Help Yourself

You are locked on THE ZOO, the station that still believes a record can talk if you give it the room. That was the deal on KZEW, and it is still the deal out here on the stream: no clocks barking at the song, no jingle stepping on the last chord, just the music and the story that rides with it. Right now the story is “Help Yourself,” Robert Jon & The Wreck, a Southern-rock sermon written by a California band that somehow sounds like it came up on the two-lane between Macon and Jacksonville. If you want the long version of how we do this, the door is always open at THE ZOO.

First, a little housekeeping for the crate-diggers. There is no album titled Help Yourself. The song came out as a single on the first of December, 2023, on Joe Bonamassa’s Journeyman Records, and it later took its place as track eight on Red Moon Rising, the full-length that landed on the twenty-eighth of June, 2024. Same recording, same four minutes and four seconds, same slow roll at about seventy-six beats a minute. The single just got there first, the way a good album track used to leak onto the air before the jacket hit the bins. Journeyman catalog number on the Red Moon Rising CD is JMR90603, if you are the kind of listener who writes that stuff on the spine.

Robert Jon Burrison put the point of the song in plain language. It is about self-help, and about the hard fact that you cannot do much for anybody else until you have looked after yourself. The lyric opens like a confession that never needs a clock: someone call the doctor, give me what I cannot find, a little bit of medicine hidden somewhere in my mind. Then the chorus lands, simple as a church step. You gotta help yourself just to get on with your life. A preacher shows up later and tells the singer there is not much more a heart can take. Love gets in the way, the sickness catches up, and the only prescription left is the one you fill yourself. It is country in the lyric and Southern rock in the bones, the same neighborhood Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band built, with a little of that modern porch-swing ease people hear in Zac Brown. Slide guitar cuts across big piano chords. The vocal sits in the pocket instead of screaming over it. Mellow, rolling, and built to last longer than the single cycle.

The writing credit is a band credit plus one old friend. Robert Burrison, drummer Andrew Espantman, lead guitarist Henry Schneekluth, bassist Warren Murrel, and keyboardist Jake Abernathie share the song with Ian Cullen, the longtime collaborator who had already put his name on “Oh Miss Carolina” and “Bring Me Back Home.” That is how this outfit writes: five players in the room, and a pen that has been on the bus before. Kevin Shirley produced it at Village Studios in Los Angeles, the same Kevin Shirley whose chair has faced Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, and The Black Crowes. Shirley does not sand a band down. He lets the room stay in the take. You can hear it here. The piano twinkles, the slide answers, and nobody is fighting the vocal for the center of the mix.

The clip that came with the single is its own piece of trivia. Andrew Espantman and Rob Bondurant directed it, and they stocked the frame with friends and family. The band called it a throwback in the style of an eighties sitcom. The write-ups called it a nod to Three’s Company. Either way, it is a wink, not a concept record. Southern rock usually gets the dusty-road treatment. These guys went for the laugh track and the bad couch, then played the song straight underneath it. The single also arrived behind two other statements from the same stretch of writing: “Hold On,” the one about what the road actually costs, and “Stone Cold Killer,” the high-voltage rocker. “Help Yourself” is the breather between those two, the song you put on when the highway has already won the argument.

The band that cut it did not come out of Georgia. Robert Jon & The Wreck formed in Orange County, California, in 2011, and they have been hauling an East Coast sound west ever since. Burrison is the namesake, lead vocal and guitar, the one who keeps the calendar full. He grew up on his father’s Motown and gospel records, started on drums and piano, then found classic rock as a young teenager and never put the guitar down. Espantman has been the drummer and a background voice since the beginning. His uncle played bass and toured Europe with a Danish pop star, which was all the permission a kid needed. Henry James Schneekluth joined on lead guitar in 2017 and brought the psychedelic edge, the slide, and a record-collector’s memory for who played on which seventies album. Warren Murrel came in the same year on bass, out of a string of Southern California bands. Jake Abernathie took the keyboard chair in 2023 after Steve Maggiora left for the road with Toto. Earlier lineups had passed through David Pelusi, Kristopher Butcher, Kyle Michael Neal, Nick Phakpiseth, and Derrick Wong. The five you hear on this track are the settled band.

They have shared stages with Joe Bonamassa, Blackberry Smoke, Peter Frampton, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Black Crowes, Little Feat, and Rival Sons. Last Light on the Highway in 2020 and Shine a Light on Me Brother in 2021 pushed them onto Bonamassa’s label. Ride Into the Light, in 2023, split the production among Don Was, Kevin Shirley, and Dave Cobb, with Bonamassa and Josh Smith in the mix. That same stretch gave them their first concert film, Live at the Ancienne Belgique, recorded at a sold-out show in Brussels on the twenty-ninth of June, 2022, in the middle of a run that ran to sixty-seven performances in seventy-five days across nine countries. Red Moon Rising, the album that holds “Help Yourself,” went back to Shirley and later showed up at number forty-four on the Official Scottish Albums Chart. The follow-up, Heartbreaks & Last Goodbyes, produced by Dave Cobb, reached number twenty-seven on that same Scottish list. Cobb played them Free and the Faces in the studio. Henry James has called himself the seventies rock nerd in the band, the one who can tell you the year and the session players, with a list of heroes that runs from Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix through Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Ritchie Blackmore, Eddie Van Halen, and Steve Howe.

That is the résumé. The song does not need it. “Help Yourself” works because the advice is older than the band and the groove is younger than the records it loves. Call it Southern rock from the wrong coast. Call it a Journeyman single that grew up into an album track. Call it the one where the preacher, the doctor, and the slide guitar all agree. On THE ZOO we just call it a record worth the space between the songs.

The band keeps the books at robertjonandthewreck.com. The verified page is on Facebook, the photo reel lives on Instagram, and the official feed on X is @Rjandthewreck. If you want the long sheet, the Wikipedia entry tracks the lineup changes, and the Discogs artist page is where the collectors argue about the pressings. We will be here when you get back, still commercial-free, still playing the deep cut like it matters.