Find yourself a copy of the Whiskey Thieves CD, Almost Time, cue up any song—perhaps “Used to Be,” “Stars Above” or “Whiskey and Women”—close your eyes and conjure in your mind the image of the man you hear singing.
The voice is slightly world-weary, husky with smoke and alcohol deep in the throat, hard nights and long days on the road. It’s a voice that, on any experience meter, should be at least 50 years old. Faces that could match it might include a piece of Boz Scaggs, maybe a little Merle Haggard, some Waylon Jennings too, although the voice is more blues than country.
What you would not expect unless you already know him (as most of Sonoma apparently does), is the smooth-faced, non-smoking, boyish countenance of Codi Binkley.
Arguably one of the best male singers in Sonoma County and clearly someone with enough talent to make it across the show business threshold into a national spotlight, Binkley, at 36, is still awaiting his breakthrough moment. It’s not like he and the Whiskey Thieves haven’t had some fun in the sun. They’ve opened for some notable musical acts—including Journey, the Doobie Brothers, Los Lobos, Taj Mahal, Joe Cocker, Keb Mo, Norton Buffalo, Dead Presidents, Etta James, Jackie Greene and more. They’ve played South by Southwest and their first (and only) CD (produced by Jimmy Goings, of Santa Esmeralda fame) got enough play to make the iTunes favorite upcoming artists list.
The band has had seriously good musicians. Guitarist Gabe Brueske is formidably talented with a sound that channels Santana. Bass player Zack Murphy and drummer Thomas Bottari are both standouts.
So the very fact that Codi Binkley is not under contract somewhere, that he’s not on playlists across the country, makes you scratch your head and wonder: Seriously, why isn’t this man famous?
Turns out, it’s a question Codi Binkley has already asked himself, although he still struggles with the answer.
“I would love to have it,” he says, of that elusive, breakout success. But in the next breath he admits, “It’s a scare. It’s scary in the sense that you have to leave everyone. You have to leave everything you are doing to get your dream. And sometimes I don’t know if I want to do it or not, because I feel so tight with my community and my friends, my family, and being comfortable is so easy.”
Some people might call this the Sonoma trap. If you already have it made, Sonoma’s gravitational pull is a welcome seduction. If you don’t, if you’re still trying to break out, leaving the nest may be both a necessary and impossible imperative.
“I definitely would love the opportunity,” Codi says again, maybe arguing a little bit with himself. “I just felt like there is a higher plan, and I figure I’m going to be in the right place at the right time, and that’s what I’ve always felt.”
Blind faith? Fear of flying? Comfort addiction? Or just wariness and weariness of the road? Codi and the Thieves have had their share of couch surfing with late-night burritos.
Of course, achieving national recognition in the music business is a statistical anomaly. Look at the thousands who flock to compete on each season of American Idol and The Voice but fail. Codi has pursued the dream long enough to know the outlines of the success equation, so it’s easy to understand if he’s ambivalent about chasing it further.
“A lot of the time,” he says, “it comes down to having a core band that has the same passion and drive that you do, as well as availability and willingness to accept the sacrifices to make that possible. Putting in your hard day’s work after you’ve already put in a hard day’s work, believing in yourself that you can make it and being able to take criticism and make growth out of that possibility.”
On top of all that, Codi knows, it’s hard to survive in a high-rent market when you’re perpetually broke.
“Living in Sonoma county, living in San Francisco, you have to make a lot of money to be able to live, and I did it for so long, and we were so broke, with no health insurance, not knowing where your next rent check is coming from, getting behind in your bills, going to collections, wanting that dream. But then you end up, say, either losing a drummer or somebody has a kid. There are always going to be these life struggles. I just felt like I’ve never had the complete package in the sense that we’ve never been able to fully do it. We were all just growing together, and it’s almost impossible, I feel, for everyone to be on the same page.”
Codi knows the constraints that come with having a kid. His son, Jaden, was born in 2011, which now makes him the single father of a 5-year-old boy. He chews some more on the music breakout bone.
“I’d like to be able to set myself a business plan with a 90-day schedule,” he muses, “knowing that I believe in myself, and feeling that if I were to push myself for that amount of time I’d have a better understanding whether that [success] is possible or not, knowing that I put in 100 percent and that’s where it ends up coming.”
He pauses, there is a rueful smile.
“Sometimes, I want to go play guitar, but my son smiles at me to go play T-ball and go jump on the trampoline and go in the pool. And being in the business that I’m in now, it’s hard to have a set schedule. I’ve just really got to maintain time to do that for myself, as a passion and a dream.”
The business Codi is in now, of course, is Burgers & Vine Whiskey Bar & Grill, in the old Creamery building on the historic corner of the Sonoma Plaza across from the Mission. Partnered with chef/restaurateur Carlo Cavallo, he has his hands full with food, drink and entertainment. Live music, including Codi’s, was part of the original plan. There’s a portable stage and a professional light bank set up, and he’s performed there numerous times. But Codi says booking live bands hasn’t proved profitable and a good DJ has as much draw at a fraction of the cost.
So that’s one more small step away from the spotlight.
The vagaries of performing aren’t exactly foreign. Codi was raised by musicians and, as his mother Lisa says, “We have apologized to him several times for that! We never wanted him to travel the same road we did, but God has different plans. Music has been a blessing and a curse. The road is very rough sometimes.”
