Neon Trees’ Campbell grew up in Las Vegas

Branden Campbell isn’t the first rock star to rave about the feel-good effects of cannabis. He is, however, the first you’re likely to hear sing the praises of a strain that doesn’t get you high. At all. Not even a little bit.

Sound like a buzzkill? It is. Even its nickname conjures the sad trombone: The Stoner’s Disappointment. Alas, that’s not what this stuff is about. It’s not meant for smoking. It’s not psychoactive, which means there’s very little tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in it, ergo, no high.

So why, exactly, is the Neon Trees bassist so stoked about this stuff? When he talks about it, the excitement in his voice is palpable, like this stuff is the greatest thing in the earth. Well, to this former Las Vegan, it’s exactly that.

You see, for the past eight years, Campbell and his wife have tried everything they could to alleviate their son’s seizures, which he’s suffered every day of his preciously young life. Nothing has helped. But then one day, they discovered a serum that worked; the tremors suddenly ceased.

“We tried every anti-seizure med,” Campbell says. “We’ve gone to the Mayo Clinic, we’ve gone to the Cleveland Clinic, we’ve met with neurologists all over the country and have tried everything, and this cannabis oil worked. It’s literally a miracle that this happened.”

Campbell’s obviously not the first person in the country to advocate for the medicinal properties of marijuana. But he is directly responsible for helping ensure that others in Utah who suffer from similar maladies can explore alternative treatments without becoming sideways with the law.

“We lobbied to legalize cannabis oil to use as an anti-seizure med, and it passed,” Campbell says. “And in Utah, that wasn’t an easy thing because of the stigma of reefer madness and everything like that.”

Campbell’s last sentiment is facetious — but then again, maybe not fully. After all, Utah is well known for its conservatism, which makes one wonder, really, how a kid raised in Las Vegas, a town that practically celebrates debauchery, ended up in a place like Provo, Utah. Nothing against the city that gave the world the Osmonds, but on paper, at least, the two towns seem to have about as much in common as, say, Bukowski and Bill O’Reilly.

Campbell, who moved to Provo with his high school sweetheart just in time for college, says the two places are more alike than you’d think. For starters, there’s a distinctive do-it-yourself determination fueling both scenes. He should know. Before joining the insatiably catchy Neon Trees — one of the smarter, more interesting, colorful and compelling mainstream pop acts to emerge in the past five years — Campbell learned to fend for himself as a part of the Las Vegas scene.

“It was great,” he recalls of his time making music here. “It was a time when there were no all-ages venues in Vegas. Anybody who ever tried to get a permit for something like that always got shut down. So I think a lot of our shows were just kind of these very on-the-run desert shows. We’d rent generators, or we’d rent out the Elks Lodge, or something like that to do these shows, but we’d never be able to come back once they saw these 16-year-old punk kids running everything, and kind of anything flies.

“But there was a spirit about it,” he adds. “Because we really had to kind of figure everything out on our own. You learned how to network, and you learned how to work in all the different capacities that are needed, whether it’s figuring out how to run a sound system, and figuring out to promote shows and how to book shows. We did all that ourselves. It was really cool, being part of a scene.”

Turns out, a similar scene was developing in Utah. Campbell got a taste of that with Attaboy Skip, the band he played in with Killers drummer Ronnie Vannucci (whose band not only gave Neon Trees a huge lift by taking it on tour for some dates early on, but who championed the band to labels, admonishing execs not to give them a “dog-crap deal”). That skacore outfit was one of many Vegas bands that used to trade shows with their counterparts in the next state.

“I think that’s where most of us made our strongest connections with the Utah scene,” Campbell says. “I think, early on, we probably played more shows in Utah than we played in Vegas.”

This made for an easier transition when Campbell moved to Provo, where he found kindred spirits in a thriving scene, one that produced both Campbell’s combo and Imagine Dragons, another act with strong Las Vegas ties.

“I think that’s the deal with Utah,” he says. “It was that same thing, that these people had to fight to create something unique, something that’s their own, so they were very well rehearsed in the do-it-yourself spirit that really fell upon these punk rock shows.”

They were also not tied to a certain genre. Once there, Campbell found the musicians to be adventurous, infusing that same punk rock spirit into different styles of music, something that immediately appealed to him.

“That’s why I stayed here,” he says. “It really just offered so much variety. And for me, as a bass player, it challenged my skill set.”

After living out a pronounced anti-rock phase in Provo, during which he explored playing jazz, folk and bluegrass, Campbell joined Neon Trees, whose captivating creativity was likewise fostered in Provo. But the synchronicity didn’t end there, as the bassist later discovered.

Campbell’s dad, Steve, who still lives in Las Vegas with Branden’s mom, Sue, works at Young Electric Sign Co., the company that dispatched him to install signs at a fast-food joint in Southern California, that, by complete happenstance, ended up being the exact totem that inspired the Neon Trees moniker years later.

“This was before In-N-Out came to Vegas,” Campbell says. “I remember him having to leave town and go do these neon palm trees. At the time, In-N-Out was such a legend of California. So we thought it was really cool that he was going to do that.

“That story stuck with me, and later when I joined Neon Trees and they told me how they got the band name, I was like, ‘That sounds really familiar,’ because those neon palm trees aren’t at every In-N-Out.”

Steve’s a big Neon Trees fan and he gets a kick out of the whole thing. Likewise, he and Sue are proud of the boy they raised in a neighborhood near Jones Boulevard and U.S. Highway 95, not far from the Meadows mall, where Branden and his friends used to hang out when he was growing up.

Recalling that time, you can sense the joy in his voice as he fondly recalls skating there from his house to the top of Harmony Avenue, down the big hill on Meadows Lane, past Decatur Boulevard. Campbell may play in a band from Provo, but he still has a soft spot for his hometown.

“So many good things in my life happened because I came up here,” he says of Provo, where he followed his dream girl, a fellow Las Vegan he met in sixth grade and wound up marrying 15 years ago. “And it’s always hard to say that because it sounds like, ‘Oh, you don’t like Las Vegas.’ I love Vegas, and we’re only five hours away. So we kind of have the best of everything, being here and being able to come home to Vegas all the time.”

Now, that’s the kind of high you can’t buy.

Read more of Dave Herrera at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com.