Kix Brooks recalls that after he and partner Ronnie Dunn had been onstage together their first couple of times, Dunn told him that he was out of the Oklahoma school of belief that a vocalist should stand at a microphone and sing, not move all over the stage the way Brooks did.
“He told me, `You might want to settle down,’ ” Brooks remembers on The Nashville Network’s upcoming “Ralph Emery on the Record With Brooks & Dunn,” but Brooks, a Louisianan with a flair for pizazz, indicates he made it plain he wasn’t about to take Dunn’s hint.
“I told him, `Hey, pal, that mike stand isn’t an anchor.’ “
In the hourlong TNN production set for June 21, Dunn acknowledges that Brooks has “absolutely” loosened up, and the result obviously has helped put the twosome among country music’s hottest ticket sellers. Named duo of the year for the past three years by the Country Music Association, they have seen their “Brand New Man” album sell 5 million copies.
In this interview, the duo tell how they were brought together at a Mexican restaurant in Nashville by record executive Tim Dubois. Dubois himself makes an appearance to say that he had received solo tapes of each of them and that their musical similarity prompted him to suggest a partnership.
The two men also discuss family matters. Dunn recalls how he spent two years in “serious” contemplation of a career as a Baptist minister; how he had to buy his wife a truck because she successfully bet him that the duo’s first single, “Brand New Man,” would go to No. 1 on the country hit charts; how his father, also a country musician, was both his first musical inspiration and also a sometime antagonist; and how he made his first mark in the music business by winning a national talent search as lead singer for the band that now is becoming famous as the Tractors.
Brooks, meanwhile, recalls his mother’s death of cancer when he was 4 years old, and that his musical aspirations received strong support from his father, even though the oil-company employee had no musical aspirations of his own.
“He told me if I was going to be a songwriter, to go to Nashville and go head to head with the best of them instead of killing myself for $50 a night in some local honkytonk,” Brooks says.
– Latest in the Americana Series at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport Ave., are Texas-associated song poets Richard Buckner–whose debut album, “Bloomed,” is defined by Spin magazine as “somewhere between the Texas folk of Butch Hancock and Townes Van Zandt and the L.A. country-rock of Gram Parsons”–and Michael Fracasso, who is labeled “one of the most promising new voices in American music” by the Austin Chronicle.
They appear at 8 p.m. Friday.
Ty England, Garth Brooks’ guitar player and close friend since college, will be at Whiskey River, 1997 N. Clybourn Ave., June 17.
– One of the faster contract wrap-ups in recent Nashville history was that of the Texas band Perfect Stranger, whose single “You Have the Right to Remain Silent” started out as an independent release and was grabbed, along with the band, by Curb Records in Nashville back in April.
By 6:30 p.m. of the first afternoon, the band’s manager met with Curb executives, terms were being discussed. Within 24 hours, a verbal deal was done. Four days later, the final contract was issued. Within days the band was shooting a music video and recording two more songs to be added to its independent CD, “It’s Up to You,” which is being repackaged for release by Curb.
The single is more than halfway up the Billboard charts and rising.
– He’s back.
Nearly a decade after his last album, the seemingly indestructible Jerry Lee Lewis is back with a well-titled new release, “Young Blood,” on Sire Records. Lewis, now 60, credits producer Andy Paley with making it happen.
“Andy gave me all the patience out of his soul to make this record,” the Killer says. “I wanted to prove I could still rock, and he created an atmosphere to let me be myself.”
The album features 14 cuts that range from such oldies as Hank Williams’ “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” and Billy Grammer’s “Gotta Travel On” to new ones like “Goosebumps” and “Crown Victoria Custom ’51.”
It’s all done with Lewis’ usual modesty. “My only regret in life,” says this man whose sorrows have been several, “is that I’ve never sat in the audience and watched a Jerry Lee Lewis show.”
– The amazing country singer-songwriter Billy Joe Shaver says he wrote “Hottest Thing in Town”–the first cut on his band’s new live album, “Shaver: Unshaven”–about Madonna.
Not that he knows her or anything.
“There’s a TV station on that does these biographical things, and it had a thing on there about Madonna,” Shaver says. “And it showed her when she was first starting out, and she was dancing all over the place and singing these songs. That’s how I came up with that title and just wrote the song about her.”
Recorded during a three-night stand at Smith’s Olde Bar in Atlanta in January, the album captures the Shaver band sound, which Shaver says he has heard termed “heavy-metal honkytonk.”
The band is a tight triumvirate: Shaver; his guitarist son, Eddy, who has backed both his dad and Dwight Yoakam on the road; and bassist Keith Christopher, who was the original bass player for rock’s Georgia Satellites.
And most of the songs are Shaver classics: “Georgia on a Fast Train,” “Honkytonk Heroes,” “Ride Me Down Easy,” “Black Rose,” “Old Chunk of Coal,” etc.
– In the recently published paperback edition of his autobiography, “Pride” (Quill), country giant Charley Pride gets in a few graceful licks for racial understanding.
Sensitively written by Pride and Texas newspaperman Jim Henderson, the book recalls a show in Texarakana where a fellow walked up just before the show and introduced himself as “the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan here,” adding: “I just want to shake hands with a man.” He then returned to his seat, “stayed for the whole show and seemed to enjoy it.”
At a show in Atlanta, the book goes on, Pride chose not to take offense when a South Georgian sincerely complimented him while referring to him with the hated N-word. The Mississippi-born Pride explains that “I was coming to realize that many people, particularly Southerners, weren’t aware that there was any other way to refer to a person of African .
“I didn’t set out to be a crusader for racial harmony or change anybody’s heart or mind, but I learned early that you can accomplish more with tolerance than with indignation.
