Chuck Mountain

Chuck Mountain has not been on the Greensboro music scene long – the band just came to fruition in July – but they have already been on tour and laid down a number of original tracks. The band’s guitarist Beau James says their trip to Nashville, which included camping on the North Carolina state line, expedited the team bonding and lit a creative spark for the band.

Members of Chuck Mountain join host Frank Stasio to share their musical journey and the inspiration for their blues rock sound. Chuck Mountain also performs live in studio with Beau James on guitar and vocals; Jeff Wysosky on vocals and bass; and Sammi Printz on drums. - WUNC

Beau Wigington has led multiple lives as a musician. He’s played in biker bars. He’s done musical theater. He did a stretch of the Americana singer-songwriter thing. He’s written songs more or less for hire, along the lines of a jingle writer. He lived, worked and made the rounds of club stages in the music-centric cities of Los Angeles and Nashville. Wigington is the frontman of Greensboro-based Chuck Mountain, a riffy Southern-rock-tinged trio. For the last couple of years, the band has been steadily playing shows, writing and recording tunes, and making a video or two.

I spoke to Wigington by phone last year about his music, and about Chuck Mountain. The band plays Bull’s Tavern in Winston-Salem on Thursday, July 11.



Wigington went to college in Greensboro, where he studied to be an actor, before heading to Southern California, “and never acted again,” he said. He may have abandoned his plans of a career in T.V. and film, but his time as an acting student prepared him for the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, in a way. He had voice lessons that helped him out as a singer, and his theater instructors taught him how to zero-in on the emotional core of what he’s doing, how to carry himself on stage, and how to get in the expressive zone without a lot of head games.

After returning to North Carolina a little over two years ago, Wigington has used the move as a way to recalibrate his focus.

“Since moving to Greensboro, a lot of my writing has been focused on cautionary tales. I found when I lived in bigger cities; I fell down the wrong path,” Wigington said. “That’s a big personal thing I’m working on, trying to be the responsible adult. It’s been a long road.”

Working as a bartender isn’t always the easiest way to affirm one’s commitment to the traditional values of adulthood, but Wigington said the bar culture in North Carolina is a little less excessive than Nashville. At previous stints behind the bar, Wigington said he was a little self-destructive, but these days, he focuses his energies on collecting ideas.



“Bartending has always been one of my biggest wells for inspiration for songs,” he said. “You’re a psychotherapist, and you can tell the story.”

Wigington has a knack for the key detail that can make a lyric stand out and play over again in a listener’s mind. On “Got Nobody,” the band’s most recent single, he sings about the ways that one’s habits and patterns of behavior can reinforce a life of sadness, frustration, and loneliness. It’s about “being trapped by your ways,” said Wigington about the idea behind the song. “It’s like waiting for the bus in the rain when it’s already been,” he sings. Anyone who’s ever relied on public transit knows the creeping self-pity and resentment that can be a part of the experience. “Everybody’s got a haunted heart,” he sings elsewhere on the same song.

Another single, “The Devil,” conjures a world where demonic forces are part of the mundane everyday atmosphere, where dark energy almost seems to emanate up from the Earth. After a rainfall, when the sun is out and making a mist on the ground, Wigington envisions something Satanic lurking. “The devil likes the steam around his hooves when he walks,” sings Wigington, capturing a cinematic image in one line. The devil in the song isn’t necessarily the devil of the Bible and popular religious imagination.

“It’s more about the idea of being trapped, being confined in your own will, feeling held back and controlled,” Wigington said.

That song was a part of what Wigington conceived of as being a series of songs, a sort of concept album, based on the cards of the Tarot deck.

“I’ve been a very big fan of Tarot cards and mysticism for quite some time,” Wigington said.

“I was working through the songs as they kind of talked to me. ‘The Devil’ was one of the first ones that I wrote.”



Chuck Mountain play bluesy riff-rock with a Southern-rock core. These are songs that would sound right at home in those biker bars that Wigington used to play at in California.

Wigington and his bandmates — Jeff Wysosky on bass and backing vocals, and Sammi Prints on drums — have been rehearsing and gigging quite a bit. They’ve got several hours of material for extended club sets. And Wigington said they’ll be releasing a single every month or so until they’ve assembled enough for a full-length record. There are also plans for mini-tours that will take Chuck Mountain to Nashville.

When he’s not working on Chuck Mountain material or bartending or performing, Wigington keeps busy writing songs for the personalized gift-song company Songfinch, which provides customers with one-of-a-kind, tailor-made songs to commemorate occasions or mark significant life events, or just for fun. It keeps his songwriting chops sharpened, and it means that melodies, hooks, chord changes, and ideas never stop percolating.

Wigington has a remarkably eager attitude about working on projects like that. For him, if it’s at all musical, it’s worth doing, and it’s what he’s committed to working on. He’s not turning his nose up at projects or rolling his eyes about the work. There might even be some choice life lessons to be learned by this kind of a slog.

“It took many years of being jaded and cynical to not be jaded and cynical,” he said.

John Adamian lives in Winston-Salem, and his writing has appeared in Wired, The Believer, Relix, Arthur, Modern Farmer, the Hartford Courant and numerous other publications.

Wanna go?

