Blasts Past

“Like some sort of Naugahyde-dipped superheroes,” the band Sunflower Fox and the Chicken Leg is lionizing an era of “Olympia beer, shag carpeting you can’t possibly vacuum, and unpasteurized rock and roll,” says its press kit.

“Kaity, her favorite band is Heart,” said Gross, her longtime friend and co-conspirator behind Sunflower Fox, “and her second favorite band is Fleetwood Mac.”

What ain’t broke this six-piece band of working musicians isn’t trying to fix. Imagine “Fleetwood Mac meets Heart meets Zeppelin,” Gross said, and “throw in a little Skynyrd and some Allman Brothers.”

Birthed during the pandemic when the music business ran dry, Sunflower Fox and the Chicken Leg preserves the stadium-sized vocals, monster riffs, sizzling guitar solos and moody keyboards of yesteryear.

“A beast of an album,” the press kit calls the band’s self-titled debut LP, which Gross said will be out before year’s end. While the band (and publicist) don’t mind poking some fun at the concept, nothing was spared in pursuit of quality and authenticity.

Band members — several of whom, including Gross and Heart, have played together in a crackerjack corporate and event band called Shirts and Skins — picked sympathetic surroundings to record two albums, the second of which will be released shortly after the first.

Demos were made at Pachyderm Recording Studios in Cannon Falls, where Nirvana recorded “In Utero” and Minneapolis’ own Soul Asylum recorded its multiplatinum “Grave Dancers Union.”

“It’s got a lot of history,” said Gross, who has his own studio at home in Burnsville. “They have an old API Legacy board out there.”

Sunflower Fox then headed to Studio in the Country, 70 miles northeast of New Orleans, to soak in some history and record on the studio’s fully restored console, a Neve 8068 circa 1975.

Past records made at Studio in the Country include Kansas’ string of platinum albums and Stevie Wonder’s “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.”

A band full of music tech junkies, Sunflower Fox gets juiced about recording with vintage microphones and instruments on consoles with some history. The band has also recorded at Sonic Ranch, a celebrated studio near El Paso, Texas.

“It’s been awesome to have a reason to buy some of this old vintage stuff and get it up to par,” said Gross, 45, who grew up in Prior Lake, studied guitar at McNally Smith School of Music and has a degree in audio production and engineering from Hennepin Technical College. “It’s realizing a Gibson SG (guitar) plays a certain way and you never realize that until you have one. Or an old Orange amp and an old Marshall amp.”

The band hopes to make a pilgrimage a year to classic studios around the country, Gross said.

“As an engineer it’s been amazing and satisfying,” he said. “As a guitar player it’s been satisfying. And as someone who likes to travel and have adventures, that’s been part of it, too.”

A final, critical touch on the debut album was the mix, done by Ron Nevison, who has been named four times as one of Billboard magazine’s top five producers of the year. Nevison engineered Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti” album and has also worked with the Who, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, Bad Company and Thin Lizzy. Gross reached out to him online.

“If somebody would have told the 15-year-old me I’d be talking with somebody on a weekly basis who’d worked with Zeppelin and the Who, I just wouldn’t have believed it,” Gross said.

He and Kaity Heart, who enlisted Gross’ help in forming a vintage ’70s band and writing songs, assembled Mike Schmidt on guitar, Craig Holets on bass, Kyle Primus and drums and Al Berg on keyboards.

It’s become more of a “collective” than a band, and everybody contributes to songwriting, Gross said.

Also a member of the jam band Hallaballo, Gross said he’s seen his profession dwindle in the last 20 years, capped by the COVID shutdowns.

“In the music industry, you kind of have to have a three-tiered system at this point,” he said. “When playing is lucrative, it’s kind of calming it on the other things. When playing isn’t lucrative, you’ll increase your student load, or, for me, when playing went down, especially during the pandemic, the studio just exploded.”

He said he’s all in on Sunflower Fox and the Chicken Leg, which is scheduled to play a “1970s Happy Hour” April 29 at the Red Carpet in St. Cloud.

“It’s just new classic rock,” he said. “Nobody’s really done that.”