all of us. So we wanted to do something with Gypsy and Queen in it, but the first part needs to catch something. I remember Chris was in the car and he’s something like Gypsy Mamas, something Queen, but then somehow he landed on Naked Gypsy and he came back to practice the next day and said that and I said “What?” I didn’t like it at first. But the other guys loved it. I’m one of those people that when it comes to music I’m very particular. I heard that and said “people are going to laugh at us.” It took me maybe a couple of weeks of just saying the name out loud and NGQ for short. I thought okay I’m gonna give it a shot.
In Tennessee it was funny for people to hear the name. They thought it was very different, but that’s kind of what we wanted. But it rooted from Santana and Jimi Hendrix.
Cool, cool.
So I guess there is no meaning behind it.
But see, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s always interesting figuring out the origins of not only a band name. I know you guys met in high school. Every superhero and every villain has an origin and a band is the same way. Maybe not radioactive spiders and government experiments involved, but you know. It’s kind of the same way of sorts. Did you guys just bump into each other in the hall or did you guys have classes together?
I’ll tell you a funny story that I never actually told in an interview before. I went to a different high school my freshman year than everyone else. In Nashville there’s a festival called Pilgrimage Festival and it’s a big music festival. Me & my buddies went out and we saw Weezer. We were in the very front row. A storm rolled in and it started raining hard. Then I hear this kid and it’s to my left and he’s like “Protect the weed! Protect the weed!” I look to my left and it’s Chris, but I didn’t know it was Chris at the time. I never knew this kid before. He’s in the middle and he’s trying to roll this little joint. So me and my 3 buddies start shielding him from the rain so the weed doesn’t get wet, you know? I later found out that was Chris when I met him at high school. I said “you look so familiar” and we were talking and got on the topic of the Pilgrimage festival and he was talking about how people were shielding him from the rain. I said “that was me!” So that’s when I met him, and Landon was already there. Cade wasn’t there yet, he was at my old high school. I knew him from my old high school a little bit, not too much. Just ran into him a couple of times.
But then all of us kind of ended up at the same high school. Landon and Chris were already in a different band and I wanted to hear what they sounded like, but didn’t really know how to ask. Our high school we were at had a recording studio down in the basement. The reason why I went to this high school is because they had a class that would teach you how to run a studio. In the studio, they had amps and drums and guitars and everything. One day after school I had left my car keys downstairs and I’m hearing “Whole Lotta Love” being played. I swear to God I thought it was legit Bonham and Page playing. I heard the part where Jimmy Page gets the violin bow and starts playing. I walk into the studio and I look and it’s Chris and he’s doing it with the drumstick. Landon’s keeping the high hat beat going, then they come in on that roaring solo. Right then I was like I have to be in a band with you guys. But they were already in a different band so I just kind of waited for my shot. It eventually came and then Cade and I got involved. That group split off and we made what is NGQ today.
That was the first time I’d actually heard them play and I was just in awe. I’ve played with other people before but they never played like that.
To be able to form the band and to be just tearing it up. You guys started playing in Nashville and then got such a big reputation and then becoming such an attraction to your live shows. How do you keep it together? Doing school and doing that? I don’t know if anybody had jobs after school. It seems like a lot to try to keep together.
Dude, it was. Oh yeah. So our school is really cool. It wasn’t like a mega high school like you would think. It’s very small. Maybe 100 kids, 150 tops in this whole school. It was more of an art based school. You’re learning the basic high school stuff, but at the end of the day you can either do art or programming and that’s what we all went there for. Our principal and our teachers were so lenient because they knew we were out playing a show the night before. We were going to school with no homework done and everything. We did get in trouble a little bit from school work, but at the same time they knew we were doing what we truly loved. But they also made sure we got our high school work done.
But it was definitely hard because I had an afternoon job and homework, but then I would go to practice. We would practice 3 times a week. We still do to this day, but it was hard to juggle that stuff. Trust me.
Were you playing in clubs? Were you even old enough to come into a venue if you weren’t playing?
In Franklin there was a couple of crazy cool places. One of them being one I grew up at, it’s called Puckett’s and it’s out in Lieper’s Fork which is about 15 minutes from Franklin. It’s one of those places where really famous people go and hang out. It’s out in the country a little bit, but they have open mic nights. We would go up there for open mic nights and play some songs on our first record that we still play today, one being “Black Cat Blues.” Next thing you know we got a show there and we sold it out the first time we played. It’s a pretty big room, for us back then it was too. We could play there, but when we got to Nashville there were some places that wouldn’t let us play because we weren’t 21. Most of them were 21+, but next thing you know they were calling us and saying we could play there.
Dude, this is amazing. So there’s all this momentum and stuff, then Covid hit and you went into lockdown. Where were you guys in the progression of the band and how did that affect you guys?
I feel like we were about to break uncharted territory right before. I think in late 2019 everything was going great. We became friends with Greta and we got invited to a show they were playing that was a pretty big place in Nashville. It wasn’t quite a stadium, smaller than that. But it was a big room anyway. They invited us there. We went backstage and met them all, hung out. That was awesome because we knew they knew about us. We were hoping that we might get to hang out with them a couple more times. We had big shows we were playing, selling out big shows in Nashville. It’s like we were at our peak and then we get signed by Mascot Records. Everything was about to go the way we wanted it, then Covid hit. I’m talking, we were out of business for like a year straight.
Wow.
All of 2020. We played not even 10 shows. That was the hardest part because we’re sitting there twiddling our thumbs like what the fuck. We had everything going for us and then a pandemic broke out. We always make jokes about it and say we must have the worst luck. We have good luck on other things. After Covid hit, it was just like bad news after bad news. I feel like now we’re finally getting back to where we were.
