Diamond Rio

Over the years, I've seen a lot of country bands. To be clear, a band in country terms is distinct from a rock band. In the sixties a country band played "backup" to the star. That said, some bands distinguished themselves ~ The Buckaroos and The Strangers, to name two. I would add the little-known Po' Boys, who backed Bill Anderson, and get zero mention.

By the seventies things began to change. Alabama was self-contained; Randy Owens was the lead singer, but the band in its entirety was the star. In the eighties, NGDB (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) were iconic. The Mavericks, in the nineties, distinguished themselves as seminal musicians.

But the best true band I ever saw live was Diamond Rio. It was a small, intimate venue, in a casino many miles from home. Having dinner in the restaurant prior to the concert, I spied Gene Johnson at a table alone, endeavoring to eat his steak and baked potato, when a couple of frenzied female fans accosted him, and I thought, wow, leave the poor man alone. He was gracious, but I would never do that to another human being. It was an eye-opening revelation; thus when my then-husband and I passed by his table on our way out, I deliberately ignored Gene.

At half past eight o'clock, we settled into our third-row seats in the venue and proceeded to be wowed by a phenomenal band. I think there was actually a red velvet curtain as a backdrop.

Marty Roe was a true bluegrass singer who tucked himself into the country genre and embraced the role of showman. Lead guitarist Jimmy Olander exuded perfection and personality. Gene Johnson, despite the heartburn interference, was a master. The band was rounded out by Brian Prout on drums, Dan Truman caressing the keys, and Dana Williams plunking the bass. 

There are great artists who are duds at live performance. See: Alan Jackson. I wouldn't even remember the Jackson concert I attended except for a skinny elm tree perched in front of the mic wearing a white cowboy hat.

Diamond Rio was no Alan Jackson.





I love this song:



I'm partial to this one, too:



Barney Fife and a country band? C'mon!



Sadly, I don't know if DR was oblivious, but they never made an official video of this song?





All Rio's songs weren't about the fun.







Yes, George Strait did it, but Diamond Rio did it first:



The nineties can be summed up for me in two words ~ Diamond Rio.

This is what the nineteen nineties were about.

You've Got Your Troubles

I honestly know nothing about the group The Fortunes, other than they took horrible publicity photos (trust me, I searched). Wikipedia, however, tells me that they were an "English harmony beat group", which I didn't even know was a thing. "60's on 6" on SiriusXM likes to play a certain song by the band a lot, and I find myself dialing up the volume every time. It's not that I don't remember the song from when it was a hit in 1965; it's just that I barely paid any attention to it.

Music, when one reaches a certain age, fails to surprise or inspire. We've frankly heard it all. Our biggest thrill is rediscovering songs we'd once ignored or failed to appreciate at the time.

The reason I like this song is because its arrangement is different from the standard pop songs of the sixties. I am a sixties pop fan ~ people can apply all the significance they want to the songs of the seminal artists, but they're all in the end just songs. John Lennon actually slept in the bath ~ it wasn't a metaphor for anything. I never looked to pop music for deep meaning; I looked to it for fun. Shoot me.

I realize this is the original recording transposed over a band performance, but I like the original and I like seeing a team of kids earnestly performing their first hit:

You may be surprised, as I was, that The Fortunes had more than one hit. I will say, however, that between '65 and '71 they must have had some personnel changes. This next song (of which there is no live performance to be found) has a completely different lead singer and a completely different sound. I think I subconsciously attributed it to the Four Seasons, because the lead singer sounds eerily like Frankie Valli. Regardless, I like this song and always have:

The Fortunes also had the distinction of recording a Coca-Cola jingle in 1969. Watching this, I suspect the lady had a little more than Coke in that glass ~ she's enjoying it a bit too much ~ but life was like that in the sixties; everybody knew, but nobody told.

It seems, sadly, that no one is left from the original Fortunes.

That doesn't mean smart music should be forgotten.

Restless Heart

I've been watching a Netflix documentary about Laurel Canyon and rock music of the nineteen sixties ~ please check it out ~ it's awesome.

All genres of music have lapped over the edges of others. What the documentary, Echo In The Canyon, labels "folk rock" I would call country rock. The Byrds would have been country had they come on the scene twenty years later. The Eagles aren't folk rock ~ they're country rock.

