Inside you’ll inevitably find a basic, no-frills setup with simple furniture, rudimentary bar choice, greasy table tops and an air con set to bare minimum, no matter how hot it may be outside. This time around the temperature reaches +27°C as I sit, my face beginning to glow in the heat, at a small round table with my recording gear set up on top of a black table cloth dusted with cigarette ash.

I contemplate the fine balance the organisers of Graspop Metal Meeting, one of Europe’s largest and oldest heavy music festivals, have managed to strike this year between gypsy aesthetics and rock’n’roll luxury. The Belgians were seemingly able to grasp the basic principles of achieving road pizzazz without much trouble – the interior is all about things done on the cheap but with a certain amount of vagabond pride.

The paradox is that stardom and life on the road don’t mix well. Yet in the rock world these days you can’t have stardom without ceaseless touring. At least it is so for all the young bands, and Black Stone Cherry is one young band that’s been sweating it out on the road ever since they got signed to Roadrunner in 2006.

First they spent colossal amounts of time on the road outside of the US supporting their self-titled 2006 debut, and now they are pursuing a grueling road schedule touring their second album, the fabulous Folklore And Superstition.

One thing about touring as much as this band does is, however certain: it gives you confidence. Three years of ceaseless gigging have turned Black Stone Cherry’s live shows into an explosive mixture of well-honed musicianship and a huge, overwhelming stage presence.

Their show in front of a 20,000-strong crowd at GMM this year, if anything else, has shown that now the quartet's sound has gotten bigger, the fan following – crazier, and their live shows are now something that you have to see once to remember forever. This time they have become one of Graspop’s favourites for the second year running, hitting the main stage at 3 pm on the festival’s final day.

Not perhaps since the golden days of British hard rock has the music scene witnessed so much energy and so much swagger coming from a band which plays what is essentially blues mixed with pop and given a metal coating. The band’s GMM show this year was really one of the most intense physical workouts a rock fan can possibly conceive – hair flying, guitarist Ben Wells and bassist Jon Lawhon leaping off the drum rise into the centre of the stage only to strike one archetypal rock hero pose after another, racing non-stop across the stage, and headbanging so hard you’d think they were raised at a rock-drill manufacturing factory.

My interviewee this time around is John Fred Young, the band’s drummer, and it is him I am waiting for at the VIP bar in Belgium while contemplating backstage aesthetics of big summer festivals. Apart from being one of the most exciting drummers of his generation, John Fred Young is also a visual attraction to behold, on par with his bandmates Wells and Lawhon, a natural born showman who has learnt the visual aspect of the drummer’s art down to the most perfect, most entertaining tee. Every stage trick a drummer can do with his drumsticks he knows, and uses them with such spectacular, self-confident flamboyance that once you fix your eyes on him, it’s hard to look anywhere else. It’s not just the showmanship or his amazing chops, but the combination of both that makes Young an absolutely irresistible musician to watch live.

Being a thoroughly modern drummer, John Fred is at the same time firmly grounded in the best the rock tradition can offer for his instrument – you can tell that he’s been spending his teen years learning those Bonham and Baker chops, and this time, when the band launched into a space-rocking rendition of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”, he sent bona fide chills down many punters’ spines when he channeled Mitch Mitchell’s rolling thunder with spooky precision.

Thinking back to the blistering energy of the band’s performance I’ve just seen, I expect to see Young completely exhausted and hope for no more but a 15-minute interview. The best I expect are a few good quotes and one fun road story. So nothing prepares me for suddenly seeing an upbeat, buoyant Young walk through the doors of the bar and up towards me with a spring in his step and a bright, interested expression on his face, looking like any real rock star should in his tight t-shirt and jeans, the unruly mass of his curly hair sticking in all kinds of crazy directions as he tries to ignore those wild corkscrew strands.

We shake hands and I tell him how I can’t believe he can still walk and talk after such an intense physical workout of a show. He smiles with a broad Southern smile, and replies in a gorgeous Kentucky accent, the long toffee-string vowels sounding like a special kind of music you can only make if you were born in the South, telling me that he does indeed put a lot of physical effort into his performances. “I sweat a lot when I’m playing,” he says and smiles again. He then bashfully mentions that he got praise from Vinnie Appice from Heaven & Hell, who watched Black Stone Cherry’s set that day.

