CMT Blog: The Eagles

Kenny Chesney turns 40 today.

Sometime in the next decade, he may reach that midlife point where he’s not sure why he’s doing what he’s doing anymore and need to rethink it all. That’s what people do in their 40s. And he’ll likely end up doing exactly what he’s doing now, maybe just for different reasons, because that’s something else people do in their 40s.

What’s particularly predictable for Chesney is that his crisis will revolve around home and nesting. His songs, when they’re not party-themed, are inevitably about domestic partnerships — “Don’t Blink,” “You Had Me From Hello,” “Me and You,” “The Woman With You,” “There Goes My Life,” “The Good Stuff” — but Chesney’s never gotten the good stuff he keeps singing about. There was an engagement in the 1990s that went sour before they tied the knot and the much-publicized marriage to Renee Zellweger that ended in an annulment.

The Eagles‘ song “Lyin’ Eyes” contains that familiar line, “Late at night a big old house gets lonely,” and at some point, Chesney is going to wake up and feel like all the work he’s done at building his career — and he’s done a huge amount of it — is just a bit hollow because there’s no one to share it. Or he might discover that the fans and the musical camaraderie are enough, and then immerse himself even more in the music. Producing a Willie Nelson album and inventing his new Big Star Contest to discover new talent suggest that might be a route. One way or another, he’s likely to go through some sort of transition, because that’s what people do in their 40s. Even multi-platinum people.

Happy birthday, Kenny. And hang in there. It’ll be even better when the transition ends.

Sure, some people will look at just-announced nominations for the 2008 CMT Music Awards and insist that the future of country music — and maybe Western civilization — is coming to an end because the list includes Robert Plant, Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis and The Eagles.

Those first three may be relative newcomers to the wide world of country music, but the Eagles have exhibited a strong country influence throughout their career. Think back to their first charted single — 1972’s “Take It Easy.” It never made it to the country chart, but it sure contained more banjo that most of the No. 1 country singles that year, including Jerry Lee Lewis‘ “Chantilly Lace,” Ray Price’s “She’s Got to Be a Saint” and Donna Fargo’s “Funny Face” and “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.”

The Eagles made the CMT nominations list for “How Long,” a song that reached No. 23 on Billboard’s country singles chart. Another nominee — Bon Jovi’s “(You Want To) Make a Memory” — didn’t do quite as well at radio, but it also received substantial airplay. Bon Jovi also picked up another nomination for “Till We Ain’t Strangers Anymore,” a song and video with LeAnn Rimes.

And then there’s Huey Lewis, who’s nominated simply because Garth Brooks recorded one of his songs, “Workin’ for a Livin’,” and later invited him to appear in the video. And what about Robert Plant? The Led Zeppelin vocalist is nominated for his video with Alison Krauss, “Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On).”

Substantial promotional effort was involved in marketing the Eagles and Bon Jovi to the country audience, but that’s simply part of the music industry machinery. I can’t imagine that either group sat down and said, “Let’s see what we can do to pander to the country audience.” I’m not a huge fan of either band, but both acts have too much artistic integrity — and money — to resort to that. While it’s impossible to predict what Robert Plant will do in the future, he still seems to be guided by a true artistic muse. He may do another acoustic-oriented album, such as the one he recorded with Krauss, or maybe he’ll do something else. Rest assured, he’s not trying to take over country music.

I might suggest that these occasional rock elements help widen the scope of country music without posing any serious danger to the genre’s future. The real danger, I think, has more to do with record labels signing too many generic-sounding mainstream artists who are devoid of any genuine artistic vision. That’s a trend that should scare the hell out of any true country fan.

Events are underway in Los Angeles as the Recording Academy prepares for the 50th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday (Feb. 10). A Grammy is one of the ultimate achievements in music, though if you listened to rhetoric in Nashville, most years someone writes it off as a lame exercise.Country artists have voiced opposition to the Grammys — saying they don’t present enough country awards or country performances on television — for years. Tanya Tucker made such a claim in the early ‘90s, Toby Keith did it this decade, and practically all of Music Row got mad at the Academy last year when the only country artists on the show, Rascal Flatts and Carrie Underwood, were featured in a tribute to the Eagles and Bob Wills. They performed none of their own material.

The anger demonstrates pride in the genre, a good thing. It also shows a certain provincialism, not such a good thing, though realistically Music City fights a huge L.A. provincialism that’s built into the process. The anger is also fueled by dollars, which is just a fact of life.

While viewers watch awards shows for entertainment, the industry gets behind them as a promotional tool. If your artist wins a Grammy or a CMA Award, it can mean more press, more sales and higher concert prices. If an artist performs, it can particularly fuel a spike in sales.

