Written by Nathan Savin Scott

The van seems as good a place as any to start. It’s red. Not bright red. More like the color of blood. The thing is boxy but still somehow streamlined. It looks built for movement. The van is a Dodge Sprinter, but the guys in Filligar have dubbed her  Dee Dee (or The Red Rocket when they aren’t feeling as poetic.) They bought the thing used from an electrician from Joliet, IL. Aside from a decal with the band’s name stuck to the rear door, you’d never know a major touring band was inside if you saw her on the road.

Inside Ruby is where you can start to piece together a narrative. Photographs, flyers and other random kitsch are tacked up helter-skelter on the gray felt walls that make up the interior of the van. Looking at the photos of the boys taken with cheap disposable cameras, sports team paraphernalia, playbills and all the other stuff that makes up this sort of road-warrior-mélange, you begin to see where the four young men in Filligar have been.

The faded White Sox pennant tacked up above the rear seat is a relic of their upbringing. The four members of Filligar (brothers Johnny, Pete and Teddy Mathias and their childhood friend Casey Gibson) grew up running around the streets of Chicago. They’ve known each other as long as they can remember: mornings playing street hockey on patches of concrete near Lake Michigan, evenings piecing together music in dark basements. Though all in their early 20s, the boys have been playing together for over a decade, and you can hear it when they play – the hours put in, countless hours, when they were only kids.

Look above the rear door and you’ll see a playbill for a sold-out show at Mercury Lounge, the famous Lower East Side venue. New York is where the boys first built their base outside Chicago. All four attended college in the Northeast, and NYC became the hub where they’d come and play to more and more people during weekends and vacations. Kids from D.C. to Maine would make their way to the city to hear this band with the live show no one could believe.

Tucked beneath a pair of old parking tickets you’ll find a faded picture of the guys at a farm in southern Mississippi. They’d spent all night making music with the farm hand there, R.L., who was 68 and only knew six songs on the guitar (but, man, did he know them well.) Or tacked above that is a receipt from a Denny’s in Scottsdale, where a concert-goer bought the guys breakfast because he said Filligar had satisfied his fix for rock and roll like no band had done for him since the 1970s.

These moments were stand-outs for them, memories from their long summer tour, where they played 80 shows and put 20,000 miles onto Rube’s odometer in support of their critically-acclaimed eighth release, The Nerve. Here they discovered the feel of the open road, refining their live act, playing to dark dives and large concert halls throughout the country. This was also the tour where they began to really get noticed, when they started headlining big rooms and sharing the stage with bands like The Black Keys, B.B. King, Tom Petty…

The last thing you’ll notice before you close the door is a small, faded American flag hanging in a back corner. A small display of patriotism, yes, but also a reminder: of where they’ve been and what their music is.

Filligar makes rock and roll.

Not indie chill. No electro-dub. Not some other genre that critics will fawn over for two weeks and forget just as quickly. They’re made up of a guitar, a bass, keys and drums. It’s music to listen to on a long drive, or on a faded barstool in an ill-lit, dusty bar somewhere in the nation’s heartland. Like a lot of other American things, it’s not too complicated. The guys in Filligar are just fine by that.