Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires Bring Southern Rock to Alabama Music Box with Diarrhea Planet

The Alabama Music Box on Dauphin Street hosted one of its rowdier bills of the fall on Thursday, November 15, 2012, as Birmingham’s Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires headlined a three-band night alongside Nashville’s Diarrhea Planet and local favorites The Suzies. Doors opened at 9 p.m., and the lineup paired a rising Southern rock act with one of the loudest young bands in the Southeast.

Three bands, one stage, and a Thursday night crowd gave the Dauphin Street venue a bill that ran from Birmingham guitar rock to Nashville’s six-piece onslaught to Mobile’s own underground act — a cross-section of the region’s independent music scene in a single evening.

A Homecoming for a Former Dexateens Guitarist

Lee Bains III, whose resume includes stints with Birmingham bands the Dexateens and Arkadelphia, returned to Mobile with his own outfit peddling a brand of guitar-driven Southern rock that had won the group attention across the region. The Glory Fires’ stop at the Alabama Music Box continued a run of touring behind their debut material.

The Dexateens connection carried weight with Alabama audiences. The Tuscaloosa-born band had spent years building a reputation as one of the state’s most durable rock acts, and Bains’s time in its ranks meant his headline set came with a built-in audience of listeners who had followed his playing from one project to the next.

With The Glory Fires, Bains moved up to frontman, writing songs that drew on his Alabama upbringing and delivering them with a rawness that separated the band from the polished Southern rock of an earlier generation. The debut material that anchored the tour positioned the group as part of a wave of Southern bands reframing the region’s musical inheritance on their own terms.

Diarrhea Planet’s Six-Guitar Assault

Nashville’s Diarrhea Planet brought their famously oversized stage setup — four screaming guitars, a stomping bass line, and a power-rock drum kit played by six best friends, as the band describes it — to the Mobile stage. The young band had built a reputation for loud, chaotic live shows that blended punk energy with classic-rock hooks.

The band’s four-guitar format is no gimmick at full volume: the guitars trade lead lines, stack harmonies, and occasionally abandon melody entirely for pure noise, all grounded by a rhythm section that keeps the songs moving at punk tempo. Critics who caught the band on its relentless touring schedule consistently returned to the same observation — that beneath the absurd stage picture was a group of tight musicians with genuine pop instincts.

By late 2012, Diarrhea Planet had become one of Nashville’s most visible indie exports, playing virtually nonstop and converting audiences show by show. The Alabama Music Box date placed that reputation in front of a Mobile crowd on a bill where volume was never going to be in short supply.

The Suzies Open the Night

Rounding out the bill were Mobile’s own The Suzies, a local act with a growing reputation for unpredictable, freewheeling sets in the city’s underground scene. The band’s slot on a touring-heavy bill gave out-of-town headliners a local anchor — the kind of pairing that keeps a city’s own musicians on the same stages as the region’s rising acts.

Local openers carry a specific value on bills like this one: they draw the hometown fans who arrive early, they set the tone for the night, and they give visiting bands a measure of the city’s own sound. The Suzies’ freewheeling approach made them a fitting opener for a night that promised volume and spontaneity from start to finish.

For Mobile’s underground scene, the booking also mattered as a signal. A Dauphin Street venue stacking a Birmingham headliner and a Nashville cult favorite on a weeknight indicated a booking philosophy aimed at original music rather than cover-band programming — a direction that has defined the Alabama Music Box’s place in the city’s live-music landscape.

The Alabama Music Box’s Place on Dauphin Street

The Alabama Music Box has long occupied a distinctive niche among Dauphin Street venues. Where the street’s bars and restaurants book music as an accompaniment to a night out, the Music Box built its identity around national and regional touring acts — a room where the stage is the point, and where a Thursday in November can draw fans specifically for the bill rather than the address.

Its location on Dauphin Street places it in the middle of downtown Mobile’s entertainment district, where visitors moving between venues on a weekend or event night can stumble into a show they did not plan to see. On a themed bill like this one, that foot traffic adds to the core audience that follows the bands.