So country executives want all the slots they can get. But so do the classical, jazz, Christian and gospel folks. Somebody is always unhappy with the process.

Increasing the antagonism, the Grammys don’t line up with the other country awards shows. More than any other genre, country relies on radio to reach its audience, and the CMA and ACM award shows reflect that very much. Most years, the Grammys throw non-radio hits into the nominations mix, giving space to artists whose current work doesn’t get much radio play — this year, that includes Willie Nelson, Ray Price, Vince Gill and the Time Jumpers — and sometimes giving actual trophies to people without country radio hits, such as the Dixie Chicks last year, Alison Krauss & Union Station in 2006 and Loretta Lynn the year before.

I personally find it refreshing, but I probably come from a naïve place. I’m very aware of the bottom line, but I still care most about the quality of the product, which is what every awards show — not just the Grammys — should reflect.

The biggest tour in the world is coming to Nashville. The dinosaurs are on their way. And I don’t mean The Eagles. I mean Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience. Just after Bob Dylan/Elvis Costello at the Ryman, this is the show I have most looked forward to.

This is truly an epic-size tour. Fifteen life-size walking and bellowing animatronic dinosaurs will stalk through Nashville’s Sommet Center. The biggest of them is the 50-foot-tall Brachiosaurus. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is 45 feet long. The tour uses 27 tractor-trailer trucks and employs a crew of 68 people. The tour began in January in Sydney, played Australian dates through March and then began in North America.

This came about from the 1999 BBC-TV series, Walking with Dinosaurs, which was itself groundbreaking and watched by millions of people. Those dinosaurs were computer-generated, a process which was enormously expensive and complicated.

An Australian company decided to try building realistic, life-size dinosaurs and taking them on the road for an arena tour. The life-size creatures were built and “dinosaur drivers” learned how to operate them. Consider the cost. The movie Jurassic Park had about nine minutes of dinosaurs in it. The tour production of Walking with Dinosaurs runs around three hours. It’ll be in Nashville Oct. 17-21. The big screen videos I’ve seen of it and the accounts I’ve heard from friends who have seen this show tell me it’s well worth seeing. The script traces dinosaur development throughout the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods of the Mesozoic Era. And there’s one epic dinosaur battle.

I’ll tell you what. This is really about getting back to the roots.

One of the coolest records to come across my desk this year is Suzy Bogguss’ Sweet Danger. All you country fans from the 1990s will remember her crystal-clear soprano from “Letting Go,” “Aces,” “Someday Soon” and several other hits. She knows she’s been out of touch lately but, like a lot of us, she checks her MySpace page every day.

“Just from getting on there half an hour a day, I feel like I have found so many old fans that I have lost touch with, because I didn’t have the big machine behind me anymore,” she told me over the phone. “That’s been incredibly valuable for me. Having started out by sitting down and writing 200 postcards, saying ‘Hey, I’m going to be back in Montana,’ this is a breeze. You blog one little paragraph and everybody knows what the heck is going on. I think it’s really groovy.”

It just so happened that while I was in Boston last month on vacation, she was playing at Club Passim in Cambridge. I was so impressed at her range of material that night, as she sang George Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” The Eagles’ “Take It to the Limit,” Merle Haggard’s “Somewhere Between” and Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,” to name a few. And of course, Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” one of her early signatures.

I remarked, during our phone interview, that she came on the country scene when all eyes were on country music. “That was good timing for somebody who had the background and the influences that I have,” she replied. “Being a person with a rather eclectic taste, at that point in time, was a good thing.”

Back then, women were making the most memorable country records, in my opinion – Faith Hill, Pam Tillis, Lorrie Morgan, Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, Wynonna and Mary Chapin Carpenter all come to mind. I remember marching out to “Letting Go” at my high school graduation in 1993 — and then doing a little dance that I was finally out of there once the procession moved into the hallway.

If you ever spend the morning looking up old classmates on MySpace, check out Suzy Bogguss on there too. She’ll add you, I bet.

The old Eagles are back. And sounding as good as ever. A friend played this for me as a blindfold test without telling me who it was. Not five seconds into it I knew it was Glenn Frey kicking off a new Eagles song. Then came Don Henley’s sandpapery second lead vocal and the gorgeous harmonies from Timothy B. Schmidt and Joe Walsh. The guys have found their magic code again. “How Long” is a perfect summer, car song, with great radio guitar licks and a steady groove. The amazing thing is that — while it sounds new — the song “How Long” is actually 35 years old. J.D. Souther wrote and recorded it on his debut album, John David Souther, in 1972. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Their first new studio album in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden, is due later this year. It will be available at retail only through Wal-Mart. A good move for the Eagles? I guess you will decide that. Check out the video.