‘It was like the army’: How The Killers became huge

He liked them both, liked their band. There was just one nagging concern: He wasn’t 100 percent sure they were sufficiently out of their minds.

For sure, Ronnie Vannucci Jr. qualified as such back then.

He still does, playing as if his drumsticks were dusted in gunpowder. The 46-year-old remains a rock ’n’ roll ghost hunter of sorts, chasing after the spirit of John Bonham, one of his earliest, most profound influences, dating back to when Vannucci was 9 years old and his mom played him “Led Zeppelin IV” for the first time.

Twenty years ago this month, Vannucci joined The Killers, Vegas’ biggest band ever, founded in 2002 by singer Brandon Flowers and guitarist Dave Keuning.

It took some convincing.

“It’s not like I wasn’t interested,” recalls Vannucci, a UNLV student at the time. “I was interested — I just wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I was so close to finishing school, and I was really dedicated to school at the time.

“I think I was a little down on being in a band,” he acknowledges. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to trust these guys to be as crazy as I wanted to be about rehearsing every day and writing every day and being very methodical with the way we do things, because I didn’t want to waste any more time.”

And then he got to know Flowers and Keuning.

“They were crazy as I was — maybe even crazier,” Vannucci says, his voice tinged with a mix of incredulity and respect. “We practiced every day. We’d break for a 20-minute dinner and then go back in and play for three more hours. It was like the army — and we loved it.

“I loved to see shows and concerts and have so many heroes, and I knew that the only way they got to be where they’re at is through all that time it takes to become good,” he continues. “I just wasn’t sure if that was even possible, that anybody in Las Vegas had that kind of unrelenting ambition or drive, because it seemed to be very trendy to be almost fair weather, to not really care about, you know, wanting to play in stadiums — but I wanted to played in stadiums.”

Two decades later, Vannucci has spent the summer doing just that, The Killers selling out stadiums, in mere hours in some cases, on their recently completed European tour, playing in front of gargantuan crowds of 50,000-plus from England to Poland to the Czech Republic.

Hit YouTube and check out fan-filmed footage of one of the band’s London gigs in June: The crowd is so frenzied, bouncing in unison on the venue floor, it’s as if tens of thousands of bodies have been fused into one sweaty mass of seriously overtaxed adrenal glands.

And now, The Killers are back in the States, on the road again.

Their hometown’s up next.

New albums — and a new way of making them

Ronnie Vannucci’s ears are not like yours.

At least in terms of how he hears his band’s back catalog.

He acknowledges as much when explaining how The Killers’ approach to making an album these days has evolved from earlier in the group’s career.

“It used to be we’d get a collection of songs together that had no sort of common thread,” he chuckles. “I listen to some of our records sometimes and they’re so dynamic that it sort of loses the plot, at least for me — I hear things differently than maybe an outsider might.

“My point is that I think we’re a little bit more deliberate about what kind of record we’d like to make,” he continues, “what complexion or feeling that a record may have, what kind of songs.”

This becomes apparent when delving into the band’s two most recent records, 2020’s “Imploding the Mirage” and last year’s “Pressure Machine.” (The Killers’ current tour is their first full-fledged U.S. outing in support of both.)

For “Pressure Machine,” a stirring, equally biting and beatific song cycle revolving around opioid abuse in Nephi, Utah, where Flowers lived as a boy, the band homed in on a vibe that recalls the grim realism of Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Nebraska,” complete with snippets of interviews with residents and an alchemical blend of hope and dread.

While the sonically diffuse, guest-heavy “Imploding the Mirage” is wide-ranging musically, its inspiration was much more singular: artist Thomas Blackshear’s beguiling painting “Dance of the Wind and Storm,” which depicts a pair of godlike figures, man and woman, soaring among the clouds over a desert landscape, a scene that feels both otherworldly and distinct to the Southwest, a merging of grandeur and grit, which could also describe a good portion of The Killers’ songbook.

“It was our first time really dedicating a record to a feeling,” Vannucci says of “Imploding.” “In that case, we had a piece of art that we were sort of using as a compass to make these songs. We were engineering songs based on an image, which was something we’d never done before.

“As you climb the rungs on the ladder as a band, you sort of look for different ways to compose and get to making a body of work,” he continues. “It’s interesting. It’s a lot of fun, too.”

How to become a member of the band — for a song

What does it take to be a Killer?

Start with some well-decorated poster board, a concert ticket, a little luck, maybe.

That, and the chops to handle the dizzy surge of “For Reasons Unknown” on your instrument of choice.

A recurring signature at Killers shows in recent years has been recruiting a fan from the crowd to jam with the band during the aforementioned “Sam’s Town” standout.

It’s a consistently emotional thing to behold, someone’s dream coming true in real time, if only for a few raucous minutes.

The way it works: Crowd members bring homemade signs with them to a show, the more eye-catching the better, in hopes of getting the band’s attention. The Killers then choose someone to join them on stage, usually to play drums, leaving Vannucci to switch to guitar.

“Well, you know, I’m 46 now and I need a break once in a while from playing the drums,” Vannucci quips. “I think it’s just sort of a moment of spontaneity. People make these ornate signs.

“People just kind of know that that’s a thing,” he adds. “Sometimes they jump on bass or keyboard, but it’s mostly drums. Anytime you get to have a moment in the set where you break that wall, that barrier, down for people, it certainly makes it a night. It’s fun for everybody.”

The band’s also been keeping things fresh lately by mixing up its set list, swapping in a variety of new songs as well as airing some rarely played tunes.

A new tool for helping determine which chestnuts to play where?

Metrics.

“What’s really fun is that now there’s data out that lets you know what people are listening to, what people are streaming in what territory or country or sometimes city,” Vannucci says. “We’ll be in, like, Mexico, what are people listening to in Monterrey, Mexico? They really like the song ‘Just Another Girl’ — we never played it. It was just sort of a cutting room floor song that our good friends in Mexico liked, so we put it in the set list there. They go bonkers for it.”

Another vintage album cut that the band has been playing sporadically of late is the propulsive “Midnight Show,” which hasn’t been a regular part of the Killers’ performances since they were touring their smash 2004 album “Hot Fuss.”

It was among the songs the band performed way back in 2003 when it first hit the United Kingdom for a run of shows that lit the fuse on the Killers’ career, garnering early press acclaim.

It was a turning point.

After all those hours in the practice room, The Killers had learned how to knock ’em dead.

“It felt like nothing was going to stop us after we played, like, a week’s worth of shows in London in these little places,” Vanucci recalls, noting the presence of some influential British magazines at the shows. “‘NME’ was out there, and Q magazine was out there. All these people were out there to just kind of look at this band that sort of had one or two songs to see if we could pull it off live. And they’re like, ‘Oh s—-, these guys are doing something.’

“It just felt awesome to be regarded as being worth watching,” he continues, “being one of those bands that you hear about. Now, suddenly, we were one of those bands. I think that was a big propeller for us to keep going. We knew that the work ethic was sort of crazy, but this was like, ‘OK, well, this makes sense. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep doing this.’ That’s kind of remained part of our DNA as a band ever since.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram