Early in his forthcoming movie debut, country music superstar George Strait-portraying a character whose degree of celebrity is identical to his own-reminisces with a fellow musician about a stage they once shared with a chicken.
The chicken, they recall, was made to dance by an insensitive con man who had surreptitiously heated an electrified sheet of metal beneath its feet. In a shock of recognition, Strait`s character suddenly sees the chicken as himself, and thereupon exits stardom.
Strait indicates he has seen times he identified with the frantic chicken.
”I`ve thought about running away myself,” he says, with an unamused-sounding laugh.
”There were times earlier in my career when I was working like 200 or 250 dates a year, the way a lot of young artists are doing today, and I remember getting to October and November, when we started slowing down for Christmas, and being burned out so bad I didn`t think I could go another year. ”It got to the point there at the end where I would start feeling that way several times during the year. I figured out that I had to get some time away from the music business.”
He`s getting it now, at least sort of. In ”Pure Country,” a Warner Bros. film opening Friday with veteran actress Lesley Ann Warren and newcomer Isabel Glasser, Strait-long one of country music`s major stars and still its handsomest-makes a surprisingly credible first try at acting.
With a script tailored to his personal interests, ”Pure Country” is a heartland fairy tale told with epic photography. Its unpretentious plot depicts the awakening of a country singer pushed into pop-style megamarketing- and away from his music`s message and its fans-by a high-handed manager played by Warren.
Dropping out, he heads back to the Texas cattle country of his roots, where he encounters a young rodeo queen played fetchingly by Glasser and gets his creative batteries recharged in one of the more platonic romances to hit the big screen since Gene Autry petted his horses more than his leading ladies.
Strait does no more kissing than Autry did.
”There were a lot of things involved there,” he explains. ”We thought about it, and then we thought, `Well, what if we didn`t?` Looking back, I don`t see that it would`ve added anything.
”We wanted my fans that come to the shows to come to see it and like it.”
Obviously. At the suggestion of longtime Elvis Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker, Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub gambled $10 million on this project on the theory that Strait`s long-solid and considerably feminine fan corps would faithfully support the venture.
Such female fans might not have been happy at the sight of the hero of their fantasies locked in in-the-flesh clinches with the beautiful Glasser. That, however, doesn`t seem to have been the only consideration.
Asked if he would have been uncomfortable in a more amorous role, the quintessentially quiet and shy singer replies after a pause:
”Well, maybe a little bit. It would have been kind of different for me.”
The script of ”Pure Country” keeps Strait where he is most at home:
– On the stage, from which he does a lot of singing, thereby guaranteeing the satisfaction of fans.
– Back at the ranch and/or in the rodeo ring, where he does his own riding and roping in an eyepopping display of horsemanship calculated to impress even his most devoted followers.
Some probably will wonder why a man of such good looks who boasts such a valuable guitar-picking hand would continually risk both in activities as potentially dangerous as rodeo roping.
”There`s a risk involved in a lot of things,” Strait says. ”I enjoy it so much I don`t see a risk in it. And I`ve got good horses, and I know how to rope.
”I`m not saying I`m great at it or anything. I have friends that rope professionally, and occasionally I`ll go to a rodeo or two and compete against `em, but as far as roping on their level, I can`t do it. I don`t have the time.”
He says that although the camera ”makes it look easy, believe me, it ain`t.” The events in which Strait is filmed in ”Pure Country” are team competitions in which he works with another horseman and the two of them chase down a 500-pound steer, one lassoing its head while the other ropes its feet. Strait says he sees steer-roping as somewhat like golf, which he also enjoys.
”It`s very mental, and it takes a lot of concentration,” he says.
”To make a good golf swing, you`ve got to do a lot of things right. Same thing with roping.”
Whereas professional rodeoers usually start training as children, he says, he himself only began roping in college, while earning an agriculture degree. He took up the hobby, he says, because a lot of his friends were engaged in it.
He pretty much got into country music the same way. While ranching, he began playing local nightclubs in the evening. One was owned by his longtime manager, Erv Woolsey, who eventually left Texas for an executive position with MCA Records in Nashville. He then got his friend Strait signed to MCA.
That was around 1980, when pseudo-country music was a lot more popular than ”pure” country. Strait`s rise, in tandem with that of bluegrass-oriented Ricky Skaggs, started traditional country music`s `80s
renaissance.
Having won virtually every major country award he was eligible for, Strait turned his attention to movies. He was serious enough about it that he is reported to have showed up for work knowing every line of his part and a lot of the lines of the film`s other characters.
”I don`t know whether I knew every line or not, but I was serious about it,” he says. ”I had studied a lot, because I wanted to be prepared. I wanted it to turn out good.”
The crew began filming with some of the ”concert stuff,” he says, where he naturally felt on firm ground. Then, however, he had to get down off the stage and do his first film dialogue.
It was an argument with Warren about the smoke, lights and thunderous volume with which her character had liberally laced his concert`s production. ”I was really, really nervous about doing that,” Strait says. ”I was really scared. I didn`t want her (Warren) to regret committing to do the movie with me. I didn`t want her to think, `This guy really stinks. What have I gotten myself into?`
”That concerned me, but when we started rehearsing and running the lines, she was real good to work with. Isabel was, too. Both of them are really good actresses, I think, and they made it easier for me.”
They must have. For the most part, Strait is impressive, his quiet but charged personality and subtle sense of humor seeming as perfect on a fictional cowboy as they do on the real one Strait himself is.
Personally reputed to be about as straight as his surname, he exhibits aptitude and even genius in a sequence in which his character gets so inebriated that he falls backward in a chair and then is totaled in a fight.
In keeping with the film`s generally wholesome plot, there is the usual quota of sappy lines and made-for-TV-like suspensions of disbelief, but there also is considerable humor. An all-but-speechless breakfast scene after Glasser takes the dog-drunk Strait home from a honkytonk verges on hilarity.
Interesting also is what ”Pure Country” seems to say about country music, especially since the script was written especially for Strait.
In one of the plot`s more explosive twists, when the Strait character drops out of stardom, Warren turns up the stage smoke another notch and puts an imposter onstage to lip-synch his songs-and, for a time, gets away with it. ”I don`t think that could really happen,” Strait says. ”I`ve never heard of it happening, and I don`t see how anybody could do it. But this is a movie.”
The film`s dim view of the thunder-and-lightning approach to stage production may seem to be a sly slam at the much-publicized rope-swinging, guitar-smashing performances of Garth Brooks, who long has proclaimed himself a Strait fan.
Strait says no.
”I`ve been hearing that, and I guess everybody`s gotten that impression, but we never intended that,” he says. ”We never intended to make fun of anybody`s show. Garth was never even considered as an example in any way or fashion when the script was written or when we were making the movie.
”I`ve never seen his show. The main reason we blew that (production)
thing up so much was so the viewers would see what Lesley Ann, as the manager, was doing. She was making the music secondary to the production of the show. That was the whole point. Nothin` else.”
Asked how he would critique his own performance if he were asked to write something about it, Strait indulges himself in another long pause.
”Well,” he finally says, ”I thought I could pull it off, but it was easier than I thought. I think I did better than I thought I would do.”