The venue’s fall 2012 booking run — capped by this three-band night — reflected the strength of the Southeast’s independent touring circuit at the time. Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, and New Orleans acts moved through Gulf Coast venues in steady rotation, and Mobile sat squarely on the route between them.

A Region’s Bands on the Rise

What made the November 15 bill notable in retrospect was the trajectory of the acts on it. Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires were touring behind debut material that would build the band a national following; Diarrhea Planet were a year or two away from wider attention that would take their six-member lineup to festivals and larger rooms; and The Suzies were establishing themselves in a Mobile scene that would keep producing original acts in the years after.

Nights like this one are how those trajectories start — a mid-size room, a modest door, and a crowd that shows up on a Thursday because the bill is right. The 9 p.m. doors gave the night room to run, and the three-band format delivered the full arc from local opener to visiting headliner.

For the fans who filled the Alabama Music Box that Thursday, the show delivered what the bill promised: Birmingham Southern rock with teeth, Nashville’s loudest young band, and Mobile’s own freewheeling openers, all on one Dauphin Street stage in the middle of November 2012.

Lee Bains’s Road from the Dexateens

The path from sideman to frontman is one of the more demanding transitions in rock, and Bains’s version of it followed the pattern. As a guitarist with the Dexateens, he played in a band whose blend of roots rock and Southern songwriting had earned respect across the Southeast through years of touring and a string of well-received records. His time with Arkadelphia added another chapter before The Glory Fires formed.

With his own band, the songwriting responsibilities shifted squarely onto his shoulders, and the debut material he brought to the 2012 tour showed the change. The songs drew directly on Alabama — its towns, its tensions, its music — and delivered them through a guitar-forward sound that acknowledged the Southern rock tradition while pushing against its conventions.

The Glory Fires’ regional attention by the fall of 2012 reflected that combination. Birmingham has long punched above its weight in American music, and the band’s rise added a new name to a lineage that stretches from the city’s storied venues to its nationally known acts. Mobile audiences, sitting two hours down the road, had followed the story closely enough that the Alabama Music Box date carried the feel of a hometown-adjacent show.

Why Six Members and Four Guitars Work

Diarrhea Planet’s stage setup — four guitars, bass, and drums — is unusual enough that first-time audiences tend to spend the opening minutes working out how it functions. The answer, delivered quickly at full volume, is arrangement: the guitars occupy different registers and roles, with leads, rhythms, and noise parts layering into a sound that a standard four-piece could not produce.

The band’s self-description as six best friends playing a power-rock kit and a wall of guitars captures both the lineup and the spirit. Their shows in that era ran on physical energy — guitarists swinging instruments, crowds pressing the stage — and the chaos was real, but it sat on top of songs built with pop structures and classic-rock melodic sense.

That blend of punk urgency and arena-sized hooks made the band a natural fit on a bill with a Southern rock act. The two bands approached the same musical ancestry from different directions — Bains through the South’s songwriting tradition, Diarrhea Planet through punk’s volume and speed — and the Alabama Music Box’s room gave both the close-quarters setting in which their live reputations had been built.

A Thursday Night for the City’s Music Fans

The November 15, 2012 show landed on a weeknight, which in venue terms means the audience that attended chose it deliberately. Mobile’s live-music fans had options along Dauphin Street that night, and the three-band bill gave the Music Box’s regulars a reason to arrive by the 9 p.m. doors and stay through the closing set.

Bills like this one also serve the city’s musicians, who attend as much as audiences. A touring headliner’s soundcheck, stage setup, and crowd handling are all visible lessons for local acts hoping to book their own regional runs, and the Music Box’s steady diet of touring bands has functioned for years as informal continuing education for Mobile’s scene.

By the time the last band left the stage in the early hours of Friday, the venue had delivered one of its rowdier nights of the fall — exactly as advertised. Birmingham’s Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires headlined, Nashville’s Diarrhea Planet brought the six-member storm, and The Suzies flew Mobile’s flag, closing out a Thursday that summed up the Gulf Coast’s independent music circuit at its best.