Dirty Honey lead singer visits home turf at SPAC

It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of people reading this have attended a concert at SPAC. To go one step further, a good lot of you have probably wondered what it would feel like to be performing onstage there or even wished it was you up there, belting your heart out to the thousands in attendance.

For Marc LaBelle, that wish is about to become a reality.

The Niskayuna native fronts Los Angeles-based throwback blues rockers Dirty Honey. On Tuesday, Sept. 14, the band will be at SPAC as support for the Black Crowes on its “Shake Your Money Maker” 30th-anniversary tour. For LaBelle, the tour has been a chance to play with some of his heroes, and the Saratoga show marks an opportunity for friends and families to see him helm one of hard rock’s fastest-rising outfits.

“Right now I’m sitting at a restaurant in Denver with a day off, before we play two nights at Red Rocks (Amphitheatre),” he said. “This has been an amazing tour and it’s an amazing match for sure. We get told a lot that we’re ‘bringing the roll back in rock ’n’ roll,’ and the Black Crowes have the roll as well. They’re heroes of ours and have been super-supportive.

“It all started for me at SPAC and I’ll have a ton of family there,” LaBelle continued. “It’s going to be one of those things where a wave of emotions is going to come over me. It’s going to be emotional, for sure, but more than anything I want to come back there one day and headline my own show.”

When he was around 5, LaBelle was given his first guitar. Inspired by the overlapping tastes of his dad and stepfather, he was drawn to learning and listening to classic rock. They’d take him to the big rock shows that came to the Capital Region, like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 2005 or AC/DC in 2001. But it was a 1997 concert at SPAC and a pre-show meet-and-greet that changed the course of the then-tween’s life pursuits.

“The first show I ever saw was at SPAC — Aerosmith,” LaBelle recalled. “I met Steven Tyler and Joe Perry that day, through PYX 106 and one of those small-town radio station promos. I was a kid and saw the full-on rockstar life; they showed up in a limo, were taking pics, signing autographs, signing girls’ boobs. Then I went to the show and seeing them play, it sparked this serious interest.”

It was the push LaBelle needed to pursue music as a career. He remembers gigging around the area in various local bands and feeling “like a rock star.” But it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 2012 that he really began to make things happen.

A friend of a friend had a spare room, so with “some connections and an ability to live rent-free,” LaBelle stuffed a hockey bag full of clothes and headed west.

After a few years, LaBelle was out of the apartment and “living in a car for almost a year.”

“It was all fine, nothing bad, I was waiting tables and saving money,” he said. “I was also full-on doing gigs, $100 a night, two to three nights a week since that’s really all you could do without oversaturating yourself. But through all of that, I was always pursuing the dream.”

That dream was playing “blues-driven rock.” In meeting guitarist John Notto, bassist Justin Smolian and drummer Corey Coverstone, he found the means to make that dream a reality, and in 2017 Dirty Honey officially formed.

Playing crunchy, riff-based rock ’n’ roll proved to be an immediately winning formula. The successes they’ve achieved in the past four years have been made more impressive by the fact that Dirty Honey was, and remains, unsigned by a major record label.

By 2018, the band was opening for Slash. A year later, they were opening for classic rock icons the Who and Guns N’ Roses at their respective arena shows. That same year, Dirty Honey made history when its single “When I’m Gone” hit the top spot on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, marking the first time an unsigned band has ever hit that position.

In April, Dirty Honey released its eponymous debut LP and it debuted at number 2 on the Hard Rock chart. At this point, shopping the music to labels isn’t a concern for LaBelle, as going the independent route continues to pay off, both in terms of commercial success and credibility with their heroes and peers.

“I think the biggest thing is the music; if that’s where it needs to be, it’ll get out there to listeners,” LaBelle said. “It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying, but getting to this point led us to question if we need a label to do things. We’ve never run into an artist who says, ‘you HAVE to work with a label’ and is excited about theirs.

“Our first real gigs were opening for Slash in Phoenix,” he continued. “After, Slash said to us, ‘This is something real you have.’ If Slash is a huge fan of what you’re doing, don’t stop.”