Last December, Highway 101, an award-winning band that had suffered the defection of lead singer Paulette Carlson, received a stroke of deserved good luck.
It stumbled onto an amazingly virtuosic replacement named Nikki Nelson. But the group`s other members-guitarist Jack Daniels, drummer Scott (Cactus)
Moser and bassist Curtis Stone-didn`t really know how lucky they had gotten until a few weeks later, when they first went on stage with the 22-year-old.
In mid-song, Daniels recalls, Nelson suddenly forgot the words of a Highway 101 hit.
”When she didn`t come back in (vocally), I kept playing and discreetly glanced in her direction,” the guitarist says. ”I saw she was grooving to the music and getting over next to Curtis to find out the words. Curtis gave her a line, and she was so cool about it that I swear I don`t think anybody ever knew. She is so cool under fire.
”The same sort of thing happened with the video for `Bing Bang Boom.`
Warner Bros. has this school for artists who have never done videos, and they wanted us to go because it was Nikki`s first time. She hated it. And before we shot the video the producer wanted to get together a day early to go over what Nikki was going to do, and she hated that, too. Her attitude was, `Why are we doing this? Let`s just do it.`
”What she ended up doing on the video is uncoached stuff, and she is great. Everybody said, `Man, she`s a natural.` ”
Nelson could indeed be a natural, as anybody listening to Highway 101`s new and possibly best-ever album, ”Bing Bang Boom,” may conclude, but she also is not the neophyte her tender years suggest. No less than half of them have been spent singing on stages, much of the time with bands.
She also is no clone of the Minnesota-born Carlson. Much more traditionally country, Nelson is a Nevadan who says she grew up singing anything that was on the radio but loving the stuff on her home turntable, especially her mother`s records by longtime country stars Faron Young, Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette.
”That (music) was my favorite, what I liked,” she says. ”My friends at school always listened to rock `n` roll, but I always preferred country.” Her background has brought a new dimension to Highway 101, giving its fiery, rockish instrumentation a traditional-country core. The change has the potential of according the group its greatest popularity yet with country faithful.
The matchmaking of Highway 101`s new marriage-in-midstream happened by accident, and the bride is at least as lucky as the trio of grooms.
Having moved to Nashville at 18 after singing for six years with bands in Nevada, Nelson had had three singles on tiny 19th Avenue Records before her producer, Larry Rogers, sent a demonstration tape around to the major companies.
”One of the people he sent it to was Martha Sharp at Warner Bros.,”
Nelson says. ”I guess the day she got the tape the (Highway 101) guys were in her office listening to songs for the album. She said, `This just came in from across the street. Why don`t we listen to it?`
”They still were auditioning girls, so she played it for them, and they said they were interested. Then she suggested they call me to see if I was, too. Our tape hadn`t been sent to Warner Bros. with any thought about Highway, but it took me about two seconds to decide I was interested.”
She then had to go through the considerable audition process that a dozen or so other hopefuls were enduring, a process of learning and singing not only a couple of Highway 101 hits but also four songs the group planned to record for its 1991 album.
Daniels remembers that when the group called Nelson to a meeting with their manager, Chuck Morris, she arrived and looked ”kind of edgy.
”We all sat down,” he says. ”Then Chuck got up and said, `Well, we`re all here. As long as we can work out the legalities, welcome to Highway 101.` ”She said, `You`re kidding.` We said, `Would we kid you about that?` She said, `You guys have been so nice through the rehearsals and everything that I thought this was just going to be a sweet way, rather than just a phone call, of telling me you were sorry.` ”
Instead, Nelson immediately was whisked away to the Nashville offices of Warner Bros., where Daniels, Moser and Stone walked her through and introduced her as their new partner.
Then they plunged into what seems to have been nonstop work ever since-on the album, on the video and then on a grinding road schedule that has put Nelson before large crowds and on stages with such names as Ricky Van Shelton, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless and the Forester Sisters.
”With the new band thing, people who maybe wouldn`t have come out before are coming out to see the new Highway 101,” she adds. ”We`re all booked up for the rest of the year, too.”
Daniels recalls that even in auditioning, Nelson was distinctive in that although she was ”very nervous,” she ”didn`t appear to be.” Nelson herself now says she gets ”nervous every night before the show,” but she never really gets ”scared.”
That cool self-confidence is obvious. She handles interviews as if she has been doing them for a decade, and Daniels says she has fit into the group`s wearying travel grind and she`s ”wonderful to get along with.”
Daniels says that by the end of 1991, Nelson will have become a ”full”
financial partner in the group; the only reason she isn`t one already, he suggests, is that ”you can`t just (immediately) hand away a quarter of the business to somebody who suddenly could become disenchanted with the whole thing.”
To somebody, in other words, who might go the same route as Carlson, who had been a solo performer before her Highway 101 stint and apparently always wanted to be one again.
Nelson, too, came to the job with solo aspirations, but she says she does ”not really” still have an eye on a solo career.
”I really would rather be in a band than be a singer with a band (of her own),” she says. ”In the back of my mind, I always thought that if I could put a group together, that would be the ideal thing for me.”
