Good news about The Darlings.
Stacey, you need to have a little "chat" with Steve about Hell Country....
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Country music is singing the blues
Once thriving, the local sene falls victim to changing tastes and talent
drain
By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 01/24/99
Nashville stars are hitting it big in Boston. Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire
have played the FleetCenter. Shania Twain and Travis Tritt have headlined
Great Woods. Clint Black and Trisha Yearwood have stopped at the South Shore
Music Circus. And George Strait is expected to headline Foxboro Stadium this
summer, sharing a bill with the suddenly hot Dixie Chicks.
Yet, while major tours are drawing large numbers in the Boston market, these
successes have not translated to the local club scene, which has dried up
dramatically in recent years.
Indeed, the honky-tonks are fading fast from the city and its surrounding
environs. Where there were once 20-plus clubs in the region offering four to
seven nights of country music per week, there are now just a handful - and
none in Boston proper. The scene has been decimated by changing tastes, by
the line-dancing phenomenon (which in turn burned itself out), by a talent
drain to Nashville, by dwindling radio support, and by an aging country
audience that seems to only go out for special shows by the Garths and Rebas
of the world.
Nor is Nashville - apart from its top stars - immune from this identity
crisis. Major tours are still doing well, but country record sales have
slipped from a high of 18.7 percent of the overall market in 1993, to 14
percent last year, according to published trade reports. Country's roots are
being eaten away, as more entertainers sound like glossy, adult-pop acts
rather than twangy country singers. And more are trying to follow the path
of Shania Twain and Faith Hill, who had puffy Top 40 pop hits last year, as
the line blurred between the genres.
In Boston, there are still some enduring artists keeping the flame alive -
John Lincoln Wright, John Penny, Robin Right, Johnny White, and Allen Estes,
to name a few. Plus, there are fresh faces in Dave Foley, Terri Bright,
Paved Country, Mary Gauthier, and the Darlings - a new country-rock band
that just won a national battle-of-the-bands contest in Nashville. But
overall, the scene is singing the blues - the ''long gone lonesome blues,''
as Hank Williams once whined.
''It's really not a bad scene as long as you're willing to make no money,''
says a rather sarcastic Brian Sinclair, who has been a disc jockey at
Saturday morning's ''Hillbilly at Harvard'' show on WHRB-FM (95.3) for 33
years. He's seen the comings and goings - mostly goings - of a Boston scene
that is becoming more fragmented by the day.
How fragmented? Try this: There is little overlap between old and new acts,
and between acts that perform contemporary versus traditional country -
shades of the same battle that exists between alternative and classic rock.
Consumers are being left with a depleted sense of history (also a problem
nationally when you realize that pioneer George Jones has no recording
contract these days) and with a cynicism that suggests that someone has a
better chance of winning the lottery than making it from Boston in the
country field.
Success in Nashville
The only export to find significant success in recent years is Jo Dee
Messina, a Holliston native who used to play the now-vanished jamborees
around town. She moved to Nashville right after high school in 1991, then
starved a few years before the fates smiled on her. ''It was a crazy dream
to go to Nashville, but I'm living it. And God, it's great. I'm so lucky,''
Messina says.
She's lucky to have escaped a club scene that is a shell of its former self.
Just look at all the local clubs that have gone to hillbilly heaven: the
Blue Star in Saugus, the Hillbilly Ranch in Park Square, Nashville North in
the Theater District, the Adelphia in Dorchester, Kevin's Country Corner in
Somerville, Sacco's in Watertown, Cowboys in Saugus, J.R.'s in Beverly, and
the Wagon Wheel in Ayer.
''I can't supply a living to my musicians anymore,'' says John Lincoln
Wright, a local legend whose group the Sour Mash Boys scrambles to find work
where it can. Wright used to be a mainstay in the city, but his most regular
gig now is playing Sunday nights at the tiny Middle East bakery room in
Cambridge.
Wright is one of a diehard group of country performers who blames the
line-dancing trend for shredding the scene. Line-dancing - a kind of ''Urban
Cowboy, Part II'' movement with dance steps done in line formations to
DJ -spun records - rendered live bands superfluous. Line-dancers required
bigger dance floors (hence they weren't interested in the smaller
honky-tonks) and when they did show up for live bands, they often complained
that those bands didn't play the exact rhythms of the songs that they had
learned in their line-dancing lessons.
''We even use a metronome now to try to get the beats just right,'' says
John Penny, whose John Penny Band has been around for 20-plus years. ''But I
tell these people, why don't you just come in and enjoy the band? They say,
`Well, this is the way we learned that song.' There are some bands that
would play it faster or slower, and they'd get complaints. People would tell
club owners that `I'd rather have a DJ.' Then the club owners figured,
`Yeah, OK,' because that would cost them less.
''But the club owners wouldn't make enough money, because line-dancers
didn't drink. They were strictly there for dancing. They'd take their dance
lessons and go home by 10:30 p.m.,'' adds Penny. ''The clubs started
dropping line-dancing, too, so it was a double loss for country music.''
Clubs compromise
As for the remaining clubs in the shrinking local scene, they often
compromise by booking live bands one or two nights a week, opting for DJs
the rest of the time. That's true of such clubs as Billy's in Peabody (where
veteran bands such as Silver Saddle and Angela West & Showdown perform),
Carpenter's in Southborough, the Rockin' Horse in Taunton, and the newer Mt.
