GRETA VAN FLEET
But as their world-conquering mission enters a new phase, will they ever escape the Led Zeppelin comparisons? “We’re honoured!” they tell MARK BLAKE.
The Michigan quartet proving they’re more than Led Zeppelin’s ‘mini-me’s, to the delight of Elton John and more. “Rock’n’roll is like the Circle Of Life,” they tell Mark Blake.
IN APRIL 2018, WHEN GRETA VAN FLEET PLAYED LONDON’S ISLINGTON ACADEMY, the 800 people in the audience included one of their highest-profile fans, Sir Elton John. The band’s vocalist, Josh Kiszka, was backstage after the show when Elton strode into the dressing room, “like an endearing grandfather figure”, offering compliments and advice. “He told us we should flaunt what we’ve got,” says Kiszka. “I think what he was getting at was we’re young and should use it.” Elton then told the band, already renowned for their assiduous recreation of a sound more attuned to 1970 than the 21st century, that they should brush up on their rock’n’roll history. “He said, ‘I’m going to get someone to send you these documentaries about George Harrison and Joe Cocker.’” How much impact the Joe Cocker tutorial might have had is open to debate. Nevertheless, two-and-a-half years later, Greta Van Fleet are one of America’s biggest new rock bands, working out how to follow up one of the fastestselling debut albums of recent times. Today, Kiszka lives near a railway station in the Michigan-raised band’s adopted hometown of Nashville. His open-plan kitchen/dining room, with its burnished work surfaces and wall-mounted flatscreen, are nicely lit by the Tennessee sun, suggesting there are worse places to live.
However, several times a day an express train thunders past, rendering all speech inaudible. Kiszka and his bandmates have nicknamed this ‘the Tequila train’, with the running gag that whenever it passes, you have to take a shot. “So I’m completely trashed right now,” he jokes, flashing pearly whites and a neatly-sculptured musketeer’s beard.
Josh is one of three Kiszka brothers in Greta Van Fleet, alongside his twin Jake, on guitar, and younger brother Sam on bass and keyboards; drummer Danny Wagner rounds out the quartet. Their 2018 debut album, Anthem Of The Peaceful Army, unabashedly channelled the groove and swagger of ’70s rock, but with a cutting-edge tweak that made it accessible to a modern, prime-time audience. And it wasn’t just Elton John who acknowledged their chops. Robert Plant described Josh Kiszka as “a beautiful little singer, who borrowed his voice from someone I know very well.”
Others have been less coy. “I wish they didn’t sound so much like Led Zeppelin,” Slash admitted in 2018. “But still, the idea of fuckin’ four kids getting on-stage and playing their fuckin’ asses off with just a couple amps and a drum kit, and just playing their instruments as opposed to having all this other fuckin’ shit going on, I think that’s inspiring.”
“ROCK’N’ROLL KEEPS REINVENTING ITSELF. IT’S LIKE THE CIRCLE OF LIFE. IT’S BORN, IT DIES, IT COMES BACK AGAIN.” Josh Kiszka
THE SECOND GRETA VAN FLEET album, The Battle At Garden’s Gate, is unlikely to entirely banish the airship in the room. The first single, Age Of Machine, evokes Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter, from Jake Kiszka’s Jimmy Page-style guitar figure to bassist Sam moonlighting, John Paul Jones-style, on keyboards. But there’s more going on beneath the surface. Jake Kiszka describes the album, produced with them by Foo Fighters and Paul McCartney producer Greg Kurstin, as a “cinematic rock album”. “We grew up with great movies, like Apocalypse Now,” he explains from his Nashville residence. Sporting a sweeping curtain of hair and dapper navy jacket, the guitar-playing Kiszka could walk out of the room and straight onto a stage without having to check a mirror. “Our starting point was, Let’s score this film we’ve come up with in our heads.”
“The whole album is about war – wars of religion, wars of industry,” says Josh. But it also compounds the theory that Greta Van Fleet are a product of their environment: a dizzying mishmash of Francis Ford Coppola, Led Zeppelin, Henry David Thoreau, and a millennial childhood growing up in small-town Middle America.
GVF come from Frankenmuth, a town (population: approximately 5,000) north of Detroit, whose earliest settlers were German, and which is still nicknamed ‘Little Bavaria’. “Today it’s mainly Catholic and Lutheran,” explains Josh. “We were brought up in and around the church, but our schooling was progressive and our upbringing more bohemian.”
Their grandfather is an accordion player with his own plaque in the Michigan State Polka Hall Of Fame; their father has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a large music and film collection. Aged three, Jake Kiszka picked up his dad’s guitar “and never put it down again.”
