Dierks Bentley – Are you ready for the country?
“And I push the instrumental harmonies up louder than most people; that’s the bluegrass mentality. I want the instruments and musicians to be equal — not me and people ‘supporting’ me.”
Yet even with that instrumentation, and with banjo sometimes playing a key role in propelling the music, nobody’s going to confuse the electrified sounds on Modern Day Drifter with bluegrass.
“No,” Dierks clarifies, “you don’t hear, specifically, ‘bluegrass’ on the record. It’s part of the production, and the production mentality. I’m applying that to making a country record. A big part of the sound is my steel player, Gary Morris; there’s a real Bakersfield-Southern Cal aggressive tone to his playing, which you don’t always hear in town here, and which I think gives this record more edge and angst.”
Bentley has a lot of working-band friends on the Texas-Oklahoma honky-tonk scene, ranging from fairly well-known names such as Cross Canadian Ragweed to thus-far more regional acts including Wade Bowen, Stoney Larue, and the Randy Rogers Band. These are the artists with whom Bentley most identifies, more than many of the other rising mainstream acts of the last couple of years with whom he seemingly competes.
“Dudes down there that have heard ‘Got A Lot Of Leavin” [his new single] have been saying things like, ‘It’s got that Waylon sound on it, and the guitars are rammed up your ass, and there’s great Tele playing and that’s it; there’s not a lot of crap on there.’ And we had requests for tracks from the first CD from DJs who only play ‘Texas Music,’ too. So I knew that we’ve been doing something right, because they have a good gauge down there for what’s cool country-wise, and what’s sappy and pandering.”
But all of this talk about what sound he’s gotten — and his own descriptions are quite accurate — begs two questions.
First, to the degree these sonic ideas are similar to those being worked outside the major-label Music Row system, how is it that they’re able — or, as some would put it, are being allowed — to work inside that system?
Part of the answer, just as in the “Great Credibility Scare” of the mid-1980s that saw a generation of mavericks and neo-traditionalists signed to major labels, is timing.
“Yeah,” Bentley concurs. “Times got lean, and this town kind of had to branch out and take some chances and risks, and try some people who are doing their own thing. And I think that’s probably the reason that they are.”
But it took a long time for that timing to be right, and for Bentley to be ready when the moment came. Thus the second question: Who is this guy, anyway, who wanted to make these sorts of sounds and bring them to a massive audience?
It’s not a story that begins with particularly rural roots, romanticized or otherwise — and certainly not southern roots, for Bentley grew up in Phoenix. “And I did not grow up in a musical family,” he adds. “There is no church choir or family band story to tell. But my dad loved country music; we’d drive to school and he’d have Strait on.” (That’s the same Texas honky-tonkin’ George Strait for whom Bentley has opened dozens of arena shows in the past year and a half.)
“When I was 13, I discovered the electric guitar, distortion pedals and Marshall amps. At that age, you want to play power chords, and Van Halen, and Whitesnake — and there was all that terrible ’80s hair-band music. So years of possible musical integrity were wasted listening to that stuff! But that’s what you listen to.”
He played with some schoolmates in a garage band that never got out of the garage. Then one friend introduced him to the records of Hank Williams Jr. “And I thought, ‘Holy Crap!’ That’s played with such ego, and it’s so loud, it’s great. It’s rock music, but it’s also country. Hank Jr.’s a bridge; he takes people from that world and brings them into this one. All of the little pieces of what sounded good to me in singing and songwriting just clicked; this was, I thought, where my voice fits. The big sound, the voice — that was it. Like a lightning bolt.”
And so as he turned 19, with no performance experience to speak of, Bentley simply headed for Nashville, to get into country music somehow or other, to be a country singer someday.
“I spent three years just going downtown to Tootsie’s and Roberts, absorbing and watching,” he recalls. “I couldn’t have told you what I was doing. I’d written a bunch of crappy songs that I could play and sing at the same time, but I had a long way to go. I sucked!”
When the pointlessness of day jobs such a cleaning golf balls became obvious, he began to focus on ones that would get him closer to the music and the music business, to see how it worked. One of those was a research and production assistant job at the old cable Nashville Network.