Some good things just need a while to gestate. For the Sky Chiefs, it’s taken nearly 30 years.
“The idea was to put it out back then, but then life kinda got in the way,” says Stephen McCarthy of “The Sky Chiefs,” an eponymous, unreleased album he recorded in the 1990s with fellow guitarist and songwriter Kevin Pittman. “As we’re all getting older, and we’re seeing the finish line more than the starting line, it’s like, ‘Yeah, you know, this is too good to sit on the shelf.'”
“The Sky Chiefs,” with evocative cover art from the late Wes Freed, will finally see release on CD and streaming Feb. 13. What’s more, McCarthy and Pittman will perform the album and more at a two-show stint at Révéler Experiences on March 6, backed with some of the best players in the city: Guitarist and original Sky Chief Charles Arthur, bassist Stewart Myers, formerly of Agents of Good Roots, and Southern Belles drummer Mark Henderson. On Feb. 26, they will also play a few unplugged numbers at a free afternoon lunchtime concert at Plan 9 Records, sponsored by WNRN radio.
“When we wrote these songs, we were always thinking of two-part harmony,” says Pittman, a Charles City resident who returned to music in 2019 after a long absence, issuing two standout solo albums produced alongside collaborator Kim Haynie. “We wanted it to be a real Everlys kind of thing, and also the Louvin Brothers … Stephen turned me on to them. In the early ’90s, country music was in kind of a neat place, I thought. You had Dwight Yoakam and Carlene Carter and Jim Lauderdale ….”
The album is hardly an exercise in lo-fi archaeology — this is a fully realized, 14-song set with memorable, melodic songs, cracking Fender guitar riffs and excellent two-part harmonies in the style of the Everlys. It’s quite possibly the best country rock album of the year, whether the year is 1999 or 2026. “When it was recorded, we were half the age that we are now,” says multi-instrumentalist McCarthy, a Richmond native who co-founded the alt-country band, The Long Ryders, and serves as a “utility member” of the popular Americana group, The Jayhawks. “This is a miracle story …. a real recovery mission.”
It all started when the two musicians moved back home to Virginia in the early ’90s after stints in California chasing fame. Pittman had been a member of The Dads, alongside the late Bryan Harvey, who was also starting to perform at that time alongside his boyhood friend McCarthy in a band called Gutterball. “I moved in with Stephen shortly after he purchased his house,” Pittman recalls. “He said, ‘I’m gonna make an attic studio’ and I was, like, ‘Sign me up.'”
McCarthy had just moved back home after the Long Ryders broke up (the group has since reformed and has a new album, “High Noon Hymns,” slated for release March 13). Guitarist and songwriter Pittman had just come back from LA, where his band the Wit Lincolns had flirted with major labels and worked with industry bigwigs like producer Jimmy Iovine. “We’d been around the studios a lot,” he says. “So we knew how to mic stuff and how to get a level and to record, but that was about it. It sounds good.”
For the better part of a year, until Pittman moved out of McCarthy’s home, the duo wrote and recorded a dozen or so songs. “We only played a couple of shows as the Sky Chiefs,” McCarthy says. “We were booked to play a show in Nashville. This was around 1993 and we drove down there to play at this club, where we had a bunch of record company people and publishers set to hear us. And it ended up being the ‘Storm of the Century.’ We laugh about it now but at the time it wasn’t funny.”
The duo played the gig anyway to a handful of people who braved an avalanche of snow and ice. “I look back and think it was like [quoting The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Nashville Cats”] ‘1,352 guitar pickers in Nashville.’ I just felt like this was not the time for us… there are enough guitar players down there. We better just head on back home because we’re not needed now.”
But the Sky Chiefs weren’t done.
“We hooked back up and did another batch of songs in ’98 and ’99,” Pittman says. “And that’s when [multi-instrumentalist] Charles Arthur came [to the sessions] and played.” Some of these new sessions were recorded professionally at Sound of Music studio and In Your Ear, McCarthy remembers.
The Sky Chiefs played shows at the Main Street Grill and at Poe’s Pub — alongside Charles Arthur, Charles’ bass playing brother Claude, and House of Freaks and Gutterball drummer Johnny Hott — and the idea of culling an album from all of the sessions reached the cover art stage. Pittman: “At some point, Stephen ran into Wes Freed down at Main Street Grill and told him, ‘You know, we have a project,’ and gave him some seed money for a little sketch. ‘Hey, could you give us a cover or something?'” Freed, who performed in bands like Dirt Ball and Mudd Helmut, was in the throes of designing iconic album art for the likes of Drive By Truckers and Cracker.
But, again, the Sky Chiefs failed to take off. “You’re in your mid-30s, and, you know, life’s coming at you fast,” says Pittman. “All of a sudden, that stuff got pushed to the back of the bus,”
“Kevin had some other things going on and it all ended up being shelved because I was touring” echoes McCarthy, who adds that the duo still knew that they had something special. “Over time, I’d think about those songs and how they were pretty cool and Kevin would say, ‘we should take another look at this.'”
As time went on, however, the session tapes disappeared, prompting a feverish search. “We ended up finding the tapes in a friend’s attic,” says McCarthy, “and when I got the case back that held the ADAT tapes, it was so hot, I thought, ‘this thing is ruined because it’s a hundred degrees up here. I thought the tapes were gonna be like Hershey’s chocolate, they were just gonna pour out. That’s why I call it a miracle that this thing even survived.”
The tapes initially wouldn’t function in either man’s antiquated ADAT machine. Finally, Pittman found an old player at RVA Planet for $20 bucks that could actually play the tracks. “I was feeding tapes in and just putting it on the computer,” Pittman says. “I didn’t stop, ’cause I knew once I stopped, we may lose it. We just completely lucked out.” He mixed the tracks in Pro Tools, a new experience. “I’ve never mixed before, but we didn’t have the money [to do it professionally]. Stephen would come down and make suggestions and, over time, we could get to a place that we thought was representative of the song.”
Because the duo had avoided trendy production touches, the results sound timeless. “I think one thing we were smart about was not to use any vocal effects,” McCarthy says. “I think that if you were a fan of Marty Stuart’s music, you would love this. It has an edge but it’s also melodic. You can tell these guys liked The Beatles and The Stones but you mix that with some Merle Haggard and you get a neat intersection of genres.”
So far the reviews for “The Sky Chiefs” have been laudatory.
“If you are a big country music fan, or like a bit of twang, then you will find it an absolute treat,” writes Andrew Raw at the Americana U.K. website. “First and foremost, it’s a monster guitar record — and the Telecaster looms large,” raves Magnet Magazine. The album’s first two singles, “House Full of Company” and “Engines” have won airplay on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country and Tom Petty channels.
The next challenge for Pittman and McCarthy is to represent these songs live at Révéler, essentially covering their younger selves. “His voice sounds as good as it ever has,” says Pittman, 63, of his singing partner. “And I’ve still got my range and stuff. So I’m looking for it to be pretty good.”
“It’s not that easy, though,” says McCarthy, 68, with a laugh. “You can do anything when you’re young. But I’m trying. I’m chasing my 32-year-old guitar player’s hands up the neck now. and I’m, like, ‘Wow. Slow down, buddy,'”
The Sky Chiefs will perform at Révéler Experiences on March 6. Two shows at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. $22.50. For more, go to https://www.revelerexperiences.com/
On Feb. 26, they will also play a few unplugged numbers at a free afternoon lunchtime concert at Plan 9 Records, sponsored by WNRN radio.
