BR549 – Back to Broadway
“Gary would be the first to tell you that Chris is an outstanding guitar player and singer,” Mead says. “He’s nothing like Gary, so there’s really no reason to compare them other than Chris is now doing what Gary used to do, and that is sing and play guitar. But they’re so different.”
Though two other letter-writers defended the band and Scruggs in the following issue, the initial letter still presses a sore spot in all of them. “The guy just tore Chris a new asshole,” Wilson says. “Sure, Chris had big shoes to fill, and he’s done great. He’s an amazing musician. But this letter bothered Chris so much that he investigated this guy and found out where he lived. I mean, he got his address and everything. So the next time we’re going through Illinois, I jokingly asked Chris if he wanted to go by the guy’s house. Chris looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He was serious! Of course we didn’t do it, and Chris is over it now, but we still laugh about it.”
The incident serves as a reminder that BR549 stokes a passionate response from both believers and nonbelievers. From the days of sold-out shows at Robert’s to packed clubs on the road, BR549 fans tend to be wildly devoted. Partly it’s the wise-guy fun that Mead and his partners-in-crime bring to their modern take on traditional honky-tonk. Partly it’s just that people who love this style of music fear that it’s perpetually on the brink of extinction, since country radio and Music Row ignore it. Dale Watson, the Derailers, Wayne Hancock and others attract the same kind of cultish devotion.
But BR549, more than the others, evokes a level of passionate hatred as well. Like k.d. lang in her angel-with-a-lariat days, or to a lesser degree Dwight Yoakam in his guitars-and-cadillacs phase, BR549 draws criticism from those who perceive them as dressed-up posers or as insincere hillbilly caricatures rather than the real thing (whatever that is).
“We’ve always been misunderstood,” Mead says. “Some people were downright insulting about it. They thought we were sending it up. There were those who called us a costume band. We were called Sha Na Nashville by some wise-guy. Well, all bands have costumes. If you come onstage in a T-shirt, it’s a costume. They’re wearing it for a reason. When we started playing Robert’s, there wasn’t anybody in the bar. We were trying to attract some attention.”
Then there was the other side of the criticism: Some folks in the commercial mainstream of country music viewed BR549 and their ilk as “retro.” “When you break it down, what we play is country music,” Mead says. “That’s all you can call it. That’s what it’s always been called; it was hillbilly music or country music, and that’s what we do. We used to engage in that argument about what’s country and what’s not, but it’s useless. Still, there were people in country radio who called our music ‘retro’ and used that as an excuse not to play us.”
Mead has always disagreed with that concept. “We’ve always done our own songs,” he says. “From the first time Gary and I were onstage together, we sang songs I wrote and that he wrote. They were modern songs set to a hillbilly country beat. But when you’re playing five hours a night all week, it’s kind of hard to play all-original material, unless you’re Bob Dylan. So we added songs we both knew. For us, that happened to be Hank Williams and Johnny Horton and Faron Young and Webb Pierce. That’s where our tastes and influences came together. We both knew old hillbilly and country music, and we both loved playing it. So we put that in the set, and people loved it.”
Of course, playing for tips meant that fans could make requests, and the fans requested songs they knew: “Crazy Arms”, “Honky Tonk Blues”, “Cherokee Boogie”. As the band’s reputation grew, fans would put a dollar in the jar and ask for such solid originals as “Even If I’m Wrong”, “Lifetime To Prove” and “One Long Saturday Night”.
Of course, seeing as how these were midnight shows in front of rowdy beer-drinkers, the requests also tended to favor novelty songs, and BR549 obliged them with such originals as “Eighteen Wheels And A Crowbar”, “Little Ramona (Gone Hillbilly Nuts)” and “Me ‘n’ Opie (Down By The Duck Pond)”. That’s a song about a violent trucker, about a punk-rock gal who goes crazy for traditional country, and about a guy getting high with the red-headed son of Andy Griffith. Each were mainstays of the band’s set, and each time the songs were played, the dance floor filled, feet stomped and people went hillbilly nuts.
Musical humor was always a part of the show and a big part of the draw. But so were dead-on versions of plaintive harmony songs such as “Knoxville Girl” and “Hickory Wind”, which would still the throngs, at least momentarily. All these traits — the mix of reverence and irreverence — appealed to fans old and young, liberal and conservative, rich and poor. But those same traits, especially the covers and the novelty tunes, got the band stereotyped as lightweight, at least among some critics.
Mead has also never apologized for being an entertainer. “Bob Dylan said it best: ‘People come to be entertained, not to be whipped. And if they come to be whipped, then aren’t they being entertained?'” Mead recounts.
“I mean, we have a point of view that we want to get across, just like any other songwriters. But we don’t want to bang people over the head with a lot of pitiful songs. I’m just not into that. ‘Here’s a song I wrote when I was going through a really hard time. So listen a little more closely, because this is important, this is serious.’ Fuck that. If you can’t move their asses, how are you going to move anything else? That was always the way we approached it.”
On Tangled In The Pines, the band fine-tunes their approach. Not only does the new disc show the influence of Scruggs and Firebaugh, who bring rougher rockabilly oomph to the mix, it also finds Mead and his colleagues honing a sound that moves away from covers and novelties into songs where the humor is more subtle.
Tracks such as “That’s What I Get” and “The Shape I’m In” rely on a sly, self-deprecating humor that runs through several of the best BR549 songs, and these two rank among them. But there’s a tightness in all the songs, a wound-up and relentless focus that doesn’t let up.