Three Day Threshold :

Spread their root throughout the northwest

By: C.D. DI Guardia

Photo By: Anthony Tieuli

Kier Byrnes is on the stage, working the crowd. In actuality, the “stage” isn’t really elevated above the floor, and the crowd is about 10 people strong. Three Day Threshold knows that there are home shows full of throngs of sweaty fans and there are away shows in front of smallish crowds in town bars that start the night neutral at best. This is the latter of the two. This will simply make it more fun for Three Day Threshold.

Three Day Threshold aren’t northerners playing dress-up in western shirts and cowboy boots; Byrnes’ boot heels carry actual road dust. The band — four decidedly normal looking guys — seems at ease in the club, as though they’re in week six of a seasonal residency. “We’ve never played here before in our lives,” admits Byrnes outside during a set break. He looks up and down the street, familiarizing himself with the environs. It’s only the first set and the band is comfortable as can be — relishing the fresh air that the break provides, but itching to get back inside for the second set.

“We don’t really have a ‘set list’ either; we just sort of play how we’re feeling,” says Byrnes. The band is playing the fabled “9 p.m. to closing,” set with no supporting acts, just the band with whomever shows up. The bands and people who filled up their record release party a few months back at the Cambridge Elks are around 40 miles away. It’s time to make friends in Gloucester, and Byrnes is already charming the locals, borrowing and lending cigarettes like he’s one of them fresh off the docks, and the locals are loving it.

This personal touch has put Byrnes and his band light-years ahead of groups that stay in comfortable cliques and get by on MySpace and message boards.

“You can’t rely on the internet alone as your marketing piece,” says Burns, who knows that a band has to leave the city every once in a while. “You have to get out there and get in front of people,” he shrugs, like this is some old-fashioned idea. This mindset has kept Three Day Threshold going strong now for almost a decade. Burns formed the band in 1998, and found that booking his band good shows was tricky business

“Alt-country’s kind of cool now — Johnny Cash had a movie and Wilco sells out crowds now — but in 1998, it was impossible to get a show in the rock clubs,” recalls Byrnes. In a bold move, Byrnes targeted the Boston area with a guerilla-marketing scheme that involved not Lite Brites, but flyers. The group pooled its funds and had 100 T-shirts and around 10,000 flyers printed up, all bearing the same legend: “Let Three Day Threshold Play.” The T-shirts were distributed and the flyers slapped onto any flat object with enough surface area. In no time, they were a band that everyone had at least heard of.

The message on the flyers finally found the right eyes — a booking agent from the now-defunct Boston club Mama Kin. “He hadn’t heard us, but he was like ‘Yeah, I’ve seen these flyers everywhere,’ and gave us a night,” smiles Byrnes. The band played to impress and by the next month they were the club’s house band, playing once a week right up until the club finally closed its doors.

“If the flyers didn’t work,” deadpans Byrnes, “I would probably have a better job, a healthy relationship and about $10,000 more in the bank. So, I’m kind of pissed about that.” The job, relationship and money notwithstanding, Byrnes and his gang have quite a few trophies in the band trophy case — they can coolly refer to their “handful of Boston Music Awards” in stride. “We’ve been able to stay around,” understates Byrnes of the band’s continued success. “I haven’t had to call and ask for a show that often.”

The band has gone through many personnel changes over the years as can be expected with a 10-year project. They also have a bench full of musicians ready for whatever situation might arise — a mandolin here, some extra percussion there, maybe a fiddle. Byrnes, who also skates with WBCN local DJ Shred’s “Boston Rockers” hockey team, regards the group more as a sports team than a band. “Like in many professional sports teams, there’s rebuilding years. We’ve had a series of rebuilding years and now we’ve got a quality squad,” he says, sounding like a general manager in a press conference. In this case, it’s general manager who also serves as team captain, top goal scorer, equipment manager, bus driver and national anthem singer. It seems like all any bandmate would really need to do would be to hitch onto Byrnes’ coattails, but guitarist Colt Thompson and bassist John Stump seem energized by Byrnes’ driving spirit.

