By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

Steve Vilot was just 22 years old, freshly laid off from a gas company in Massachusetts, and standing in his barber’s living room trying to figure out what came next. The house was nice. Real nice.

“Gene,” he said. “This is a really nice house.”

“Yeah,” Gene said.

“From barbering?”

“Yeah. You do it right.”

The rest — as they say — is history.

He enrolled in barber school the following week. That was thirty-some years ago. Today, Steve Vilot is the personal barber to Dave Matthews, the official barber for the X Games, and the man behind the chair for a roster of clients that runs from Eminem’s camp to Korn to Shinedown to Aaron Lewis. He has cut hair in Naples, Florida at a private show. He is going to Dave’s house next week.

“I don’t even listen to music,” he says, almost apologetically. “If you got in my car right now, it’s got NPR. Talk radio. My dad always had it on. I think it’s just a comfort zone.”

Today, he also runs Barber Authority here in Lynchburg. His shop sits in the converted Cashion Brothers Texaco Station just off the square.

It’s a juxtaposition between clean, white subway tiles and trendy neon. There’s a set of old school barber chairs for those getting cuts and rocking chairs made out of barrel staves for those waiting. Rows and rows of Gibs Grooming products line the shelves in neat rows. Steve’s an official educator for the brand.

There’s also local merch. Lynchburg Candle Company made Steve his very own Barber Authority scented candle and there are several Lynchburg themed t-shirts and sweatshirts. Our favorite reads, “Lynchburg vs. Everybody” — a play on the “Detroit Versus Everybody” shirts made for a recent Eminem tour.

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Barbering led to becoming a product educator

Steve grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts — Western Mass, nearly to the New York state border — where his father, a Marine, took him to the barbershop every other week for a high-and-tight military cut. No exceptions. He was an only child, and those barbershop visits were a ritual he carried with him everywhere.

After vocational high school and an associate’s degree in drafting from Wentworth in Boston, he landed at a gas company laying pipe. The work was constant customer conflict. He was always in the wrong — always putting out fires. He lasted a couple of years before the layoff that changed everything.

Gene’s house did that. Barber school in Holyoke. And then 30 years of building something that no straightforward career path could have produced.

The route to rock royalty ran through continuing education — or rather, through the lack of it. Stylists, Steve learned, received constant training: new techniques, new products, new everything. Barbers got almost nothing. The reason, he eventually figured out, was retail. Product companies fund education. Barbers don’t sell product. So barbers don’t get classes.

He found a workaround. His friends — cousins, girlfriends, all hairstylists — started bringing him along. He learned things his peers weren’t learning. He eventually became an educator for The Art of Shave and started doing hot shave pop-up events across Boston and New York City.

Pop-up hot shaves led to becoming a barber to rock stars

A walk-in at one of those New York events was Eminem’s tour manager. Then came Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager, whose head Steve started shaving regularly.

“It kind of snowballed,” Steve says.

At the same time, Pink was filming a movie in New York where she plays a barber. Her team Googled “hot shave in New York City” and Steve’s name came up. He started working with her, became friends with her husband — X Games athlete Carey Hart — and in 2013 became the official barber for X Games athletes. He still holds that gig during both the summer and winter games.

The X games led to the Dave Matthews Band. Dave Matthews came through the X Games where Stefan Lessard, Dave’s bass player, sat in Steve’s chair. The guy who ran the athletes’ lounge also ran Dave Matthews’ backstage bar. Connections compounded. Eventually Steve was in Hartford, Connecticut, cutting hair in the green room, when Dave Matthews walked up to him.

“Hey, everybody’s got cool haircuts. Can I get one?”

“You’re next,” Steve said.

That cut led to him being the official touring barber for The Dave Matthews Band. They’ve been close ever since. It’s like that with barbering — clients become friends, Steve says.

Lynchburg came through Nashville. Steve was consulting on a barbershop for Yelawolf — a Nashville rapper signed to Eminem’s Shady Records — in a building near Mike Wolfe’s American Pickers store. A Jack Daniel’s executive named Dave Stang came by the shop one day, watched Steve work, and asked what he did.

Pop-up barbershop events. Outside of shops. That kind of thing, Steve told him.

“You ever do one at a barbecue?”

He hadn’t. He said yes anyway. That first Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue appearance drew an instant line. Then Frontier Days. Then haircuts at the Lynchburg Hardware & General Store. Then Homeplace Director Steve May sat down in Steve’s chair in the little courtyard landing and said: We really need a barbershop in Lynchburg.

May walked him over to the old Cashion Brother’s Texaco Station building. It looked in shamble but May had big dreams for it — an Indian Motorcycles Store and hopefully a cutting-edge, rock star barber shop. May admitted it looked rough but promised a coll space once renovation were complete.

“I’m a motorcycle guy and a car guy,” Steve says. “Having a barbershop in an old gas station was just — this is so cool.”

The Human Side of Barbering

Barber Authority has been open nearly five years. The shop runs almost entirely by appointment — two weeks out, on a good week. Steve is in town once a week, sometimes three times, sometimes not for three weeks running.

His staff, fellow barber Sara Grace Boleware, grew up in Lynchburg practicing cuts on her Barbie dolls before moving to New York City to become a barber. While living in the Bigg Apple, she worked as both a editorial and celebrity stylist.

The prices are real. No kids’ rate. No senior discount. One price, roughly double what the franchise chains charge. But Steve trains Sport Clips’ national education team. He knows exactly what you’re getting at those places — and exactly what you’re not.

“Those haircuts are 12 minutes,” he says. “Mine are 30. So it’s twice as much, all the way around.”

His clientele in Lynchburg ranges from famous locals to those who drove past the sign, got curious, then got lucky with a walk in appointment.

He mentions Master Distiller Chris Fletcher as a regular customer but it’s really Chris’s young son, Payne, that most puts a smile on his face. Jack Daniel brand ambassadors Randall Fanning and Goose Baxter are also regulars. So are Goose’s twin grandsons. He gets a fair amount of business from local teenage boys who want to “look cool.”

A few weeks ago Korn drummer Ray Luzier and his kids drove down from Franklin for a cut. There is no typical customer, and Steve seems genuinely delighted by that.

The relationships that form when you’re the person someone trusts with how they look. Clients easily become friends. He mentions eating burgers recently at Dave Matthews’ house because Dave’s wife had them on the grill when he got there and of course you stay.

What he talks about most, though, isn’t the famous ones. It’s the chair itself. What happens in it.

“Being someone’s barber,” he pauses. “You’re like a bartender who’s not drinking, and it’s one on one. You’re physically touching somebody. And it’s very powerful on a human level, to put a smile on another human’s face.”

“You’re on the inside circle,” he says. “Because you’re their barber.”

He grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts surrounded by farms. He landed, eventually, in a small town in Middle Tennessee surrounded by farms. He was a Jack Daniel’s drinker long before Lynchburg called — enough of one that he’d been nominated as a Squire years before he ever set foot here.

“It’s really familiar,” he says referring to Lynchburg. “The small-town barber, farmer kind of thing.”

Barber Authority sits at 10 Mechanic Street in Lynchburg just off the square. They open by appointment only and spots fill up quick. If you’d like to book an appointment with Steve or Sara visit the Barber Authority website by clicking here. Steve also says he’s interested in adding a couple of additional barbers to the shop. If you’re interested, reach out to them at 931-464-4000. •

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