But Allen and his bandmates didn’t benefit from the accolades.
“That helped us for about five minutes,” he told Scene a few years ago. “All those bands are great, but they weren’t selling tons of records. We’d do these [out-of-town] showcases, and they’d tell us, ‘Whiskeytown sold only 100,000 copies. We expect you to do less than that.'”
The group would eventually splinter.
It reunited a few years ago and continues to play Cleveland a couple of times a year. It has just announced it will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its debut, 1997’s Carp & Bones, at the Music Box Supper Club on April 8.
Originally released to rave reviews, the 10-song album garnered some high praised from No Depression, a magazine dedicated to alt-country, which proclaimed that in an ideal world, “the incredibly catchy [tune] ‘Late Great Singer’ would rule radio stations across the country.”
New York’s Reckless Citizen will open up the show.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2017.