Auburn Grill in Oxford.
The club scene is further polarized, because some clubs just want Top 40
country bands, while very rare ones accent bands with original material.
''We can't play the line-dancing bars, so we have to play the alternative
places like the Plough & Stars [in Cambridge] and Johnny D's [in
Somerville],'' says singer Sara Mendelsohn of Paved Country, an original,
vocal-harmony-filled, honky-tonk band that has delighted small but
appreciative crowds in recent months.
''There are two entirely different worlds of country music in Boston,'' says
Flo Murdoch, who books Johnny D's. ''There are the bands like Paved Country
and Nola Rose who are doing something different with the music; and then
there are the bands that just copy the hits.''
Oddly enough, the original country bands often find more acceptance at local
rock clubs. That goes for the Darlings, a country-rock group that just beat
out 1,800 other acts to win the annual Jim Beam-sponsored battle of the
bands at the Wild Horse Saloon in Nashville.
''I actually hated country for a while, then I saw country from a different
angle after hearing an Emmylou Harris album,'' says Darlings singer Kelly
Knapp, who has also played with the local rock band the Bristols. She and
Darlings coleader Simon Ritt (formerly of rock group the Unattached) try to
''play in front of rock fans as well as country fans,'' says Ritt. ''I just
hope that people give us a chance.'' (The Darlings include
rock-turned-country guitarist Billy Loosigian, who once anchored Willie
Alexander's Boom Boom Band. Loosigian also plays locally with Terri Bright.)
The Darlings plan to revisit Nashville to seek a recording contract, but
they'll keep Boston as a home base. Other local acts, however, have been
moving to Nashville at a fast clip in the last year. That includes ace
drummer Kathy Burkly and acclaimed singer Nola Rose, whose group Nola Rose
and the Thorns released a 1996 album, ''I Thought I Heard an Angel,'' that
many believe to be the best Boston country disc of the past decade.
A chance at Nashville
''I may not stay in Nashville, but I want to experience it once in my
life,'' says the Iowa-born Rose, who recently played a sendoff show at
Johnny D's with the Darlings and Paved Country. ''Also, I've always had a
fulltime outside job in Boston,'' she adds of her project manager role at
Cambridge consulting firm Pugh-Roberts. ''And my boss said, `We'll keep your
job for you, but please go now. We want you to pursue your dream in
music.'''
Local artists who have done well in Nashville in recent years, apart from
Messina, include Jess Leary (a Hingham woman who wrote the hit ''Mi Vida
Loca'' for Pam Tillis), Robert Ellis Orrall (a North Shore native who had a
brief chart career), Walter Garland (guitarist for Colin Raye), Perly Curtis
(pedal steel guitarist for Loretta Lynn), and the late Rocky Stone, who
played guitar for Mickey Gilley until he died of a stroke last year.
Another artist pursuing her Nashville dream is Barbara Lawrence, a
21-year-old Dighton native who has a demo deal with famed Nashville producer
Norro Wilson. ''She's got the right age, the right looks, and the voice to
make it in today's Nashville,'' says Penny, who helped get her started, just
as he helped Messina get started locally.
Those who remain in the Boston area are fortified by the support of the
Massachusetts Bay Country Music Awards Association, which holds its annual
awards at Lombardo's in Randolph each fall. They're also boosted by the
chance of playing the many state fairs in the Northeast, which are a growing
alternative to the fading club scene.
One artist who has made the jump to fairs is Robin Right, who has released
two independent-label albums, but is also riding high with her ''Tribute to
Tammy Wynette'' show that will likely be booked at many fairs this year.
Right, 51, has sung Wynette's songs for years and even named her daughter
Tammy 31 years ago. ''This show comes strictly from the heart,'' Right says.
Radio criticized
Many artists, unfortunately, feel that any success they've had in the Boston
area comes from their own hard work and ingenuity, not from mainstream radio
support. There are some specialty programs that are cited as helpful:
''Hillbilly at Harvard'' is one; another is the Sunday mid-day country show
on Boston College station, WZBC-FM (90.3), hosted by George Hauenstein; and
another is ''Homegrown Tomatoes'' on Sunday afternoons on the revitalized
WCAV-FM (97.7) in Brockton. But many bands criticize the only major Boston
outlet, WKLB-FM (99.5), claiming it plays just Nashville acts and ignores
local talent.
''I'm recording a third independent album now and I know that WKLB is not
going to play it,'' says Right. ''When was the last time that WKLB had a
record in rotation by a local artist?''
WKLB, which sponsors a country festival at Great Woods each summer (with
Nashville headliners) and cosponsors summer events at Indian Ranch in
Webster, has no time slot devoted to local music, but ''that's not to say
there won't be one in the future,'' says music director Ginny Rogers. The
station also has booked some local acts, such as Allen Estes, Nick Tella,
and the band Phoenix, in opening slots for its St. Jude Hospital fall
benefits in Faneuil Hall Marketplace. ''We give local acts a chance to
perform in front of our listeners,'' Rogers says.
Still, the bottom line is that country music is drying up around Boston - a
depressing fact of life for the people who play it. ''It's not like it was
15 years ago,'' says drummer Boby Bear of the Darlings. ''It's still out
there, but you have to look harder for it.''
