by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our main “feature” last night was the Academy of Country
Music (ACM) Awards, the rump country-music “awards” show created by the late
Dick Clark (and still owned by his production company — the person is dead but
the corporate “person” lives on!) and headquartered in Las Vegas, whereas the
“real” country-music awards, the County Music Association (CMA) awards, are in
country’s home town, Nashville, Tennessee. (There was a nice joke from host
Reba McIntire that noted that no fewer than three of the nominees are about to
have children — Chris Stapleton, last night’s big winner and the fat, homely schlub who keeps beating all the cute guys in tight jeans —
I’ve called him the Bruce Vilanch of country music — wasn’t there because his
wife was about to give birth to twins — McIntire noted that three of the
nominees were about to have kids and said, “What happens in Vegas comes out in
Nashville nine months later.”) Hosting a major country-music event in Las Vegas
right now, just a few days past the six-month anniversary of a mass shooting at
a country-music festival there, was a dodgy enterprise to say the least, and
curiously the producers of the ACM’s decided, instead of beginning the evening
with a suitably “inspirational” song commemorating the event, to have the
various stars (or about five of them) just give speeches at the start. The
actual first song — Kenny Chesney’s “Can’t We All Get Along?” — referenced the
massacre only obliquely. It was a nice song, and Chesney did it tastefully even
though he’s visibly getting a little too long in the tooth for the torn T-shirt
and tight jeans bit, but one might have hoped for something a little more, uh, appropriate for the opener.
Then Maren Morris, one of my
favorite modern singer and who was nominated for two duet records in the preposterously titled category
“Best Vocal Event” (which seems to be for duets between people who don’t ordinarily sing together — I’d been hoping it would
be won by Willie Nelson and the late Glen Campbell, but it wasn’t), came out
with a song called “Rich” that seemed awfully similar to Lorde’s star-making
hit “Royals” — it’s hardly a patch on her marvelous “My Church,” the song I
heard her do on a previous ACM and which made me an instant fan, but it’s still
good and showcases those amazing white-soul pipes of hers. (She’d be my current
favorite to do a biopic of Janis Joplin, though Carrie Underwood — of all
people — seemed to be trying to outdo her in the Joplin-redux department: more on that later.) Next up was a song
called “We’re Not Losing Sleep” by a heavy-set guy named Chris Young, and it
was workmanlike and professional — terms that cover my reaction to a lot of the music performed on this show — as were the
next two songs on the program, “Meant to Be” by Bebe Ruska with Florida Georgia
Line (which seemed to be called “Meant to Be” only because the song’s actual
catch line, “Let it be,” already got used as a title by someone else) and Brett
Young doing a nicely diffident country love song called “In Case You Didn’t
Know.” Charles was irritated at how little all this music sounded like what he thinks of as country — and I can see his point; most
modern-day “country” has its roots in the sound we who lived through the 1970’s
called “Southern rock,” owing more to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd
than to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and Charles joked, “How would you feel
if you turned on a jazz show and all it was was rock with a few bits for
saxophones?” (Actually there is quite a lot of that sort of thing out there; it
emerged in the 1970’s as “fusion music” and now is called “smooth jazz.”)
The
show periodically broke from the present to celebrate its history —
specifically 1993, 25 years ago — and one of the songs from a quarter-century
ago they hauled out and refurbished was a piece called “Chattahoochee” (don’t
hold me to that spelling!), done as a duet between the original artist, Alan
Jackson (no longer a hot male apparition in tight blue jeans but still a quite
good-looking man), and current artist John Pardi. Not only did “Chattahoochee” sound like a traditional country song, powered by pedal
steel guitar and fiddle, Jackson and Pardi even dressed like old-school country
artists, with those hilariously campy Nudie Cohen clothes and, in Pardi’s case,
a guitar strap with his last name embossed on it in leather. Then Lady
Antebellum came out and blessedly did a song on which their woman, Hillary
Scott, sang lead; it was called “Heart Break” — two words — and was quite
lovely (and as politically incorrect as their name is — when they first emerged
I joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?” — I like them, especially when Scott sings lead and the two men, Charles
Kelley and Dave Haywood, just sing backup). Next was Dierks Bentley doing a
peculiar song called “Woman Amen” which uses all the Black gospel chords to
proclaim his worship of the female gender and the various members of it that
have been significant in his life. Afterwards came Blake Shelton, whom I
usually don’t like (for reasons not the least of which is because this homely,
mediocre talent somehow has got two great woman singer-songwriters of far more charisma and appeal to fall in
love with him — first Miranda Lambert and now Gwen Stefani), but who did a
quite good song called “I Lived It,” saying basically that he at least formerly
lived the scapegrace life he’s described in his songs. Then there were a couple
of duets, one called “What If?” by Lee Brown and Loren Alaima and one called
“Coming Home” by Keith Urban and Julia Michaels — and two solo spots for Kelsea
Ballerini (a quite clever piece of material called “I Hate Love Songs”— the
conceit is that she may hate love songs but she loves the person she’s singing
the song to — for which she was lowered to the stage, Pink-style, in a giant heart)
and Jason Aldean (a more generic love song called “You Make It Easy”).
