Reporter Cathalena Burch's Fave Four

The Cole Trains, a Safford country band from ‘nowhere,’ is blown away by recent success, has album-release concert planned

How a band from the middle of nowhere found itself climbing the iTunes charts.

─ Cathalena Burch

Shane Britt was mid-sentence in a conversation about his Safford country rock band, The Cole Trains, on Friday when he got a text from bandmate TJ Taylor.

Holy crap, he said, only he used a little stronger language.

The Cole Trains’ just-released debut album had made the iTunes charts; it was sitting at No. 52 — it later topped out at No. 12 — above albums by Luke Bryan and several others whose success The Cole Trains could only dream of emulating.

“I’m blown away that we’ve charted on iTunes at all,” said Britt, the band’s frontman. “We’re four dudes from the middle of freaking nowhere.”

A week before “Lucky Stars” dropped, the band from nowhere was standing on the biggest country stage in Arizona as the first of nearly two dozen artists performing at Country Thunder April 11-14 in Florence. Britt looked out into the festival grounds where about 1,000 people had gathered — the audience later swelled beyond 32,000 for that night’s headliner Brett Eldredge — and realized he was facing the largest crowd of his band’s eight-year run.

And as they tore into a 45-minute set of original songs, the audience inched closer to the stage, and Britt could see them starting to dig his band’s hard-driving country.

“We were a little curious and apprehensive to see the reaction,” Britt said. “The stage is big, and the field is what, 20 acres? There’s 1,000 people there. The average show for us is … 300. We were just blown away. … We’re just floored by all of it.”

Talk about a good week.

The Cole Trains are about to have another one: On Wednesday, May 1, the band will play a CD release concert on the Hotel Congress patio downtown, the only time their name has appeared on top of a Tucson marquee. They are co-headlining with their buddy, Tucson country singer Drew Cooper.

“They’ve put a lot of work in, and they put in a lot of time songwriting,” said Cooper, who has been friends with the band for five or six years. “Their songwriting says something.”

The band recorded “Lucky Stars” at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in Los Angeles with Cross Canadian Ragweed frontman Cody Canada; Cooper produced the project.

It is The Cole Trains’ third recording but their first full-length album since Taylor and Britt started performing together in 2011.

The pair never set out to be a band or to seriously perform. Their first real performance happened on a lark when they went to a concert at Flagstaff’s Museum Club. They asked the club’s manager about the opening act — there was none, he told them — and found themselves volunteering to fill the slot.

Before long and after recruiting two other musicians to form a band, the pair was making regular trips from Safford to Flagstaff. When the Museum Club phased out its live music, Taylor and Britt took The Cole Trains to play in Scottsdale. They recorded an EP in 2013 so they would have something to sell to fans and followed up three years later with a live CD/DVD recorded at Scottsdale’s Rockbar club.

“We never started this to get famous or make a bunch of money,” said Britt, a 38-year-old father of two who builds custom homes in Safford with his dad. “We started it because we really believe in songwriting, and we wanted to put what we had to say out there for the world and hope that it connected to people and made them feel something.”

“Lucky Stars” was six years and a couple band iterations in the making. When they were ready to record last year, Taylor, Britt, drummer Tad Jacobson and bass player Patrick James spent a week in Grohl’s studio with Cooper, who had recorded in the studio, and Canada, who plays guitar on several of the record’s dozen tracks and sings on one.

The album borrows from Canada’s style of Texas red dirt country, influenced by a little Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. There’s soulful vocals on the ballad “Carolina” and a Southern rock edge on the driving opening track “Heroes.” “Reaping” is a throwback to straight up garage rock, while “Listen to Your Heart” will remind you of ’70s country rock, and “Hurricane” is blessed with solid guitar-driven hooks.

The album gets all warm and fuzzy on the last track, “Lucky,” which was a late add to the record. Britt said once they got home, they decided they wanted to include the song, which they had written years ago but never performed after a Phoenix band recorded it. So they brought along their families — aunts, uncles, siblings, moms, dads and kids — rented a big house and recorded the song in one take in a big room of Grohl’s studio.