Records and tapes shared space with books about philosophy. Josh explored the works of Thoreau, whose tales of bonding with Mother Nature dovetailed with the Kiszkas rafting in their local creek and camping in the woods. Today, he names British theologian Alan Watts as his favourite philosopher: “There is optimism there, some cosmic and Eastern influences – and I like that.” Greta Van Fleet formed in 2012, encouraged by their parents: “If we were interested in something,” says Jake, “they were like, ‘Go do it.’” Josh and Jake were 16, Sam 14. They spent their first four years juggling school with weekend gigs in saloons and biker bars, before signing to Lava Records off the back of Highway Tune, later released as their first single (and boasting 102,246,049 Spotify streams when MOJO last looked). Their 2017 EP, From The Fires, bagged a Grammy for Best Rock Album, before Anthem Of The
Peaceful Army became a Billboard Number 3 hit.
In 2018, Josh claimed Greta Van Fleet were “introducing a new generation to rock’n’roll”, and he’s been proved right. Their fanbase includes those discovering hard rock for the first time, plus an older audience in the market for a young band putting their own slant on familiar blues, metal and folk tropes. Like The Black Crowes, and Primal Scream’s roots-rock rebirth in the early 1990s, songs such as Age Of Man and Highway Tune reimagine the past through the prism of GVF’s relative youth and wider influences. Just as importantly, they also deliver live. The exultant show MOJO witnessed at London’s Forum in November 2018 proved how much their early years on Michigan’s club circuit had paid off.
“You have this group from a small town that just goes, Whoosh! to extraordinary heights very quickly – it can be strange,” explains Jake.
“We’d never been abroad before,” says Josh, remembering how they spent most of 2018 and 2019 on the road. “Where we come from, a lot of people don’t leave. But we always wanted to travel. Except when we did, people already knew who we were.”
IT WAS MARCH 2018, WHEN GVF realised how much their lives had changed. Elton John rang and asked them to play his annual AIDS Foundation Oscars party in Los Angeles. Josh: “He said, ‘Hello boys, it’s Elton.’ There was a moment of silence and the oxygen was sucked out the room. Is this actually happening?” A month later, he was backstage at their club gig in London.
Greta Van Fleet followed up on Elton’s recommendations from that night. “I’ve really gotten into George Harrison and Joe Cocker,” says Josh, who also has Miriam Makeba and Wilson Pickett on his current playlist. Jake, meanwhile, recalls studying recordings by his guitar heroes – “Hendrix, Beck, Page, Rory Gallagher…” – like sacred texts: “You have to do your work with the old masters.”
“Led Zeppelin are an influence,” Josh admits, with a Zen-like smile. “But it’s Jake who carries the torch. I am more folk, Sam is more jazz, but Jake is blues and rock’n’roll. It’s all Jake’s fault.” He laughs. “I didn’t hear Led Zeppelin until I was in high school. I remember thinking, What the fuck is that? It’s unique.”
“We are honoured by the affiliation,” says his twin, adopting a poker face. “You gather a bunch of influences at a young age. You’re not going to craft a sound straight away, so you begin by copying. It’s a natural progression, human evolution.”
Do you think critics will stop mentioning Led Zeppelin to you? “No, probably not,” beams Josh.
Zeppelin comparisons notwithstanding, Greta Van Fleet’s perceived authenticity is compromised in the eyes of some by their mainstream music connections: Lava Records’ boss Jason Flom helped break Katy Perry, for example. The speed of Greta Van Fleet’s rise has led to suggestions that their sound and look – a sartorial riot of silk scarves, ballet slippers and tailored jumpsuits – have been manufactured by outside forces.
Not so, apparently. “There has been no other influence than the four of us,” insists Jake. “The whole thing is crafted by us. But we are well protected and have a manager whose attitude is, ‘These guys are the creators.’”
What Lava and GVF’s manager, Aaron Frank of AMFM Music Management, have done, though, is pitch the group at the mainstream. History is full of bands who sounded like Led Zeppelin, but never escaped the hard rock ghetto. Greta Van Fleet aren’t aimed at lapsed Sounds and Kerrang! readers. They’ve played Coachella and Download, covered Cream’s White Room and Adele’s Rolling In The Deep, and been beamed into millions of American homes via Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “Rock’n’roll keeps reinventing itself,” shrugs Josh. “It’s like the circle of life. It’s born, it dies, it comes back again…”
Greta Van Fleet’s ‘new Zep’ experience is also nothing new. In 1974, tracks from Canadian geek-rockers Rush’s first album were played on a Detroit radio station. Listeners jammed the switchboard asking when Led Zeppelin’s new LP was coming out. The Battle At Garden’s Gate fleshes out the sound of GVF’s debut, and, as Jake Kiszka puts it, suggests “natural progression and evolution”. Time, then, is on their side.
“What we do isn’t really classic rock – it can’t be,” says Josh, with a final grin. “Give us time, let us age a bit, and get a little fat and irrelevant first.”
Greta Van Fleet’s The Battle At Garden’s Gate is released on Lava/Republic on April 16.