“I was watching him, and he watched our set too,” says Young. “He said to me: ‘It’s nice to see a drummer who hits hard. I don’t see that many drummers that hit hard.’ So that’s cool. I guess our performance demands a lot of physical activity.”

I ask what or who inspired Young to start playing drums in the first place, and he immediately mentions his family – his uncle, drummer Fred Young, and his father, singer and guitarist Richard Young of the Kentucky Headhunters, a Grammy-winning country rock band, which he names first in the list of influences.

“My uncle is a great drummer,” Young says. “I learnt so much from him as a kid growing up. I think that they’ve been a great influence on us. Fred turned me onto Mitch Mitchell, and Ginger Baker, and John Bonham, and so many others.”

With Black Stone Cherry being able to blend a staggering amount of influences into their sound, I wonder how they manage to do this so seamlessly and so consistently - song after song, album after album. How do they manage to walk this tightrope between blues, rock, pop, and metal?

“That’s the trick,” says Young. “I don’t know. We somehow do. We have an appreciation for metal, for classic rock, Southern rock, blues, Motown. I think each member of the band is influenced by different things. Ben [Wells, guitarist] is an Elvis fan. Chris likes Southern rock, and I grew up listening to a lot of stuff. My dad really influenced me. Some of the earliest stuff I was listening to was Motown, like the Temptations..."

"Jackson 5?" I ask, the day of our interview falling on June 27, the next day after Michael Jackson's death has been announced. Young nods. "Jackson 5. Which was a huge, huge detrimental loss the other day when Michael Jackson died.”

I share that I still can't quite take in the news and would rather believe Jackson has staged his death and went to live on an island, and Young replies, "Here is what I thought. My girlfriend is a huge Michael Jackson fan, she's crazy about Michael Jackson. As a musician you can't help but note that Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. He is the Baddest in the World. I hate to think that he's gone. I just wonder if he's just been fed up with people and he just faked his death and moved to a damn island."

We then talk about the 50 shows Jackson was scheduled to do in London this summer and Young says he was trying to attend one. "It was going to be a gift to my girlfriend for her birthday, so I was trying to go to one. But not now. It's a big loss...really big loss."

Returning to the subject of Black Stone Cherry managing to pull so many different influences together into one whole, Young says that the trick is to strike the right balance. "When you are trying to put pop, rock, blues and metal together, you have to blend it where one type of a genre is not too much,” he says. “It's a fine medium. But honestly, on the other hand, we've never set out to be a hard rock band, or a metal band, or a Southern rock band. We just want to be the greatest band in the world."

I wonder if this means that the band's writing process has to take time and songs have to be really crafted before they are recorded. How long, I wonder, does it take them to go from the initial snippet of an idea to finished harmony and melody? "It's half and half,” Young replies. “Some songs take 15 minutes, and sometimes lyrics can take a little while. But when you're writing a song sometimes it's hard to get it going. I think sometimes songs take longer. But when it takes too long, you can work on it too much. It needs to come naturally."

Is the band working on any new material right now? "Yeah,” says Young. “We are working on it all the time. Some of the songs for the last album were written when we were going through Germany, things like that. But it's kind of hard because it's really out there. It's like you are going at 90 miles an hour. It's better to write at home. Sometimes we'd be on the back of the bus and all four of us would be writing a song. But it's hard because our bus over here on this tour in Europe is totally what's called 'dank'. It's a word for... Let me think of a universal road... It's very drab, it's just nasty. We try to keep it clean, but it's so fucked up compared to the one we have in the States."

He then elaborates further on the subject: "We are so fortunate to get to tour, but if you have a bad bus, it's really hard to tour. Sometimes people go, “Well, you are complaining about your bus and it shouldn’t matter,” but it really does. The key to great touring is to have a great bus. It doesn’t have to be a million-dollar bus, but for example, things like the color inside the bus have to be positive and uplifting. Our bus is like vomit brown. [He laughs] It’s just depressing.”

