GRETA VAN FLEET
“ART IS SUPPOSED TO ELICIT STRONG REACTIONS, ISN’T IT?”
Jake Kiszka asks rhetorically. The Greta Van Fleet guitarist is considering the extreme, diametrically opposed responses his band has received since they first topped radio playlists in 2017 with their single, “Highway Tune. On one , are Michigan quartet as the brightest young band of this millennium and the red-hot shot of adrenaline that rock has sorely needed. On the other side, there are the detractors who have tagged the group as nothing more than competent yet shameless Led Zeppelin clones. It’s a “love ’em or hate ’em” proposition with little gray area in between.
After four years of it, Kiszka isn’t letting any such noise get to him; in fact, he takes a philosophical — and surprisingly welcoming — view of the band’s polarizing nature. “I actually think it’s a beautiful thing,” he says. “There’s something sort of perfect about having one or another direct response to what we’re doing. It’s the essential point, really. Music can affect somebody in a very loving, peaceful or inspirational way, or it can go the other way and you have a determined opposite reaction in which people are infuriated by it. I think that’s the objective of all artists.”
In the years since their arrival, the band (which also includes Kiszka’s two brothers — Josh on lead vocals, Sam on bass and keyboards — along with drummer Danny Wagner) has come a long way, issuing two EPs, Black Smoke Rising and From the Fires, as well as their 2018 full-length Anthem of the Peaceful Army, all of them brimming with rollicking riffs, hammer-of-the-gods-like rhythms and epic, high-register vocals. They’ve topped Billboard charts, collected a Grammy (for From the Fires) and toured the world several times. But along with their success, the band members have still been unable to shake the nagging perception that they’re simply Seventies FM-radio revivalists adopting a modern sheen.
“It’s somewhat perplexing,” Kiszka says. “I think one has to establish the fact that we are commonly referred to as a ‘classic rock band’
