Below is an excerpt of an article that originally appeared in RS 1077 from April 30, 2009. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about Rolling Stone Plus.

Caleb and Nathan Followill don't fight very often, but when they do, get the hell out of the way. One night in 2007, the brothers — at 27 and 29, respectively, the two eldest members of Kings of Leon — arrived home after a night of heavy drinking in Nashville. What precipitated the fight, no one remembers exactly, but "I had just walked in the front door when I heard pots and pans falling everywhere," says their cousin and guitar tech Nacho. "I ran into the kitchen, and Nate and Caleb had handfuls of hair, just rolling in grease in front of the stove." Nacho eventually separated the brothers, sequestering Caleb, who'd dislocated his shoulder, in the adjacent greenhouse. But Nathan was still going ballistic. He shattered a $7,000 mirror in Caleb's bedroom and repeatedly stabbed his brother's mattress with a kitchen knife. "Nathan definitely gets psychotic when it comes to fights," says their younger brother, Jared, 22, who plays bass in the band. "He's like the American Psycho — he's told me that one day he'll kill Caleb."

The following morning, Caleb, the band's singer and lyricist, and Nathan, the drummer, made peace. "I love ya, bro," Nathan told him. "I'll pay for everything I broke." But the brawl also had an upside: It led to Caleb writing the group's biggest song yet, "Sex on Fire," the smash anthem that has helped the Kings' latest album, Only by the Night, sell more than 3 million copies worldwide. "I came up with that song fresh out of shoulder surgery," says Caleb in his hushed Southern drawl. "The doctor told me not to play guitar for nine months, but within a week I'd popped my sling off." His stitches had immobilized his left arm, restricting his movement, so when Caleb picked up a guitar again for the first time he could only articulate chords high on the neck in the upper frets. "The first thing I did," he says, "was come up with that riff and sing the melody for 'Sex on Fire.'"

In February, the song earned the Kings — brothers Nathan, Caleb and Jared, and their cousin Matthew, 24, on guitar — their first Grammy, and in the past eight months the band has checked a handful of career goals off the list, including performing on Saturday Night Live and selling out Madison Square Garden. "Sure as fuck never thought that'd happen," says Nathan. After four stellar albums, the song has helped earn the Followill foursome the overdue respect that has eluded them in the U.S. since their 2003 debut, Youth and Young Manhood. Only by the Night — full of the Kings' dirty brand of Southern rock & roll, as well as arena anthems as grandiose as anything by U2 or Pearl Jam — has gone gold in the U.S., and in the U.K. the quartet have sold a staggering 1.8 million copies (more than the last Coldplay record). Down under in Australia — where I lived the life of a King for seven days, in Sydney and Newcastle — the album has been certified eight times platinum.

Six years ago, the Kings were four scraggly, wasted kids who could barely play their instruments, and now they're rolling through a life of uninterrupted luxury, traveling in private planes, performing in sold-out arenas and making more money than they could ever imagine. "We feel blessed," says Caleb. "There have been too many talented bands who have gone down the toilet to think that there isn't someone smiling down on us."

"I feel like the kid in that Richard Pryor movie The Toy," adds Jared, who was 15 when he joined the band. "Like, why can't I go buy some $800 night-vision goggles?"

The Followill brothers have come a long way since their backwoods childhood, much of which was spent in a purple Oldsmobile, barnstorming churches and tent revivals in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma with their father, Ivan, a United Pentecostal preacher. The boys' religious mandate was strict: no movies, no music but church music, no "mixed bathing" (with girls), no competitive sports, no short pants (even while water-skiing). "You're under the microscope," Nathan says. "It was like TMZ before TMZ. God forbid you get caught going to a theater, or watching TV. Then you're fucked."

Nathan was born in Oklahoma City in June 1979, two years after his parents, Ivan and BettyAnn Followill, tied the knot. Caleb came along in the winter of 1982. The fact that their parents hooked up was a minor miracle. "It was a great love story," says Caleb. "He'd get off work on Friday night, drive from Oklahoma City to Memphis, eight hours, every weekend, just to tell her she was going to marry him. She was engaged to another man, and he said, 'God has told me we were meant for each other.'"

Ivan was a natural showman with a great voice and a wicked sense of humor that he passed on to his three boys. "He was definitely my idol growing up," says Caleb, who compares his dad to the Robert Duvall character in The Apostle."My dad was the best preacher, hands down. He could crack the code of the Bible pretty easily. He would take a sentence this long" — about an inch — "and his whole sermon would be about those three words. The biggest man in the room would be bawling his eyes out. Two seconds later, he'd be on the floor laughing." During the services, BettyAnn played piano and Nathan would drum along on the backs of pews with straws or pencils. "Most people think the [Pentecostal] music is reserved, but there's organs, pianos, guitars, basses, drums, horns," he says. "It's the equivalent of black gospel music. It's a full-on Al Green, Aretha Franklin-style service."

Until 1986, when Jared was born, the family never had a fixed address. But with three kids the Followills settled into a run-down, one-story house in Millington, Tennessee, near Memphis. For the six years the family lived there, Ivan was the pastor at the Munford United Pentecostal Church, which the kids would attend at least five times a week. Caleb and Nathan wore ties and rode their bikes to H.M. Simpson Academy, a three-room schoolhouse.

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