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The Shinglers

By Kip Sikora on June 14, 2023

“We like to joke that it’s because we found out we could play music better than we could do hard labor, like shingle,” surmised Colton Cerny while ruminating on the origin of the Shinglers, the Austin-based honky tonk spaceship he copilots with lead guitarist Jeremy Brandelik.

“We used to have a roofing company and it tanked,” added Brandelik.

It’s hard to stomach, but failure is an evolutionary fork in the road, and following the collapse of their business, Cerny and Brandelik circled the wagons and focused on music.

The fruits of their labor bore their 2021 debut LP, Cosmic Range Oven, a confluence of geographic influences grounded in four fingers of Bakersfield with a splash of Cajun country, a twist of Texas, and a bowl full of far out, space is the place psychedelia.

When asked about the significance of a cosmic range oven, Brandelik didn’t miss a beat, “That would be a DMT pipe; it’s what you need to enter the cosmic range.”

DMT is a psychedelic derived by milking the Sonoran Desert toad, and, when dried, the milky venom becomes a powdery crystal that can be smoked. It is, by all accounts, potent sorcery.

That explains the psychedelia, but what about the Bakersfield Sound?

“I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s raw, beautiful music,” Brandelik explained. “There’s no overthinking. It’s exactly what the music calls for, and it just sounds great every time.”

Clarifying what makes the sound so unique, Cerny added, “It’s the two Telecasters (played by) Don Rich and Buck Owens, I think.”

The music that would eventually become known as the Bakersfield Sound sprouted from suds-soaked soils in the honky tonks that punctuated the Pacific end of westward migration from barren Oklahoma farmland during the Great Depression.

As it turns out, Okies fleeing the dust bowl hit the road with more than patchwork jalopies and decimated lives. They carried the seeds of their musical heritage with them as they searched for something more than ragged subsistence in the elusive promise of the Golden State.

And even as their search for prosperity proved largely futile, those humble musical seeds blossomed into a twangy, rock and roll-inspired counterpoint to the lush, orchestral arrangements that defined country music in the 1960s.

Comparatively speaking, it was loud and unvarnished, a celebration of the working class championed by the likes of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Gram Parsons came along, twisted it into a doobie, took a hit with the Byrds, passed it to the Stones, and, decades later, the Shinglers got high on all of it.

Braised in this rich musical broth, the four-piece brought their bag of tricks to Meanwhile Brewing in Austin, TX on June 6th.

Peppered with shade trees, the family-friendly beer garden was packed with parents chasing a Tuesday night buzz, rugrats rampaging playscapes, professional happy hour types, and not only a 170-pound Cane Corso but also a three-pound Chihuahua.

Not exactly a honky tonk, but an inviting, dog-friendly launchpad nonetheless.

Cerny and Brandelik’s twin Telecaster twang and two-part harmony was complemented by Mikey Best on drums and Dale Pohly on bass, and their set of range-fried originals included “Fire Tongue”, “Bandera” and “Far Away and Near” as well as covers of The Byrds, a revved up rendering of Merle Haggard’s “Swinging Doors” and “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day”, a deep cut from Texas’ own, Doug Sahm, which Brandelik dubbed “psychedelic bubble gum pop”.

The last light of day had bled into the stars, and having caught their Tuesday night buzz, the parents and their progeny were gone. Few remained save the aforementioned dogs and a handful of stragglers, but those hangers-on were rewarded when the fellas unspooled what would prove to be the highlight of the night.

A slick, Byrdsesque lick reminiscent of “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” signaled “Far Away and Near”. But rather than recount the antics of a 500-pound DJ named Ralph, “Far Away and Near” morphed into an ode to the toad. Grounded in two-steppin’ rhythm, Cerny’s third eye-open lyrics spoke to the transcendent awareness associated with a profound psychedelic experience and peaked when he sang the final verse.