'S.O.B.' singer Nathaniel Rateliff had no ETA for success

After a troubled, destitute youth and a decade of trying to make it as a singer, Nathaniel Rateliff sure is enjoying his "overnight" success.

"It's just nice to have a bigger audience, no matter how long it took," said the Denver-based soul-rocker, whose sold-out show Wednesday at the Turf Club in St. Paul with his seven-piece band the Night Sweats has turned into one of fall's biggest club gigs.

There is a fraction of truth in Rateliff, 36, being called an overnight sensation. His first network TV performance on "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon" in August went viral the next day, egged on by Fallon's rapturous reception.

The song he performed on air that night, "S.O.B.," is a gospel-tinged, hand-clapping rave-up that has since turned into a No. 1 adult-alternative radio hit and Rateliff's calling card. Between manic bursts of horns, the burly-looking, brawny-voiced singer at once sounds haggard and weary and uplifting and joyful as he sings about his struggles to stay sober.

Talking by phone from his home in Denver last month before hitting the road for most of the rest of the year, Rateliff admitted he was "totally naive" about how big a difference the Fallon performance would make.

"I'd always thought being on TV doesn't really sell records anymore, but it's obviously not true in this case," he said. "We were on there 10 days before our record came out, and it changed everything."

Rateliff was already on a new trajectory, though, after years of recording and touring more as a folky singer/songwriter.

He put the Night Sweats together — "the kind of band I wanted for a long time but couldn't make it work," he said — around the songs that would make up their eponymous debut album. The recordings drew interest from Concord Music Group, parent company to legendary Memphis R&B label Stax Records, which fittingly became the brand behind Rateliff's retro-flavored music.

"I really didn't even know [Concord] handled Stax when I started talking to them," he said. Like so many people, he added, "Stax is such an institution to me. I'm honored to be involved with it in any way."

Rateliff's album echoes classic Stax albums by the likes of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. However, he and producer Richard Swift (a frequent Shins collaborator and Black Keys touring member) managed to keep it from sounding too much like a nostalgia trip, with freshly updated, Danger Mouse-style grooves and modernized soul-pop harmonies in "S.O.B." and other standout songs of endurance — such as "Howling at Nothing" and "Trying So Hard Not to Know."

Part of the record's timeless quality comes from Rateliff's authentic-sounding, rough-hewed soul-singer voice. He certainly has the personal back story to suggest he's singing with depth.

A native of rural Hermann, Mo., Rateliff dropped out of school in the seventh grade following the death of his father, killed in a car accident on his way to the church he and Rateliff's mother helped run.

"I took time off and then didn't really get back to school until toward the end of the year, and by then I just didn't see a point in continuing," he recalled. "I was pretty rattled."

He spent his late teens working "miserable jobs" such as a line man in a plastics factory, he recalled, and even took up with church missionary work for a while.

Finally, he and his longtime bassist Joseph Pope III headed to Denver after turning 18. Obviously, though, it would be years before they would make it as musicians. In that time, Rateliff worked at a trucking company, and Pope endured a bout with cancer.

"We put up with all kinds of crazy [stuff], but we just never really quit playing music," said Rateliff, who also issued two solo albums before the Night Sweats record. "We just kept playing shows whenever we could — all kinds of [crummy] shows — because it's the only way we really knew how to go about it."

Another battle along the way, Rateliff's fight with alcoholism as he entered his 30s, was an especially hard one.

"I was having delirium tremors and some pretty scary episodes," he recalled. "It's something I was dealing with for a long time and finally had to face."

Wryly, he added, "it wasn't exactly the kind of stuff that makes you think, 'Sounds like a hit song!' "

The experience led him to writing "S.O.B." and a few other songs, though. "I'm gonna need someone to hold me down," he bellows in the hit single. "I'm gonna need someone to care/I'm gonna writhe and shake my body/I'll start pulling out my hair."

The repeat exclamation in the song's chorus — "Son of a bitch/Give me a drink" — caused Twin Cities public radio station the Current (89.3 FM) to ban "S.O.B." from its daytime rotation for fear of offending listeners (other stations, including Go 96.3 FM, are playing it). Rateliff said he respects the decision but hopes it doesn't spark further misunderstanding of the song.

"The use of the word in this case isn't derogatory, like the way it's used too many times in a lot of hip-hop songs about women," he said. "It's just part of an expression that, I think, captures the raw emotion of what I went through.

"Sometimes a word is just a word," he concluded.

Kind of like "overnight."

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658