“Our parents were musicians long before we ever were,” Britt said. “My mom’s playing mandolin, TJ’s mom is playing piano, TJ is playing acoustic guitar, and his dad is playing slide. We’re all hooked up in that big room, and we cut that song live, one take.”

Wednesday’s Hotel Congress show is the first in a handful of shows through June. They head to Phoenix on May 5 for a Cinco de Mayo Festival concert and join Cooper and Paul Mastin for a show in Mesa on May 31 before heading to Rocky Point, Mexico, to do five shows at Scottsdale rocker Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers 20th annual Circus Mexicus festival June 6-9. Cooper is also on that bill, which includes a handful of Southern Arizona bands.

Eagles show creator didn't have license for Tucson Symphony Orchestra show, band says

The Canadian company that was bringing an Eagles “Hotel California” tribute show to the Tucson Symphony Orchestra this weekend never had a license to use the music of the 1970s super band, Eagles officials said Thursday, a day after they sent a cease and desist letter to the TSO.

Irving Azoff, the band’s longtime manager, said Jeans ’n Classics has never been licensed to perform the band’s catalogue, a fact the London, Ontario, company’s founder Peter Brennan confirmed Thursday.

Brennan said he was in the process of applying for a licensing agreement with the band.

The TSO has contracted with Brennan several times since their first show together in 2011: “Take It to the Limit — The Music of the Eagles.”

“The reason you buy a prepackaged show is that you assume they do have the licensing agreement,” said TSO President and CEO Thomas J. McKinney, noting that the orchestra will now require proof of the agreement for future events.

Jeans ’n Classics pairs a five- or six-piece rock band and vocalist with orchestras to perform covers of famous artists including Prince, Queen, the Beatles, Elton John.

Azoff said his company, Global Music Rights, never granted a license to Brennan, whose company has been producing the shows for 23 years. Global Music Rights, which oversees any use of the Eagles catalogue, has granted licenses in the past, but only after they have vetted the groups to ensure the music would be honorably represented, Azoff said.

“We’re worried about the quality of the work,” he said. “In the past couple of years, we’ve started doing this.”

Brennan said he only realized last spring that he would need a license from the groups whose music he was performing.

“Nobody — not only us — ever knew about these things. It was sort of this new thing that hit the industry,” said Brennan, who has nearly 40 tribute shows that perform throughout North America. “We’ve been scrambling to try and get these things in place.”

TSO had sold 3,200 tickets to its Saturday and Sunday “Hotel California” shows, McKinney said. But within hours of getting the cease and desist order, it canceled the show and replaced it with Jeans ’n Classics’ Led Zeppelin show, which Brennan said he has the license for.

Azoff said that after consulting with Eagles founding member Don Henley, he called McKinney on Wednesday evening and offered to give the TSO a license for this weekend’s concerts. But McKinney told him they had already switched gears and notified ticketholders of the program change.

“They made the decision to pull the plug, not us,” Azoff said.

“We didn’t cancel the show and we didn’t ask them for $10,000” per song, he added, quoting a figure the TSO had in an email to ticketholders alerting them about the change. “I would never have asked them for any amount even close to that.”

As of Thursday afternoon, 850 TSO ticketholders had asked for refunds, including Eileen Bunge.

“I was really looking forward to that on Saturday,” said the Chicago transplant, who saw a “Star Wars” orchestra concert when she was living in Chicago and thought it would be fun to see an Eagles symphony show here.

It would have been her first TSO concert in the four years she has lived in Tucson, but she is hoping “something else will come up and we can go.”

“This was just a disaster yesterday,” McKinney said. “This was just horrible to happen at this late date, which is remarkable because we have been marketing this for over a year.”