It devastated us. We felt like we were on top of the world and next thing you know we’re sitting in our manager’s basement just practicing over and over and over. But then that lead up to a big show right as stuff was starting to get lenient. That was the best show we’ve ever played because – it was at Mercy Lounge in Nashville and we had a sold-out headline show and it was the first time I’d seen someone crowd surf at our shows. We had a mosh pit. We were up there and just angry. We were on fire. We were waiting for so long, you know? Next you know we’re on stage and there’s a mosh pit in front of us, there’s people crowd surfing, it was just mania.
It’s a great combination. You’d been waiting so long to play a show and the people in the audience had been waiting so long to go to a show. What a massive pot of energy like that. I can remember the first show back and the energy in the room was just unbelievable.
Oh yeah, man. It was one for the books for sure and God it was just raw aggression. So much fun!
Speaking of live shows. What’s on the horizon?
Yeah, we’re going to be going on a couple of road trips with some bands here soon that we’re looking forward to. Right now, we were planning on Europe around the Sept-Oct area and now with how things are going there we don’t know. We’ve got some stuff coming up and I’m very excited for it. I’m not sure when we’re going to announce it but it should be coming up pretty soon.
So your video is super cool. You guys are known for your live shows. I love what you’ve done with your videos so far from the EP. Do you guys have input for that or do you have someone come and tell you what they want you to do next?
We have full input on it. That’s the cool thing. We have a friend, it’s actually Landon’s brother. He’s a videographer and we did a lot. Our first video from this EP, that was from him. He did the “Georgiana” music video, the one where we had all the candles on stage. I love his work. We usually come to him or if someone else we know wants to shoot it. We tell them our input and tell them our ideas of what we’re wanting to do. They’ll sit with it for a couple of days and come back with an idea. We usually just go back and forth, though most of the time we get it the first meeting. We say this is the type of vibe we’re going for and this is what we’re visually going for. Maybe we’ll get it knocked out that weekend. It’s quick.
From some artists you hear how grueling they are and how long they take. That’s pretty cool it comes together and happens quick like that.
It seems like we have such a raw thing. Our music is raw and our performances are raw, I think we just aren’t really that way. I think the longest music video we’ve done was probably two days and it came out great. That was the “Down To The Devil” video. It’s been just pretty straight to the point.
I did want to ask on a personal note. “Strawberry Blonde #24” I’m just real serious about that one, I keep going back to it and listening. Is there anything you can go into about that song? The meaning or how you wrote it?
So I know there is a guitar player that Cade is obsessed with, I don’t think he’s alive now. I’ll have to ask him. I know this guy did a lot of cool and different tunings and Cade was obsessed with it. He would go home and study how he would tune his guitar in different tunings which was very odd. But Cade kind of made his own and he came to practice one day and did the opening lick on his guitar. I was like what was that, that was dope. He plays it again and we started jamming on it. The thing was, it was such a weird tuning that I didn’t know how to play it on bass. So we finally got it and Chris wrote the lyrics. The music part, I’d say most of the riffs are from Cade. At the end of the song we all start doing our own solos, I added that with Landon. It all just kinda came together naturally. It was so weird how quick the song came out. And that’s how it happened dude. We have a couple of more songs that we may have on this next record that we made up during soundcheck at a random venue.
Strawberry Blonde is about a girl from Belmont (University) and I didn’t go to Belmont with Chris, but he met this girl. Next thing you know he has lyrics. It was really cool. But yeah, the tuning is really weird and I wish I could tell you the name of the guy but I can’t think of it right now.
The EP is just digital and the limited pressing of the vinyls, no physical cd’s?
Not at the moment. We will eventually. I can tell you about the artwork. For me personally I did a lot of the work on the cover. I was obsessed when we were coming out with designs for it. I kept coming up with this idea in my head of a rustic, very Victorian-like looking room and I wanted it to be filled with candles everywhere. I wanted it to be all natural lighting. We had a friend come up that said we could totally do that in her house, which was an 1800’s Victorian. So we got our photographer up there and we decided to do it. It came out the exact way I had sketched it out. It was crazy. Because we really did buy a shit ton of candles, we had fire extinguishers everywhere. But it was all that natural lighting. The photographer had a really dim light that made it a little brighter on our faces. I was fine with that. But it came out exactly how I was explaining to the band I think we should do it.
Then I came up with this other idea thinking about how this place is probably haunted. How cool would it be if we were taking these pictures and a ghost was in the background. The photographer loved it and he had a friend of ours put on a white sheet and you could see through it and have her walk through the background and we used that for our “Georgiana” single cover. It was so cool how that worked out.
Last one, we always end the interviews with something we call 3 For The Road, which is just kind of fun questions to ask artists.
Gotcha.
So you’ve seen in movies and tv shows where the character will have an inner voice speaking for them. If you could have anyone be your inner voice, who would it be?
Ozzy Osbourne. Oh yeah. I’m a huge fan. I just feel like I would do so many funny things if I had Ozzy’s voice in my head.
It would make everything hilarious. As long as you understood what your inner voice was saying. If you could play any character. What show or what movie and what character?
Man, I have three in my head. I’d be Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. I love that movie. It’s so good. I’d be Kelso from That 70’s Show. And probably Forrest Gump.
Last one. If music was over today and you had to go into professional wrestling, what would be your wrestling name?
Damn. Hmmmm…..I gotta think about this one. I’d do just like “Bo the Ho.”
Would you be provocatively dressed?
Yup. All of it. I’d do it all.
Would your pimp be your manager?
Yeah. I might have him like super dressed up. It’d be a whole thing.
Interview by I’m Music Magazine Owner/Editor Johnny Price
Naked Gypsy Queens are: Chris Attigliato, Cade Pickering, Bo Howard and Landon Herring