Then
came one of the high points of the evening, Miranda Lambert doing “Keeper of
the Flame,” apparently one of the songs from the In the Wee Small
Hours-style breakup album she did after she
and Shelton parted ways (and I noticed the diplomacy of the people behind the
ACM Awards to book their appearances about an hour apart), after which Little
Big Town did the same cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” we’d previously heard
them do on the Elton John tribute special I’m Still Standing. “It’s O.K. but it doesn’t really add anything,” said
Charles, and I entirely agreed (even though it’s nice to have lyricist Bernie
Taupin on record as saying the song was inspired by a Ray Bradbury short story
called “The Rocket Man” and meant exactly what the lyrics say, and was not a veiled reference to drugs). Then came another of
the 1993 tributes, Toby Keith (who headlined at President Trump’s inaugural
gala after most bigger stars turned the gig down) and Blake Shelton duetting on
“Should Have Been a Cowboy.” (As I once remember pointing out to a roommate,
the job “cowboy” still exists — it’s someone who’s responsible for keeping
cattle in line on cattle drives — and the only real difference between modern-day
cowboys and the ones of Western legend is that instead of riding horses, the
modern ones drive trucks.) After that came a vocal group called Midland doing
their hit song “Drinking Problem,” which was O.K. but too close to the sort of
country song people who don’t like country music make fun of. (I once told
Charles the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song backwards?
You get your job back, your car back, your house back, your wife back, and you
sober up” — to which Charles replied, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog come
back to life.”) Then came a sensational soul performance by Carrie Underwood,
belting out a song called “Cry Pretty” that had precious little to do with
country music — it was pretty obviously modeled on Garnet Mimms’ hit “Cry
Baby,” especially as covered (and transformed) by Janis Joplin on her third
album, Kozmik Blues — but was
electrifying, especially when Underwood started doing Janis-like moves with her
voice. Like Miley Cyrus’s “The Bitch Is Back” on the Elton John special,
Underwood’s was a powerful piece of soul singing from a singer I didn’t realize
had it in her.
Then it was pretty much downhill: vocal duo Dan and Shea did a
song called “Tequila” that was basically country-lite, without the boozy appeal
of the Champs’ old instrumental of the same title; Darius Rucker, who’s sort of
the Florence Foster Jenkins of modern-day pop (dorkily incompetent but charming
in his ineptitude) did a song called “The First Time,” Thomas Rhett in quite a
nice reworking of the the-partner-I-want-is-marrying-someone-else trope called
“Marry Me” (as in “she wants to get married, but she won’t marry me,”
illustrated with clips from the video for it, which show the guy she is marrying), Luke Bryan with “Most People Are Good”
(which had the interesting sentiment for a country song that you should “love
whom you want and not feel ashamed” — even the country audience has moved
forward on our issues; I can remember how Garth Brooks got raked over the coals
for a similar sentiment nearly a quarter-century ago in “We Shall Be Free” —
“when we’re free to love anyone we choose”), Lauren Alaina doing a nice feature
called “Doin’ Fine,” a third 1993 revival featuring Reba McIntire duetting with
Kelly Clarkson on Reba’s “Does He Love You?” (which might have worked better if
they’d rewritten the song so Reba sang the part of the jilted lover and
Clarkson the part of the girl he jilted her for), and a finale (most of it
heard over the credits) with Chris Jensen doing a song called “Redneck Life”
that almost qualified as country-punk: its gravamen is, “I didn’t choose a
redneck life/Redneck life chose me,” though Jensen looks considerably less like
a redneck than a cross between a beatnik and a punk, dressed in casual
all-black clothes, with tousled hair and a fiercely protective mien. I couldn’t
help but think that if he’d been born and raised in Britain, Jensen would be
singing nasty songs about the Queen!
