Kings Of Leon's Caleb Followill: 'I Hate Hipsters'

Kings of Leon recently returned to St. Louis, the site of their infamous "pigeon-shit" gig in July, where the band bailed after three songs due to the vast amount of excrement unloaded on them by a flock of pigeons in the venue's rafters. Rolling Stone's Jenny Eliscu was there, and the band spoke with her about their new LP, Come Around Sundown (which drops tomorrow); how they've settled down now that several of them are married or engaged; and how they managed to become one of the biggest bands in the world the old-fashioned way — by touring and gradually growing their fanbase, rather than being a hipster flavor of the month.

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"I hate fucking hipsters," frontman Caleb Followill told Eliscu in her profile in Rolling Stone #1116. "Everyone talks about indie this and indie that, but would you really want to be one of those indie bands that makes two albums and disappears? That's just sad," he said. "When we signed on with our manager, we all said we wanted to have a box-set career. We'll gladly be the next generation of bands that aren't going anywhere."

Whether the band's multiplatinum success continues with Come Around Sundown remains to be seen, but it's a safe bet they won't be going away any time soon.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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