A homecoming for the Zac Brown Band in Atlanta

The Zac Brown Band’s show Friday at Truist Park will be a homecoming for the talented group. It will also be an occasion to take a trip through the band’s stunning rise from Atlanta area clubs to superstardom.

“This is also probably the most intimate tour that we’ve ever done in the sense that we start out kind of how we started out as a band. We start out with this bar vibe and Zac (on stage), and it kind of unfolds the way our career did,” guitarist/keyboardist Coy Bowles said in an early June Zoom interview. “And Zac is doing more story telling and more kind of just filling the crowd in on how we all came together…Hearing it kind of spoken out and played out the way it unfolds on stage is really cool for our audience and ourselves.”

Of course, a concert in Atlanta is not just another concert for the Zac Brown Band.

“We love it. Atlanta’s home town for us basically,” said fiddle player Jimmy De Martini, who joined Bowles for this video interview. “We’re a bunch of Georgia boys and we all live around the Atlanta area. We’re going to have friends and family coming to see us at that show. We just love playing here.

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“It very much feels like a homecoming or reunion or some big social event,” Bowles added. “Everybody’s really good friends with each other. My dad and Jimmy’s dad are buds, stuff like that. They don’t see each other often, so it’s a very harmonious vibe that everybody gets to catch up and see each other. It’s that one time a year, it’s almost like a Christmas kind of thing.”

The Zac Brown Band, of course, is one of Atlanta’s biggest music success stories. The band came together one musician at a time around singer/guitarist Brown. Both Bowles and De Martini said Brown’s talent was obvious when they first encountered him.

Credit: Andy Sapp

“You could just tell by the way he plays guitar that he was just an incredible musician. Nobody’s like that,” De Martini said. “And he had the look and his voice is just like, it’s one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. He’s one of the best singers there is. You could tell right away, there was just something special about him.”

De Martini became the first recruit for the Zac Brown Band, joining in 2004. Bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Driskell Hopkins — a longtime friend of Brown’s who recently announced he has been diagnosed with ALS — joined in 2005, followed by Bowles, and then drummer Chris Fryar to form the core of the early lineup.

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The members of the Zac Brown Band cut their teeth on the vibrant Atlanta area bar scene.

“We all had the clubs that we kind of centered around, but then everybody had their own individual clubs where they kind of hung out,” Bowles said, mentioning the Dixie Tavern as an Atlanta bar that was a favorite of the band’s. “And there were a couple of places outside of the Atlanta area like Sidelines (in Kennesaw). And that was right when I started playing with the band. But then there’s other stuff. Like Clay (Cook) was really big into Eddie’s Attic (in Decatur). He was hanging out down there and all those guys at Eddie’s Attic at that time. And I was really hanging out with Oliver Wood and Sean Costello and a bunch of other guys at Northside Tavern…Yeah, we were all over Atlanta. Everybody was pretty tapped into all of the different scenes.”

Credit: Angela Morris

The story of the Zac Brown Band’s breakthrough to a national audience is well known. In 2008, the band had signed to Live Nation Records, and later that year got a distribution deal with major label Atlantic Records. “Chicken Fried” was released as the first single off of the 2008 Atlantic-distributed album “The Foundation.” Within a month, “Chicken Fried” had topped the country singles chart. Three more singles — “Toes,” “Highway 20 Ride” and “Free” — all followed “Chicken Fried” to No. 1.

Just like that, the Zac Brown Band had arrived on the national stage. With guitarist/keyboardist Cook joining the group in 2009, the Zac Brown Band got to work on their next album, “You Get What You Give.” Released in 2010, it went triple platinum and confirmed that the initial success was no fluke. The Zac Brown Band has released five more studio albums since then, while notching 10 more No. 1 singles and branching out musically from their country foundation to touch on a variety of other musical styles, including hard rock, pop balladry and even EDM and hip-hop. Along the way, the band added percussionist Daniel de los Reyes and bassist Matt Mangano to the lineup.

Credit: Danny Clinch

The pandemic interrupted the Zac Brown Band’s usual schedule of touring, but the band used the break to make the new studio album, “The Comeback.” With songs that lean decidedly country, the new album is being considered a return to the group’s original musical roots – an assessment Bowles didn’t dispute.

“It was kind of like the original recipe, great songs that Zac had his heart into and the band helping support that with musicianship and stuff like that,” Bowles said. “We were trying to sound like the Zac Brown Band, and it really worked.”