I'm a sucker for the many manifestations of country; Honky Tonk, Neo-Traditional, the Bakersfield Sound, Western Swing, Americana, some forms of Bluegrass. But I began life as a rock 'n roll child and remnants of a past life linger. While I love and appreciate what can be accomplished with three simple chords, I've always been drawn to more complex melodies and harmonics. Restless Heart wasn't exactly country rock, but they were close. The first track I ever heard from the group was this one, and it sucked me in:



I love "Wheels". There is no live performance video to be found, but this is country rock at its finest:


 

More:







Larry Stewart left the band in 1992, and Restless Heart essentially ended. Larry had one number one hit:



Bands don't last much more than a decade unless you're the Rolling Stones. But a decade is a long-ass time. A decade can be a seminal pillar in one's life.

I thank Larry Stewart and the band for one hell of a seminal pillar.

Clint Black

For a variety of reasons, barroom songs are the best songs. I grew up around bars, or what one might now call "tap rooms", with a juke box and a local band playing on weekend nights. The whiff of stale tobacco mixed with gin and bourbon smells like home. There's nothing like the morning after, when tables need to be cleared, to soak in that cloud of obliterated good times.

As a kid I only knew about the music and that people seemed to be having tons of fun. I could perch right outside the entrance of my uncle's bar, and later my dad's bar and take in the abandon displayed before me and the thumping of an electric bass and the crash of drums; even though I couldn't quite discern which song the band was playing. I didn't even think to make judgments about the masses inside ~ the sad men bumped up against the bar nursing a tall frosted glass or the wiry arms draped around hairspray-stiffened fake blondes in red booths in dark corners. Once a quarter got dropped into the juke box slot, men who had, after three whiskey sours, developed a certainty of their dancing prowess would coax the ladies into their arms and onto the dance floor, and they would two-step to Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" or Buck Owens' "Foolin' Around".

It was all exciting to me because it was different; foreign.

For reasons that all pointed back to my dad, I renounced bars for a couple of decades thereafter. The fun is fleeting; the repercussions are piercing daggers that stab for a lifetime. But sometime around 1987, I felt a craving to re-immerse myself in the fun times ~ experience the abandon as a fully-grown woman. There was a renowned country bar in my town called The Dakota Lounge that brought in all the best regional bands on weekends and had a scrolling neon sign inside that flashed all the upcoming acts. The club was dark, as all bars should be. Faux cowboys strolled in around eight o'clock, black hats perched atop their sideburned coiffes; shiny pointed boots inadvertently pinging against bar stools. The gals would saunter in as a clutch around nine; red kerchiefs circling their slender necks, a powder puff of Jovan Musk wafting off their breasts. The cowboys began to circle, scoping out the prettiest, and then the juke box would kick in as weary bar maids took drink orders.

Decades had passed since Ray Price had boomed out of a Wurlitzer's speakers, but the tableau was just the same. It requires a special vibe to commence the ritual; mystic, yet immediately agreed upon. The song is a toasty embrace with a pulsing heartbeat.

This was that song:



Had Clint Black never recorded another song, "A Better Man" would still be celebrated as the ultimate country hook-up song of the nineteen eighties.

But he did record more:



What Clint did was, he didn't forget country music:



And Clint was no flash in the pan. This track, from 1997, is as good as it can be:



Thanks to Saving Country Music, I found this wholly original video:





Ken Burns may have brushed Clint Black aside, but I won't.

Clay Walker

I had a friend and co-worker, Lynnette, who was in love with Clay Walker. I wasn't in love with him (shoot, I didn't even know him!) but I heard a song on my car radio in 1993 as I was pulling into a parking spot at West Acres Mall in Fargo (yea, memory is inexplicable) and I thought I knew the singer, but I actually didn't. (Remember the days when you'd hear a new song on the radio and you'd try to pinpoint the artist, and then it turned out it was someone brand-new? Clay Walker was brand-new.)

I stopped before I turned off the ignition and listened:



There was an exhilaration in his voice that was mesmerizing. I can understand why Lynnette loved him.

Clay's recordings were eternally optimistic and that was refreshing.







This one is a bit different, and I like it almost as much as I like "What's It To You":



Shall we date ourselves?



Clay Walker is still going strong, as evidenced by the news on his site.

I like that we don't just go away; that we keep going. That latest twenty-year-old can't erase us. I was older than Clay when I first him on my car radio and I'm still here.