Tucson Symphony Orchestra answers Beethoven's fate knocking with grace

José Luis Gomez bounded to the podium at the start of the second half of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra concert Friday night and barely took a breath before raising his baton and summoning those fateful four notes: da-da-da-dum!

That opening motif of Beethoven’s stunning Fifth Symphony is often referred to as “fate knocking,” but in TSO Music Director Gomez’s hands it was more like fate rapping on the door with a sense of urgency — dadadadum! — like he was the UPS guy who just left a package on your porch Christmas Eve.

Gomez upped the tempo of the opening motif in keeping with what many scholars of the German composer’s early 19th century symphony believe was Beethoven’s intention.

The bombastic exclamations from the brass and percussion in the first movement served as a bridge to the opening waltz in the second movement that segues into a military-like march, with horns powering and the winds adding their voices to the solemn chest-thumping.

At one point in the performance, the cellos and basses played pizzicato, sounding like actual voices singing “la la la la la.”

It was as if someone on that stage had decided to hum along. It was the neatest thing. While the fate-knocking motif often leads any conversation about Beethoven’s Fifth, it is the final 10 minutes where the magic happens. Gomez coaxed a sense of unbridled passion from the interplay between the strings and winds that dared you not to tap your toes and sway in your seat.

You found yourself mimicking the conductor, waving your hand above your lap in time to the beat as if you were actually guiding the music as the tempo became gloriously fast and furious.

The strings and the winds dueled, with brassy interruptions, providing the heart-check moment of the 35-minute symphony.

That was when the orchestra answered fate’s knock with a sense of humanity and joy that stole your breath.

Gomez opened the concert at Tucson Music Hall with Venezuelan composer Antonio Estevez’s lovely, cinematic “Mediodia en el Llano” before turning the spotlight on guest pianist Sean Chen and French composer Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

Chen, who performed with the TSO MasterWorks series in 2015, was impressive as he let his fingers dance, glide and race along the keyboard.

His performance was commanding and thrilling in the piece’s more exuberant passages and deeply intimate and moving when the tempo slowed.

The audience nearly filling the Music Hall rewarded Chen with a standing ovation.

Gomez has devoted the TSO’s 90th season to celebrating Beethoven on the 250th anniversary of his birth.

In all, the orchestra will perform eight of Beethoven’s nine symphonies through April.

The great doughnut debate revived: Le Cave's tinkers with bringing back doughnut holes

The doughnut holes are back at Le Cave’s Bakery & Donuts.

At least for now.

In honor of National Doughnut Month, the midtown Tucson bakery on Monday started adding the hole in the middle of its popular ring-shaped pastries — something you haven’t seen from Le Cave’s since the original owners nixed the holes back in 2011.

The idea then was to create a “personality for our doughnuts where if you were to see them sitting on a table, or anywhere they may be, people say, ‘I know what those are. Those are Le Cave’s doughnuts,’” Rudy Molina Jr., who was running the show at the family’s bakery, explained at the time.

When the Molina family, which closed the bakery in 2017, sold Le Cave’s and the original vegetable doughnut recipes to Chris and Naomi Pershing last year, the couple pledged not to change a thing, even those holeless doughnuts.

But they knew that the community was still divided on the issue, much as they were when Le Cave’s made the bold move and sparked one of the area’s most fiercely debated culinary controversies. In the weeks leading up to last fall’s opening at 3950 E. 22nd St., there was even a debate within the ranks of the new staff: Holes or no holes?

“It was really, really hard to decide what we were going to do,” recalled Le Cave’s sales and operations manager Charlie Salgado. “It was the day before our grand opening when we decided.”

Salgado said they are tracking input from their customers this month to decide if they will go with the holes or without come July. Customers are encouraged to participate and store employees will keep a running count of yeahs and nahs.

Salgado personally is a fan of the version with the hole.

“I like the idea of having a hole in it. The whole surface, I think, gets a nice, even cooking,” he said. “I think because there is no hole, the doughnut sometimes is a little softer inside, a little chewier.”