See Chuck Mountain at Bull’s Tavern, 408 W. 4th St., Winston-Salem, on Thursday, July 11, at 8 p.m. - Yes Weekly

Chuck Mountain has released its debut single “Got Nobody.” The band is fronted by Beau James (The Heavy Heavy Hearts). “Got Nobody” was produced by Don Bates (Guthrie Brown, North By North, The Cunning, Suzy Jones) and was recorded in Nashville.
“The song is about the feelings that lead you to vices. Everyone has something in their lives that they are not proud of and sometimes that leads you to find an escape. This song describes that feeling and offers a way out,” says James. - Blues Rock Review

Beau James was told to keep anyone under the age of 18 out of The Basement, a music venue in Nashville.

An event at a record store upstairs was attracting a good many kids. But James, who was working the door at the club, promised to do his duty by threatening to “chuck ‘em out, man.”

“Mike Grimes (the owner of the record store), he was like, ‘Well, it’s Chuck Mountain,’” James said. “And that just kind of stuck from there.”

James wound up adopting the nickname for the band he founded when he moved to Greensboro. That band is working on a new record, “Fool’s Journey,” and recently had a beer named after them at a Greensboro brewery.

In an interview, James spoke about finding inspiration in The Black Keys and Chris Stapleton, about being in a prison with Billy Ray Cyrus, and about what happened once when he mooned the audience.

How did you get your start as a musician?

I grew up in Colorado, and moved out to North Carolina when I was a junior in high school. I started a band in high school, and that’s kind of what got me hooked on playing music. Then, I went to UNCG and started another band there.

After I graduated, I moved out to Los Angeles and lived there for about four years. I started a band, the Heavy Heavy Hearts, and we all moved out to Nashville together. We were playing out there, then everyone kind of went our separate ways. That’s when I started a solo career, doing Americana, singer/songwriter songs that didn’t fit with the heavier rock ‘n’ roll blues band I was in. Then I put out my first release, “Indigo Road,” got picked up by a label called Randm Records, and released another album called “Landmarks.”

I got married and moved back out to Greensboro in 2017. And then I started another band called Chuck Mountain, which has been my focus since I got out here.

Who are some of your influences?

In college I really got into the Black Keys. That pushed me down the blues rock vibe. Also, I’m a really big fan of The Shins. There’s Aerosmith. It’s kind of all over the place.

How would you describe your music?

A lot of the stuff that I do know is kind of like the Black Keys meets the Black Crowes. My solo stuff, people say it’s Neil Young-ish. It’s sadder Neil Young, let’s say that.

What’s your creative process like?

It has morphed a lot over the years. Before, I could only write when inspiration hit, and if I didn’t get it all done, it was just going to be a half-finished song that I never put out. But when I lived in Nashville, I would come up with a fun title and take it from there.

But I’m a real big fan of just writing about situational life events, nowadays, though less about relationships, which was a big part of the past.


I’ll get rolling with an idea, sometimes just one line, and that sparks me in a direction. Other times, I might just come up with a really catchy riff that I like and build off of that. There’s all different ways that it comes to me.

How did Chuck Mountain come about?

When I lived in Nashville, I worked at a venue there, and my nickname was Chuck Mountain, and when I moved here, I decided that had to be the name of the band. I met our drummer, Sammi Printz, while I was working at Hops. And then I met our bass player, Jeff Wysosky, when I hired him to be an instructor at Guitar Center. And, we’re all kind of best buds now.

You’ve done some acting work. How did you get interested in that?

I graduated from UNCG with an acting degree, did a lot of extra work. And now I work for a company called Weld.com, making tutorial videos for them, just going over different processes and making different projects.

But I always did a lot of extra work. In Nashville, I was in “Still the King,” which was a Billy Ray Cyrus show that my mom liked. A friend’s mother was a casting director for it, and she needed some extras for the day. So I was like, “Oh yeah.” But I didn’t tell my mom, and she was just watching it one day, and I was in prison with Billy Ray Cyrus. She called me and said, “What the heck, man?” That was my go-to — trying to land random extra roles on things my mom watches.

If you could open a show for any artist, who would it be and why?

Chris Stapleton, just because I love his music. That’s another really big inspiration, too. I saw him way back in the day at an ASCAP music expo, and it was him, solo acoustic, and I was just obsessed from that day on. I love his voice, his writing style. He’s also a cool dude, and I would like to open up just so I could meet that guy.

Do you sing karaoke, or sing in the shower, and, if so, what do you sing?

My go-to karaoke song is “Dream On.” And I used to try to convince people that I was one of Steven Tyler’s children that he didn’t know about, but it was a hard sell.

Do you have a favorite song you like to perform?

We’re working on a new record with Chuck Mountain, and the title track, “Fool’s Journey,” is a really, really fun one to play. It’s a really fun riff, and it’s just an energetic song.

What’s the funniest or weirdest thing that has happened at one of your shows?

I was performing with the Heavy Heavy Hearts back in L.A. and we were playing a show for my birthday. And there were a bunch of bikers who used to like to come to our shows. And they used to always chant, “Take your pants off!” So, from time to time, I would moon the crowd. So I mooned the crowd that night, and two of them actually got up onstage and took out a knife and cut off my underwear, and spun me around ... That was definitely the most awkward.

What’s next for you?

I’m focusing more on Chuck Mountain. We’ve played a lot of different breweries, and one of our ideas is launching a show called “Brews Rock,” where we review different beers that we try at different breweries. Oden Brewing in Greensboro, they just released a beer called Chuck Mountain Dew. And we hope to have our own six pack one day. We want to have six different beers, at least.

I also went to welding school during the lockdown and started a welding business called Beau Did It. I do a lot of fabrication. So I’m very busy at the moment with trying to balance the band, doing the company, making videos and bartending at Boxcar (Bar + Arcade) two or three days a week. - New & Record