Codi’s road through life began in December 1979, when he was delivered by his father, Rick, at home, with the help of a midwife. Lisa had been performing six nights a week in a Fort Worth nightclub and went into labor during the last set. It could be said that Codi came very close to being born on stage.
Nine months later the family put everything in storage (except Codi) and hit the road in a converted school bus with two full beds, two bunk beds, a non-working bathroom, all three Binkleys, the bass player and his wife, the drummer, the guitar player and two pug dogs.
Says Lisa, “We always say we looked like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ coming into town. Codi’s first solid food was McDonald’s and Taco John’s. He learned to keep musician hours, waking up when we got home and hanging with the band until the wee hours of the morning, then sleeping ‘til noon.”
After a year on the road, the band called it quits and ended up in Pierre, South Dakota, with, as Lisa puts it, “No home, no car, no jobs.” There were some trying times but the family survived. Rick and Lisa formed a new band called “Savannah,” and they all moved to Sonoma in 1982 in a caravan that included a Chevy truck, a Chevy Van, a Honda Civic, a Ford LTD, a Ford Taurus and a 1940s panel van named “Norton the Water Buffalo.”
“We knew we had found home when we pulled into the Square at midnight,” says Lisa. “It was beautiful.”
Codi’s sister Caysi was born in 1985 and both kids attended El Verano Elementary School, Altimira Middle School and Sonoma Valley High. In high school Codi became a serious jock, playing football, baseball, volleyball and running track. Singing was something he did (almost literally) in the closet.
“In sixth grade, I would hide in my room by listening to Jodeci and Boyz II Men. My parents were still playing three times a week. I knew every single one of my mom’s songs, every one of my dad’s songs, and I’d sing the parts, but they would never see me sing because my sister was the singer of the family.”
Codi says Cayci occupied the family’s musical limelight during most of her childhood. “On the Fourth of July, she was always up there on the stage in the amphitheater, singing Patsy Cline. She was always the one who got brought up on all our parents’ shows, because they were still playing three or four times a week. For her senior project in high school she did a CD and sang “Angel from Montgomery,” and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Ask Codi to pick up the thread after high school, tracing the arc of his singing career, and he takes you to the railroad tracks in Santa Cruz, drinking beer and trying to shape a decision.
It was after the opening show of his first group, where “Norton Buffalo came up and played the entire last set with us, and he said, ‘I think you really have something. Are you going to think about pursuing this?’”
It may have been a crooked path from there, but it was a path.
Codi says at one point he made a flyer on his computer, a call for musicians.
“I hung it up at every liquor store, every music store. It said I’m wanting to form a blues band. None of my friends at the time knew I could sing. Not one. They didn’t know .”
Somehow, a group came together, called the Rock Bottom Blues Band, and people began to take notice. “We started playing. People just started to dig it. They were like, ‘What is going on? These 22 year old kids, 20 and 21 and 22 year old kids playing Albert Collins, Bobby Blue Bland, BB King, John Lee Hooker,’ and they are just like, ‘What is coming out of this young man’s mouth?’ That’s what they all kept saying and saying and saying, so we just kept playing and playing. About a year and a half in, we were just playing non-stop. There wasn’t a week where we weren’t playing a bare minimum of three times.”
Part of the attraction was the talent and part of it was the music. Codi and Gabe Brewski wrote most of the songs and while the band sang covers, their own music struck a chord.
“We would play for four hours. We had around 60 songs. I don’t know how I did it.”
With popular success, and four young guys, what followed was inevitable.
“We were partying. It was a party for us. It was like, drink whatever you like, eat whatever you like. We just drowned ourselves. Seriously it started to get to a point where … Zack my base player, in multiple occasions has completely blacked out on stage and fell through a drum set. There’s shows where we played and we don’t even remember the last set. Some people said, that was the best we’ve ever heard you sound. It was just that easy for us, it came right off your memory. Muscle memory. There wasn’t that much effort to put in.”
Was that, perhaps, one of the roadblocks to success?
“Honestly I think the partying got too much. You still had to do all the cool gigs, you still got to do all those things, but when it came to crunch time, I don’t know… My whole goal was to make that wheel, say four guys in a band, and you put in four hours a day, that’s 16 hours a day that you are putting in your music, but when you have one guy, putting in four to eight, and everyone else is doing it, you are dropping off the path slowly, slowly. You can’t run a business on your own. That’s why I had it. That’s why I had to give up. That’s why I left them.”
So, is there a future for The Whiskey Thieves? Cody would like to bring them together again for a reunion concert.
But is there a future for Codi Binkley, a big time future? Friends, he says, are pleading with him to go for The Voice. He admits to being nervous but says he’ll try.
“I just have to do it. I feel like I’d be letting my friends and family down if I didn’t just go try. I tried out for American Idol in Seattle in 2008. I made it to the second round, but I didn’t understand it was all song choice and you are in a group of 5 people. Definitely I think I need to do the voice to show my family and show them that I care and they keep reaching out. I want to do it for myself, I guess sometimes it’s scary. I don’t like failing. Never been good at that. It’s like I said, being comfortable is sometimes just easier.”
What will happen in the end?
Stay tuned.