Country music has gotten so big for its britches that it can hardly sit down anymore.
An increasing complaint of Nashville record executives is that the success of the genre has drawn so many hopefuls to the field that there seems to be almost no room for new faces-and new faces, remember, were the force that created the boom in the first place.
Where six or seven major record companies maintained offices in Nashville less than 10 years ago, there now are 16, and privately many of their occupants are crying the blues over the cost of doing business in country music today and the increasing difficulty in getting new artists introduced to the market successfully.
They claim that because of the high quality of today’s country music, it now regularly costs $150,000 to record an album, $50,000 or so to film each music video, and up to $250,000 more to get a new artist’s album ready for the radio market-where it tends now to be rejected out of hand because country radio programmers already have more great young artists than they can play.
The result is that an appalling amount of great music is going unheard. Solution? There is no easy one, but maybe the time finally is nearing when the country radio format will have to be split into sections-not just into players of “current” and “classic” country music but into “traditional” and “contemporary” divisions, with “hat” acts such as Clint Black and Alan Jackson on traditional formats and less-traditional performers such as Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Suzy Bogguss on the contemporary playlists.
Even this wouldn’t eliminate all problems. Where, for example, would you put the music of people such as Garth Brooks and Vince Gill, whose music can go both ways?
– Speaking of Gill, his new MCA album, “When Love Finds You,” is a project dealing with love in all sorts of forms.
One of the songs, “Maybe Tonight,” is Gill’s first serious songwriting collaboration with his wife, Janis, of Sweethearts of the Rodeo.
“It’s the story about how we met through music and were friends before we ever started hanging out,” Gill says. “But when we first met, there was this little spark.”
He grins.
“I had a bigger spark than she did.”
By contrast, a song titled “Go Rest High on That Mountain” is a gospel number written by Gill in tribute to his friend Keith Whitley.
“It’s got to be my favorite thing on the whole album,” he says. “I sat down and started writing this song after he passed away. I never finished it. Then when my brother died in March of ’93, I took the song back out. It sounds like a funeral march, real bluegrassy and traditional. Ricky Skaggs and Patty Loveless had to sing on it-they’re both Kentuckians like Keith was, and they’re two special people that have been a big part of my life for a long, long time.”
– Some of the best music not currently being heard in any general way on country radio is on Jamie O’Hara’s new RCA album, “Rise Above It,” and it’s nice to be able to report that it is receiving deserved recognition in Europe, at least.
In mid-May the music video of the O’Hara single “The Cold Hard Truth” rose to No. 1 on the countdown of CMT-Europe. The song is about a man being talked to by his conscience, and, asked if he has faced cold hard truth in his own life, O’Hara-who several years ago endured a particularly painful divorce that he indicates resulted from some of his own mistakes-says:
“Hopefully I have. And hopefully I’ll continue to do so. I’ve lived with some demons with addictions and things like that and tried to come through all that and the consequences of that.”
Do the album’s many references to Jim Beam and Old Crow indicate the nature of the “addictions”?
“Yes, those are firsthand experiences,” he says.
– It’s no secret that Randy Travis’ early and middle teenage years were marred by run-ins with the law for various youthful offenses, but it could have been worse.
While-and even before-all this was going on, Travis remembers, he was sneaking his father’s Colt pistol out to practice drawing and shooting it when his dad wasn’t around.
“I used to draw out of a holster and shoot apples out of a tree or off a fence,” he says.
Of the fact that he was doing this during his non-law-abiding years, he remarks, “It’s a good thing I didn’t shoot anybody.”
– The Statler Brothers, who usually have a guest artist appearing with them on their annual Happy Birthday USA celebration July 4 in Staunton, Va., have announced that they will be appearing solo at this year’s celebration, the 25th, because of “overwhelming requests by fans throughout the country for the Statlers to appear by themselves.” This year’s appearance will be the famed quartet’s final one on the celebration, which occurs in their hometown.
– Longtime Birmingham, Ala., TV host “Country Boy Eddie” Burns-who helped launch the careers of such performers as Tammy Wynette, Melba Montgomery and Wendy Holcombe and who himself has performed more than 6,000 shows at 36 TV stations-has been inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in Tuscumbia, Ala. Burns retired this year.
