Chris Daughtry stalks the stage in jeans, a black T-shirt and a hint of bling. With a shaved head and beard meticulously manicured, he glares into the middle distance, a young rock star pumping attitude for his first appearance on the long-running PBS concert show "Soundstage." Then someone in the audience catches him off guard.
Daughtry pauses, grins. Suddenly, he's not a rock star, just a guy from Guilford County who happened to win the music-biz lottery.
"I'm glad you think I'm awesome," he says with a shy smile. "I think you're awesome."
The "Soundstage" appearance came in 2008, the year his band, Daughtry, opened for Bon Jovi in arenas across America. Now, Daughtry is the headliner, returning home for a Nov. 12 show at the Greensboro Coliseum. Here, Daughtry is a married father who strives to remain just a guy from Guilford County.
"We don't want to shelter ourselves and be afraid to go out because we're always going to be noticed or whatever," he said recently by phone. "We try to be as normal as possible. The only difference between me and them is this is my job and they do what they do. I'm a person that has a really cool job, basically. We love where we live, and everybody treats us pretty good. I don't see us going anywhere."
When he called home for an interview, the post-grunge singer and his band were in Los Angeles rehearsing for their first tour as headliners, which opened Oct. 19 in Topeka, Kan.
"It's certainly a bigger production than we're used to," the singer said. "That comes with playing arenas and headlining. Turns out you have to spend more money."
Daughtry, 29, rocketed to fame in 2006 during appearances on "American Idol." Though he finished fourth, he has gone on to become one of the show's biggest success stories. His band's self-titled debut album hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, selling 4.5 million copies and earning a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song with "It's Not Over." That album's followup, "Leave This Town," released in July, debuted at No. 1 and has already spawned a hit single, "No Surprise."
An "American Idols" tour in 2006 brought Daughtry to the Greensboro Coliseum stage for the first time, and he played before thousands of local fans at a few big shows in 2007, including two sold-out shows at Greensboro's War Memorial Auditorium. A free concert in downtown Greensboro drew a crowd of about 22,000 and provided footage for the band's music video for "Home."
Daughtry didn't attend a show at the coliseum until about six years ago, when he went to see Linkin Park, he said. Daughtry's drummer, Joey Barnes, a Greensboro native, said "I love Greensboro," but he displayed a lackadaisical attitude about playing before thousands at the big arena in his hometown.
"My dream was never to play coliseums," said Barnes, 33. "I know a lot of people have those dreams; my dream was just to play. I didn't really grow up daydreaming about massive success. I was just kind of wandering aimlessly trying to find my way. It found me. It was never about that.
"To me, it doesn't matter how many people I'm playing to. When I come back home, every time I come back home, I'm out there playing. I'm gonna go hang out with Walrus, I'm gonna hang out with Patrick Rock. Those are my boys. I love to play wherever, whenever, for nothing."
Daughtry and Barnes spent years in the local club scene before making it big. Daughtry, who formerly lived in McLeansville, recalled shows at the Blue Gator in Burlington and Brewballs in Elon with his old band, Absent Element. Barnes met Daughtry about six years ago when they performed with separate groups in a battle of the bands at the Clubhouse in Greensboro. Barnes knew right away Daughtry had something special.
"It wasn't one particular song, it was just his voice," Barnes said. "I wasn't a fan, personally, of the music style; it was a bit like Tool meets Creed, and that's not my cup of tea. But you couldn't deny that the singer's got charisma, and he's got killer pipes. The respect level was established there."
It was purely coincidental that Daughtry's first exposure to Barnes was as a drummer: Barnes, a graduate of Vandalia Christian School in Greensboro, had not played drums in several years at that point, and was playing that night as a favor to some friends who wanted to compete in the battle of the bands but didn't have anyone to hold down the beat. Barnes had a solid foundation as a drummer. His father plays drums for a local beach music band called the Magnificents, and "actually built me a kit before I was born," Barnes said.
Barnes and Daughtry ran into each other periodically over the next couple of years, including at movie theaters and when Barnes took his car in for repairs at Crown Honda, where Daughtry was working behind the service desk. They also met up when they both auditioned for the TV competition "Rock Star: INXS" a year before Daughtry made the cut on "American Idol."
Daughtry said he had big ambitions even when playing little clubs such as Brewballs, but being a family man with a day job prevented him from taking a conventional route to success in the music business.
"I couldn't just hop in a van and play places until you get noticed," he said. "I didn't have that luxury. It was just, 'I'm gonna play here, and hopefully somebody that means something will come along and snag me up.' But that never happened, so it was, 'All right, I gotta do it on TV instead.'"
Though he failed to beat Taylor Hicks on "Idol," Daughtry has gone on to tremendous popular success. For his second album, he said, he tried to strike a balance between continuity and growth.
"If you just see what happens and see where it goes, sometimes you surprise yourself when you see what you come up with," he said. "I think that's where this record ended up. We just wrote and wrote and wrote and saw where it went, and picked what we thought were the best ---- not only the best representation of us as a band, but still had, I guess, the familiarity that people kind of expect from us from the first record, and still accomplish an evolution of the band."
People magazine said "his voice has never sounded better" than on the new album, and reviewers praise Daughtry's duet with country legend Vince Gill, "Tennessee Line."
"Of all places we were in Berlin, Germany, writing a country song, which is weird," Daughtry said. "But we were in our hotel room, and it's one of those that just kind of came out. We always had an idea of putting a secondary vocal on it, and so another friend of ours we were writing with at the time, Richard Marx, suggested Vince Gill. He happened to know him and call him up, and he said he'd do it."
Or did he?
"I haven't met him yet, so for all I know it could be somebody who sounds like Vince Gill on the record," Daughtry joked.
Daughtry will perform with Gill during the 43rd Annual CMA Awards 8 p.m. Wednesday on ABC (WXLV, Channel 45).
The rest of "Leave This Town" follows the familiar pattern of Daughtry's debut album: brooding rockers mixed with mid-tempo songs of love and loss. Rolling Stone damned Daughtry with faint praise in its review: "His greatness is the way he embraces the full-on rock cheese that runs in his veins. He has no interest in playing cool; all he cares about is ovary-melting power ballads. Hell, he even calls his band by his surname, a corny trope that rock stars haven't dared since the days of Winger and Montrose."
As a result of such reviews, Daughtry tends to give rock critics a wide berth.
"I try not to read that stuff," he said. "Sometimes it could be 100 people praising you and one person saying something negative, and all you're gonna hear is that negative person. For some reason the negativity always speaks louder, and you always want to change for that. So to stay away from that, I try not to read into it too much, because I feel that we have more positivity around us than negativity. So I say listen to that, listen to the majority."
Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com.
