It’s late afternoon of a long day of interviewing, and Mark Chesnutt is fried.
Fighting a nagging head cold, the singer from East Texas has spent the past several days flying from Nashville to Dallas to New York and back doing something he plainly doesn’t enjoy: hawking his considerable wares.
“We’re talking six years of nonstop touring,” he reflects on his career. “The most I’ve ever had off in that time was three weeks.” He estimates he averages at least 200 shows a year.
So why doesn’t he cut down his road work the way Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and George Strait have?
“I could cut back–if I’d sell 10 million albums,” he says. “But for some reason my albums just don’t sell like Reba’s or George Strait’s or somebody’s like that. It would be great to take half a year off, but I don’t sell millions of albums. So I can’t.”
What did he do during the three weeks he did take off?
“Went broke, basically,” he says, with a wry grin. “Tried to go fishing. But you got a band, a bus, a crew, a lot of overhead, so you’ve got to keep things going.
“I haven’t done a show in almost two weeks now because I’ve been doing this (publicity tour), flying and staying in hotels. And there are still salaries being paid (to his band and crew), and I ain’t had a dime come in in the past two weeks. So . . . there’s no end in sight. But I figure if I can’t slow down by the time I’m 40 I’m going to do it anyway.”
To a question as to whether he ever considered a change of musical direction, he gives a stare.
“Why would I want to do that?” he replies. “I would rather play honky-tonks the rest of my life for $500 a week than be something I’m not.”
Were Chesnutt the type who cares much about tooting his own kazoo, he could have been clearer about his sales totals. He sells millions of albums, just not millions of copies of each album. All told, his six reportedly have so far sold a total of five million. MCA/Decca hopes to raise that figure substantially by issuing Chesnutt’s first “Greatest Hits” package, a collection of solid, straight-ahead, no-Hollyweirdness country music designed to emphasize to the public how much notable work Chesnutt has done.
It’s comprised of such memorable stuff as the homicidal “Bubba Shot the Jukebox” and the working-class hangover paean “It Sure Is Monday”; the fire-is-gone marriage lament “Too Cold at Home” and the divorce anthem “Goin’ Through the Big D”; the opposites-attract love song “Ol’ Country” and the pretty ballad “I’ll Think of Something.”
A country throwback
Chesnutt’s a throwback to the inwardly-tough, just-do-it kind of country star they were making back when they minted George Jones, who preceded Chesnutt out of the rough-and-tumble East Texas honky-tonks 40 years ago.
The music that spilled out of those places, Chesnutt’s artistic touchstone, seemed more influenced by its roots in the Appalachian Southeast than any kinship to cowboydom or Bob Wills-style bigger-band music.
“I’ve never really been into this Texas swing kind of stuff,” he says. “They say `country and western,’ but I don’t think what I’ve done is `country and western.’ It’s `country and eastern,’ I guess, because I was from East Texas.”
Son of a struggling regional musician who himself played the honky-tonks and had some records on small Texas labels, Chesnutt started playing clubs at 15 and was good enough to grace such prominent ones as Gilley’s in Houston just two years later. Bob Chesnutt transferred his hopes for his musical career to that of his son, who was the beneficiary of Bob’s enthusiastic aid until just after the first MCA album was released, when the father died of a heart attack.
Asked what his father might say if he could see the 10-selection “Greatest Hits” package the son has achieved, his response is immediate.
“He’d say, `Where’s the other 10?’ Because there’s only half of ’em on there. I’ve had over 20 singles.”
The son has persevered through the death of his father and the illness of his longtime bandleader, who was diagnosed this summer with a brain tumor.
And now he’s struggling with the three-week-old head cold.
“It’s got me just real down,” he does say, apologizing for not appearing “very interested.” “I’ve gotta get to feeling better before I do my shows this weekend.”
Does he still perform in honky-tonks?
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “We still do some clubs. They’re nicer than the ones I started in (though), a lot of ’em are.”
Asked about the worst fight he ever saw in a honky-tonk, he seems to have seen so many that they run together in his mind.
He thinks a moment.
“Well, those women could really get after it out there. When two women would get in a fight together, they’d get really wild. That would be something to watch.”
The `Bubba’ joke
So he can’t remember any particular one?
“No,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of ’em, though. The best ones were probably at a place called Yvonne’s that I used to work a lot when I was probably about 21. It was an old dive, and they had some really hardcore people there.”
No doubt. Yvonne’s, he explains, was pronounced “Eee-vonne’s” and was located “right outside Beaumont.” It seems to have given him the kind of experience that prompted him to choose to record “Bubba Shot the Jukebox.”
Nashville’s songpluggers, he recalls, had been playing “Bubba” for singers “as a joke” that “nobody” was taking seriously.
“I heard it and thought it was a great song,” he remembers. “I thought it was true, something that probably happens.”
Had almost any of Chesnutt’s young Nashville peers recorded it, they would undoubtedly have done it cutely, diluting the effect by putting a grin in their voices and trying to let the listener know it was supposed to be funny.
Chesnutt, on the other hand, actually heightened the effect by accenting its realism, singing it as serious as an attacking pit bull. When he describes the teardrop rolling down Bubba’s nose during interrogation by the cops, the listener can all but see blue lights flashing and smell the spent cartridges in the pistol under Bubba’s truck seat.
Chesnutt’s whole demeanor bespeaks a deep familiarity with blue-collar living that makes his music ring true. Asked if he had to undergo a great change from the honky-tonk lifestyle when he married and then became a father (of a son he named Waylon) a couple of years ago, he says the changes were “just all gradual.”
“I met my wife in a honky-tonk in the old-fashioned way,” he says. “She came out there with a guy she was with at the time, and I took her away from him, and he threatened to whup me for years and never did. I guess he got tired of it and gave it up.
“But we went from strangers to friends and got married and had kids, just the old classic way.”
He sings country music in the same manner, employing a style and sound and song selection that all insist on never getting above the level of absolutely anybody. Told that, he ignores the implied praise.
“Well, it’s country music,” he says. “It’s not supposed to.”