“Kier has got these visions of what he wants to be doing,” says Thompson of the band’s founder. “It’s interesting to watch how a lot of the shit he does kind of pans out. Sometimes you’re like ‘Kier, are you sure about that, man?’ and nine times out of 10, it’s right,” he shrugs. Stump and Thompson, while being “the new guys,” both went through a veritable trial by fire upon joining the band. Stump’s first show with the band was actually his first two shows — a double-header of three-hour shows in Nantucket. “I had to learn 33-plus songs in about three weeks,” recalls Stump, working his fingers around like he’s playing all 33 songs at once. Thompson had a similar first day on the job — playing the Freedom Rally in the afternoon, then trucking over to O’Brien’s in Allston to play an opening set. And then the closing set. “Kier likes hardcore orientation,” he laughs.

Byrnes and the entire band are hell-bent on working as hard as they can, both onstage and off. A recent bull-riding barn-burner is a multi-faceted example of this band’s spirit. The story starts back in March of 2006. The band, having sold out Harper’s Ferry on St. Patrick’s Day, was asked, somewhere around June of 2006, if they’d like to come back for the holiday next March. They did, and upped the ante by making it their official CD release party. Their hopes, dreams and careful planning were all doused in green beer, though, by the one band that can walk into a Boston rock club on St. Patrick’s Day and stop time: The Dropkick Murphys. Though the Murphys’ original slot for that show had been vacated at the Paradise and available for Threshold’s release party, the band was not satisfied with the idea of a hastily arranged show being their record release. They bumped the release back and regrouped.

“We decided to go off the grid and throw a party that Boston will never see again.” They rented out the Cambridge Elks Lodge, a homey place outside of Central Square with a minimal accoutrements that they knew wouldn’t double-book or turn coat on them to any big national acts at the last minute. It was an option that a few enterprising DIY minds had already just begun using and it seemed the perfect place for a Three Day Threshold free-for-all. “Bring in a mechanical bull from Rhode Island. Bring in Redbones, Triple8 Vodka and Whale’s Tail Beer. It was a lot of work for us,” says Byrnes. “A hell of a party.”

This is how Three Day Threshold operates. Given the finger by forces beyond their control, they regroup to do things right. Get the people drunk and sweaty, and if the music doesn’t send them catapulting around the room, the mechanical bull surely will.

To Stump, a good show is easy to explain. “People come. And they dance. And somebody hopefully falls down, because we usually play better when someone falls down.”

“It’s always a good show when somebody has a wipeout in front of the stage,” agrees Byrnes.

If the insane energy is infectious, then the main carrier is Kier Byrnes. Offstage, he is polite, well-spoken and even-tempered. He is hyper-organized and the front page of the Three Day Threshold website provides instant access via direct email and an actual phone number. He responds to all messages quickly and courteously. He is professional without being officious, warm without being false. Onstage, he is a dynamo, putting on a cowboy hat and sunglasses and pulling off bizarre moves with chairs, his hat, and sometimes, his own bandmates. “I’m completely bipolar when it comes to this,” explains off-stage Byrnes. “A lot of people ask me, and yes I’m very calm. But stick around long enough, you’ll see me freak out or go nuts.” Thompson has a better explanation: “You hit a G chord and he turns into the Hulk or something.”

After 10 years, Byrnes and company are still on the upswing. Gone are the days of begging for shows. In fact their current philosophy is the opposite: “Play where you’re invited to go.” They’ll head across the country to play for 15 people in Oregon and love it, but don’t harbor any unrealistic expectations of what it’s going to do for their career. Like their the last ten years have proven, Three Day Threshold have evolved by taking things as they come, making things happen when they can and doing what they can to enjoy the rest of it.

Ever helpful, Byrnes offers advice to bands who may be where he was 10 years ago. “Once you get on the other side — once you prove that you can bring people and put on a good show — it’s pretty easy to stay on the radar of people in the regional music industry. Just keep trying and plugging away.”

www.threedaythreshold.com