Guitarist who played stadiums with famed band now 'starting from scratch' at Musikfest Cafe

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — For more than a dozen years, Scott Tournet played guitar in the successful rock band Grace Potter and The Nocturnals — scoring two Top 20 Billboard chart albums and a third that went No. 1 on the Heatseekers chart.

He and the band played before crowds of 35,000 in arenas throughout the world, performed on "The Tonight Show" and — in what he said was one of his favorite memories — shared the stage with The Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes.

But on Friday, July 12, Tournet will play a much smaller venue — Musikfest Cafe at ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks in Bethlehem.

And he'll play as an opening act — to rock band The Record Company.

Tickets, at $25-$45 remain available at www.SteelStacks.org, 610-332-1300 and the Musikfest Cafe box office at 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem.

Tournet is supporting his new solo album, "Rock & Roll Stories."

“I think I’m kind of starting from scratch again," Tournet said in a phone call from his home in Sparks, Maryland, north of Baltimore, while feeding his baby daughter. He also has a 7-year-old son.

"I had a lot of success with the Noctournals ... [but] not a ton of people know my name because even though I’ve done a lot, I wasn’t out front and center. Which is OK.

"Sometimes it’s a little hard to play to 15 people, you know?" he said with a laugh. “But I’ve done a lot of that, and I’ve ultimately kind of accepted an optimistic attitude about it all."

Building a band, and walking away

Tournet helped start Grace Potter and The Noctournals in 2003, and with Potter and drummer Matt Burr and other members released four albums and toured with Haynes' group Gov't Mule, Dave Matthews and The Black Keys.

The Nocturnals also played the largest music festivals — while touring 300 days a year — performed on TV and had its songs used on the TV shows "One Tree Hill," "ER," Gray's Anatomy" and other shows.

Its sophomore disc, 2007's "Somewhere," hit No. 1 on the Heatseekers chart, and its next two discs, 2010's self-titled album and 2012's "The Lion The Beast The Beat," both charted in the Top 20 on Billboard's albums chart and Top 10 on the Digital chart.

It had a gold hit with the song "Paris."

But in 2015, Tournet announced he had left the band.

“For me, it’s really important to be sincere and to be genuine," he said. "For me there needs to be purity in the art, or else I struggle with it.

“People wonder why I would step away from a very successful endeavor, and that’s why. Because at a certain point, I felt like the art was kind of second to the commerce if you will."

Tournet left his explanation at that.

"There are some things I wish I could be more honest about, but I’m legally unable to be honest,” he said. He said he's still in contact with "some of the people from the band ... and some of the crew I’m still great friends with."

“Grace and I are not on great terms, unfortunately," he said.

'Wildly different band'

After leaving The Nocturnals, Tournet moved to California to be with his then-girlfriend, now his wife, and formed Elektric Voodoo, which blended Afrobeat, Latin, rock 'n' roll, jazz, blues and other influences.

It released two discs, but drew little attention.

Tournet calls the band "a totally, wildly different band — like very, um, artistically forward kind of project.

“I wasn’t thinking commercially at all," he said. "I wanted to do something completely in the other direction. I have a lot of background in different kinds of music, but I had been doing kind of the down-the-middle rock ‘n’ roll thing for, like, 13 years. I needed a change.

“So I did that, and during the [Coronavirus] pandemic everything changed for everybody, and I ended up moving to Maryland, ‘cause this is where my wife grew up."

It was in Maryland, Tournet said, that he again "started making music just for the fun of it, without any reason, other than to just enjoy it."

"And I just did it because it was fun. And also, when I did my old band, I wrote the drums and the bass, the horn lines, the keyboards and then last I would fill in guitar. I was just kind of guitared-out."

But he said that when he decided to record his new album, "I was, like, ‘You know what? I’m a guitar player — let’s, like, turn the guitar on and get nasty and dirty, and start there.

“And I did it and it was fun — it kinda felt like putting on an old pair of shoes or an old pair of pants that fit just right."

He said he also liked what he created.

“I really liked the songs, too," he said. "I recorded them and really didn’t so anything with them. And my manager, he was, like, ‘Oh, come on, man. We need to put those out.’

“And that was kind of it. It was born out of just kind of following my heart and my intuition and not thinking about, you know, business so much, if that makes sense."

Courtesy Scott Tournet

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'I have to do it'

Tournet said his show at Musikfest Cafe will be just him and a drummer — "So it’s gonna be kind of a cool, unique, artistic challenge, you know?"

He said he expects to do one Grace Potter and The Noctournals song he wrote, "and then the rest of it, I think, is going to be ‘Rock & Roll Stories,’ maybe one of two that I haven’t even put out yet, that we have from the next record.

“I’m really proud of the record I just made, and I want to get it out to people so they can hear it. I kind of push it by saying, ‘If you like The Black Keys and Gary Clark Jr. and Jack White, that’s kind of the direction this thing is going."

Tournet said of Elektric Voodoo, "Technically it’s still alive, but because of the geographic thing, it’s just complicated, it’s hard.

“I’m still great friends with those guys, but my muse has kind of drifted back to this."

He also said that, despite the ending of his time with Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, “I’m really proud of it."

"There’s some things I’m disappointed about toward the end, but that being said, I’m very proud of it," he said. "It was a dream of mine, and I kind of felt like my dream came true by doing that.

“Hanging out with [Led Zeppelin singer] Robert Plant and sitting in with The Allman Brothers — to me, that was a huge deal, you know?

“It was an amazing ride and there were some really, really high highs and awesome moments — playing for President Obama, something like that, or the TV shows, playing on ‘Letterman,’ it was exciting. I’m really, really proud of it.”

But he said his current music is what fills his soul now, even when he's an opening act at places such as Musikfest Cafe.

"I genuinely love it, so that carries me through the kind of lean years," he said. "I’m just trying to get my name out there and I don’t really have any grand illusions of dominating the world or anything, I just want to do it.

“I have to do it. If nobody came, I’d still do it" he said, laughing.