I'm not impressionistic like Clay Walker was in his heyday, but I like to be reminded that brightness still exists.

I wonder if Clay is still that idealist.

I hope so.

Travis Tritt

The period from the late eighties to early nineties was so rife with exciting new music that I almost took it for granted. Like a spoiled child, I expected more and more. I'd heard "Country Club" on my local FM station ~ it had a good beat; you could two-step to it; but it didn't strike me the way a spanking-new George Strait single did. "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" was actually a better track than I gave it credit for at the time.

But it wasn't until 1991, when a new show on NBC called "Hot Country Nights" appeared out of nowhere as a summer replacement that I really sat up (on my couch) and took notice of Travis Tritt. He sat on a stool in center-stage with just his acoustic guitar, and this is the song he performed:



For a voice with so much soul, his performance was heartbreaking in its simplicity. Sometimes it's not the bells and whistles that grab you ~ sometimes it's the quiet. This sure wasn't "Country Club".

Then he did a complete turnabout and released this song, which is sort of the nineties' kiss-off answer to "Take This Job (And Shove It):



Soon Travis teamed up with Marty Stuart to record a duet that embodied the time-honored tradition of the bass-thumping country shuffle. And I loved it:



I will readily admit that my favorite Travis Tritt recording is a remake of an Elvis song that was awash in insipid artificiality, like most Elvis songs. THIS version, however, is extraordinary:



Like most artists of the period, Travis parted ways with his label, but never fear ~ he's still out there and making music. I learned, in fact, that he just did a concert with my latest obsession, Tracy Lawrence. I discovered this via Travis's website, which is an actual site and not a tiny-fonted slap-together page like poor Ricky Van Shelton's.

Travis Tritt is a musical chameleon. I can't pigeon-hole him, and I bet he likes not being tucked inside a neat package.

The last track that caught my ear, when I still listened to terrestrial radio, was one that sums up most of our philosophies as we glide through this big blue ball of ether:



And Ken Burns be damned ~ Travis Tritt represents everything about the nineties that Ken forgot.

Ricky Van Shelton

I think it was my older sister who first introduced me to Ricky Van Shelton. Carole was not necessarily a music aficionado; she just liked what she liked. She'd breeze in from Texas once a year and lay down the gauntlet of songs we all needed to hear. As an example, she was an early fan girl of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia", and I thought, well, okay...

Like all music people tell me I need to like, I was naturally resistant to Ricky Van Shelton. I think he had a cover song on the charts at the time, and I was inherently scornful of artists who earned their chops by copying someone else. Grudgingly, however, I went out and purchased Van Shelton's debut CD, "Wild-Eyed Dream". I was buying CD's like they were candy gumballs anyway, so what was one more pointless purchase? Turned out the album had some original tracks that beat the covers all to hell. A hot artist, I'm assuming (maybe naively) should have his pick of songs; so why Ricky recorded so many cover songs perplexes me. Maybe he simply wanted to memorialize the classics. Regardless, I preferred the songs I'd never before heard, like this one (of course the official video is unavailable ~ because we need to scrub the late eighties/early nineties from everyone's consciousness):





 Much like this one:




Those two tracks alone, never mind all the covers, made the album an A plus for me.

There's myriad reasons why shiny careers fade ~ the label loses confidence; tastes change. Not everyone can be a George Strait, with choice songwriters breaking down their door. Ricky Van Shelton's career suffered from either the lack of good original song choices or his own proclivities. I would have loved to see Ricky perform in a bar setting ~ his natural milieu was stacked speakers, a thumping bass, and a telecaster.

That aside, he recorded a great rendition of "Statue Of A Fool", whose original recording by Jack Greene suffered from the lack of a great singer:




My sister was right. I'll cop to it.

After all these years, he deserves more than a faint memory. Number one, he needs a website that isn't lame ~ Ricky, are you listening? I would link to it, but I don't want anyone to be embarrassed. Wix dot com is essentially free ~ even my band has a site.

Granted, Ricky retired in 2006, which is almost unheard of in the music business. Retire? The brittle-boned Rolling Stones are still touring, for God's sake! According to his pitiful website, he's a painter and a collector (still need a site to sell your paintings, though.) Maybe the good songs weren't forthcoming; maybe he just wanted to enjoy life off the road. More power to him.

Nevertheless, Ricky Van Shelton is worth remembering.