Host Abe Kanan was joined recently by singer Marc LaBelle, and guitarist John Notto of Dirty Honey for a special Audacy Check In following the release of their brand new 2025 live album, Mayhem & Revelry.
LISTEN NOW: Audacy Check In with Marc and John of Dirty Honey
As fans can attest, there’s a special something about Dirty Honey's live performances that can never be captured in the studio. "That was one of the driving factors to doing a live record," Notto tells us. Since early on in their career, followers and critics alike have told him, "'I love the records, but you guys are better live. There's like a second gear or a third gear. It's like another animal,'" he explains. "I think after enough times of that being said, and in conjunction with us realizing we wanted to bring more of our own sound gear live, we just made sure we could get gear that we can record. That's kind of just the techie side, but one of the main driving factors was realizing we should have something out there that points to why people were actually talking about us."
Along with the live album, the band is slowly rolling out a four-part YouTube docuseries to give fans something to look forward to. “One of my favorite live records when I was a kid was ‘Song Remains the Same,’ Led Zeppelin, and ‘How the West Was Won,’” John explains, “and both of those have accompanying concert films… It just felt like, well, why don't we do something different? So we hired one of Marc [LaBelle]'s longtime friends who was actually very professional… and he directed our ‘Coming Home’ video."
"When I was working on the shoot with him," he adds, "I just thought his intention to what is artistically interesting kind of grabbed me. So, when Marc was like, ‘Why don't we have him just come out and film us,’ I thought he would have a good eye for when things are interesting, that would be something that would be a nugget that you could really show the audience from behind the curtain that they otherwise wouldn't get.”
Looking back on how the band members met, John says it all happened by chance, “because I met a guy who played in his cover band years ago… and he just saw me sitting at an R&B jam. So here we are, the three white guys at this R&B jam, I don't know him, and we're sitting in with like the heaviest of cats who, you know, are all gospel Black musicians who tour with the biggest Pop artists in the world. It's just like, ‘Fit in if you can’ kind of thing, and you jam a tune and wing it.”
Eventually, he was invited to play with the cover band and after hearing some of Marc's original songs, “I was like, ‘I don't know anyone young who sings rock like that at all.’ You meet some guys who are already 50 and they've done it, and they're good, but… from there, you know, it was kind of kismet right away. I had learned a bunch of songs off that EP that I liked and sat in with them. I always say it’s random because Marc's more of a true rocker, you know, and so Mark would have never been at that R&B jam.”
“It really was chance in that sense,” he says, “but there must be something about me that's obvious rocker, because even for that kid to have called me out of the blue and be like, ‘I think you're good for this.’ It's very chance… and it's taken us a lot of work to get the right people involved too, but we have.”
“I just remember we were playing this s***ty little dive bar in Santa Monica when John walked in and immediately I was like, ‘This guy looks cool, you know. He's gonna play his Les Paul, that's cool.’ My other guy at the time was playing a Strat, and I actually always kind of liked the blend of maybe like a Telly with a Les Paul… He started playing the Les Paul and I was like, ‘This is awesome. This guy is awesome.'”
“I just came down and played a few tunes and hung out and left,” John adds. “They were doing the hustle, you know, four 45-minute sets, you know, cover band status, which we ended up doing many, many of those. That's how we got good.”
“That was kind of the mentality early on too,” Marc explains. “My best friend from growing up wound up at USC to study jazz. He's a saxophonist and he was really in with the music community, and for some reason a lot of the cats that went to USC, their playing was a lot more identifiable than the Berkeley cats that were coming out to L.A. A lot of the Berkeley cats, I was like, ‘You guys all sound the same to me. I'm not into this.' But the USC guys were, for whatever reason, more unique somehow, and it just appealed to my taste a little more.”
Marc continues, “He was the one that told me, ‘Hey, if you just book some gigs that pay, there's really good people that'll come out for $100 and play with you and learn 30 classic rock songs, and play for 4 hours and have a free meal and some drinks and have a good time.'”
“That started moving into me and Notto doing it,” he says, “and then me, Notto, and Justin doing it… We did that forever, but it was always a blast. And then at some point it just got to be like, ‘We gotta move on from this somehow.’”
Don't miss Abe Kanan's full Check In with Dirty Honey above, and be sure to pick up the brand new release, Mayhem & Revelry (Live) -- out now. Take a look at the tracklisting below and grab your copy right HERE.
Dirty Honey - Mayhem & Revelry (Live) tracklisting:
Side 1. North America
Won't Take Me Alive
California Dreamin'
Heartbreaker
Dirty Mind
Tied Up
Coming Home
Another Last Time
Rolling 7's
Side 2. Europe
Can't Find The Brakes
Satisfied
Roam
The Wire
Don't Put Out The Fire
Scars
When I'm Gone
You Make It All Right