Dirty Honey Is ‘Selling Realness’ on Fiery New Live Album

Dirty Honey guitarist John Notto has a simple but profound revelation in the tour documentary accompanying their new live album Mayhem and Revelry, out today. “Something clicked tonight in my mind,” he says backstage at London’s Electric Ballroom. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just rock ‘n’ roll. It’s just supposed to be simple fun.'”

The punchline comes from lead singer Marc Labelle, who replies incredulously, “You’re just learning this now?” But Notto’s epiphany, self-evident as it may sound, makes sense given his musical upbringing. “The bands that really swindled my soul and captured my imagination weren’t simple rock ‘n’ roll bands,” he tells UCR. “It was Queen, Pink Floyd, Allman Brothers, even Hendrix, and if you look at it, a lot of what Guns N’ Roses does.” Conversely, he adds, “there’s that realization of, ‘Oh, I’m in the AC/DC, Aerosmith thing. Even Aerosmith, over their 50-year career, gets a little out there, and we were starting to do it on the last record. But yeah, it’s exactly what you said: don’t overthink it.”

“The other angle of it,” Notto continues, “is just all the stress that goes with it on the road. Like, why didn’t this show up on time? Hey, tour manager, what’s wrong with this? And just thinking [about] the future, all that stuff, so much that makes it unfun. And then we had so much fun on stage, I just had that moment where I was like, ‘At the end of the day, this part is simple.'”

Split between North American and European shows on the band’s 2023-2024 Can’t Find the Brakes tour, Mayhem and Revelry presents Dirty Honey as seasoned road warriors, blending precision and spontaneity to create a live album that actually feels live. Notto proudly notes that the 16-track LP has no overdubs. “Nobody went back in to do a fix-it session,” he says. “We just basically just listened the crap out of 60 shows and found something where any discrepancies were listenable — where everybody played well enough and the song had spirit.”

Notto’s fiery blues-rock chops are matched by his scholarly knowledge of classic rock’s forebears, which informed the sound and aesthetic of Mayhem and Revelry. “Hopefully, you can comfortably put it on the proverbial shelf next to the other classic live albums and it’ll hold up,” he says. “That’s really what I was excited about, because I knew that live, we are a different beast that I think has another gear, and that’s what all of my favorite bands had. So to show that, I felt, was really important.”

Watch Dirty Honey’s “When I’m Gone (Live)” off ‘Mayhem and Revelry’

Although Dirty Honey’s 2023 sophomore album Can’t Find the Brakes showed them expanding their sonic palette with smoldering ballads (“Roam”) and long-form jams (“Rebel Son”), Notto acknowledges that his band’s bluesy, hip-swiveling hard rock is less cerebral than the likes of Pink Floyd or late-period Guns N’ Roses. “For me, there’s a lot of the rock ‘n’ roll that I did love that is more about that motor that doesn’t change,” he explains. “And that’s a lot of the blues that influenced all that stuff. AC/DC and the Rolling Stones, to me, are the bands that most stuck to that tradition.”

To illustrate his point, he cites a live video of AC/DC in California in 1979, when the group was at the peak of its powers with Bon Scott. “They are just cooking,” he raves. “The intensity with which the bass player plays those staccato root notes over and over, the intensity him and the drummer have — I’ve never seen anyone do that. Anyone who covers them and thinks that AC/DC is simple, I’m like, ‘But you ain’t doing it. You’re not doing it.'”

Any conversation about Dirty Honey — or classic rock in general — invariably circles back to Led Zeppelin. Notto cites them in relation to Mayhem and Revelry, but not for the reasons one might expect. “I’m not listening to How the West Was Won going, ‘It needs to sound just like this,’ although that was a reference point, but more from an instrumentation standpoint,” he says. “That is the amount of instruments we’re dealing with. Zeppelin live is the same [as us], really. If you try to make it sound like Aerosmith live, that’s tough because they’ve got two guitar players, they have a keyboard player. The later it gets, they’ve got background singers. They have more things going on. So as much as they might be an influence as a band, comparing the mix, it gets difficult.”

By contrast, Mayhem and Revelry is the sound of four guys schooled on rock ‘n’ roll tradition capturing its simple, fun spirit. “We’re selling realness,” Notto declares. “It’s real amps. It’s no tracks. It’s expressive playing that deviates from the album page and comes back.”

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