“But in the States we have a bus that we love. Our driver’s name in the States is Bob and he’s crazy. He was a sheriff in Dallas, Texas, and we love him like an uncle. One time we were in this restaurant and we came out of the restaurant. And he packs a pistol, he has a license. Then this pigeon comes over and shits on Bob’s shoulder. So Bob, like John Wayne, pulls out the pistol and shoots the bird. And there are like, kids walking around, and it’s like, “Oh, my god! That’s our crazy uncle Bob.”

Asked what the band does when they got spare time during the tour schedule, he says that they like to go around and soak in some local culture. “What we try to do is walk around,” Young says. “We get taxis and stuff and go around the cities. We are very interested in history. In American history class we studied American history and world history, but I find that the more I learn from touring and from traveling, the more… I actually learn more about places by going there than reading out of the books.”

“You can’t really digest information about a place just by reading about it. You have to go there, soak in the environment around you. We’ve been very fortunate to come to a lot of these countries and play and get days off, seeing the sights. In Spain we went to Zaragoza, there was like a ruin upon this field, like an old castle that’s been torn down, but it was really cool, a really cool city.”

After learning that I write for a Russian mag, Young gets so curious he ends up asking as many questions as I do. We talk about recent Russian history, about American music and culture being banned from the Russian radio waves and TV for decades, about censorship and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Young asks how I began listening to rock in the first place, and we end up talking about the Beatles. He says that his father remembers watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on a black-and-white TV, aged four. He then mentions with a laugh that some fans in their ‘30s tend to compare Black Stone Cherry to ‘80s glam metal, and I laugh back, saying that some people would compare anyone young, long-haired and good-looking to the bands from that era.

"They probably look at you and think Juan Croucier from Ratt," I say jokingly. Young smiles. "Did you catch Motley Crue's set yesterday?" I ask. "No,” he says,” “We were in Spain. But I saw Motley Crue one time in the States. I grew up, like, on Motley Crue and stuff like that. I'm totally eclectic. My music taste is really wide."

But when I ask what genre has still influenced the band the most, Young says that it is probably the blues. "We are very enthralled with New Orleans,” he says. “The blues and things that came from the Mississippi Delta, that came up through the water. I think we probably listen to more blues than anything else, like Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, even Leadbelly, stuff like that.”

“It’s very deep music,” he continues. “Even bands twice our age I don’t think listen to what we did. And I think it’s because we grew up using an old house on my grandparents’ farm, an old farmhouse. My dad and my uncle from the Headhunters put up all those posters on the walls: Howlin Wolf, Sam Cooke, Creedence, the Beatles, the Stones, every great artist you could ever think of.”

“Their posters were plastered all over the walls to keep the heat inside the building because there wasn’t any heat. There was no bathroom, there was no heat. We only got a phone there like ten years ago. It’s very hillbilly. [Smiles] So we grew up practicing there and it’s a really cool place. We were influenced by so many artists that young kids don’t get a chance to really see. They are not introduced to roots music. We were fortunate in that sense.”

Young then tells me that Black Stone Cherry is scheduled to be supporting Duff McKagan’s Loaded in the UK later on this year. I ask him if they have managed to meet Duff yet. “Yeah, he’s awesome!” enthuses Young. “Great guy! To be such a well-known person he’s still so nice. We’re really looking forward to touring with him.”

Then, inevitably, as our chat winds to a close, Young gets to answer the ultimate final question I put to all my interviewees. If he was granted an answer to any question in the universe, what would he ask? “Man, that’s gonna be pretty big!” He exclaims. “I would like to know where we go after we die. Like, what’s the whole thing is about. That would be my question. Everybody’s got different religious beliefs and everywhere you go people believe in this and that, but I think ultimately most of us want to go somewhere where we can live happily in the afterlife. I would just like to have some explanation. Like, where the hell are we going after we die, you know?”

The question being not of the kind that anyone can answer, I end up thinking that at least some matters in this world can be predicted with relative certainty. As I walk across the backstage area back to the press office, I suddenly find myself thinking that I, for one, can foretell the earthly destiny of Black Stone Cherry with some degree of accuracy. If everything goes to plan, this Kentucky quartet is going to move into a headlining league sooner than mainstream press will be able to follow them. And that’s the lower bound estimate, because they indeed could soon become one of the greatest bands on today’s rock scene. The latter, of course, depends on forces we humans have little control of: god’s grace, inspiration, and the survival of the music industry to sustain them.