By: Kidman J. Williams
Fly Golden Eagle is the kind of band that most garage bands aspire to be. They have a unique expression and tone. The band’s lead man Ben Trimble is an anomaly himself. He was raised in hard rocking, Motown filled Detroit with his Kentucky religious roots and honky-tonk two-stepping.
The sound of Fly Golden Eagle isn’t only diverse because of Trimble. The whole band comes from different backgrounds as well. Bassist Matt Shaw comes from Texas, Mitch Jones, keyboardist is from Knoxville, Tennessee, and drummer Richard Harper hails from Alabama; they all came together in the already cross-genre city of Nashville.
This quartet brings a range of blues, country, and rock with the adventurous spirit of the Velvet Underground and melodic engulfing of My Morning Jacket to make a truly distinctive sound and personality.
One story that I found on the bio for the band was about their album Quartz. The album lines up with an old movie from 1973 called The Holy Mountain directed by Alejandro Jodorowski. The film was produced by The Beatles’ manager Allen Klein and even funded by John Lennon and George Harrison.
The story goes that Trimble was inspired by the movie while he was writing the material for the album and though it wasn’t intentional that the film and album would run together like The Dark Side of Oz, but that is what they got. All parts, lyrically and musically line up with the visuals and story of the film.
Fly Golden Eagle will be appearing on the main stage of GonzoFest 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky.