by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was a special
sponsored by the Academy of Country Music featuring Tim McGraw in an all-star
presentation also including Faith Hill (Mrs. Tim McGraw to you), Taylor Swift
(whom I’m liking better the more I hear of her — not coincidentally this show
had been immediately preceded by a 60 Minutes segment run on her), Keith Urban, Jason Aldean,
(at least I think that’s his name), Lady
Antebellum, a band called Florida Georgia Line, rappers Nelly (and given the
way he was dressed that wasn’t at all an inappropriate pseudonym!) and Pitbull
(who I think is Latino, if only because he doesn’t look Black and his rap
included a few bits of Spanish), Ne-Yo (a haunting-voiced Black singer —
judging from his ethnicity and his stage name I’d assumed he’d be another
rapper, but instead he sang, and while the timbre of his voice is a bit on the whiny side he sang
quite well), someone identified only as Newell, and Brantley Gilbert (whose
song, “Country Must Be Countrywide,” was actually one of the best things in the
program, the only one that lyrically mentioned the country greats of yesteryear:
Hank, Johnny, Willie and Waylon — do you really need their last names?). The finale featured John
Fogerty leading the rest of the singers in a joint version of “Born on the
Bayou,” and that was yet another example of a 1960’s veteran coming on with
such power and authority he made the rest of the cast members seem like
amateurs by comparison. The big problem with this show is that most of the
music sounded pretty much alike — the so-called “country” sound of today is
actually what in the 1970’s was called “Southern rock,” and McGraw and his
(male) guests owed a lot more to Lynyrd Skynyrd than they did to Hank Williams
or Johnny Cash — aside from a possible pedal steel guitar in Gilbert’s song, very low in the mix, there was no evidence of this
once-paradigmatic country instrument, nor were there any violins, either
bluegrass fiddles or the big string sections that backed the country-pop
artists of the 1950’s like Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. Instead the songs were all
driven by power chords and basic rock rhythms; as Charles joked, “Lose the hats
and they’re just another band.”
Not that the show was entirely unentertaining;
the sight of all those hot, slender young men in skin-tight jeans had a certain
aesthetic appeal (I remember buying at least one recent country CD at Auntie
Helen’s thrift store simply because I thought the guy on the cover was hot!)
and within the limits of the genre some of the songs were pretty good — though the editing of the show
obviously assumed that anyone watching it would know who these people were and
what songs they were singing already, so they didn’t trouble to identify them.
Another problem with the show was the strong XY-centricity of the guest list:
the only women on the program were Taylor Swift, Faith Hill and the female
members of Lady Antebellum and The Band Perry — an oddly named group because
they’re composed entirely of a family named Perry, with Kimberly Perry as their
lead singer and her brothers Reid and Neil playing bass and drums,
respectively. As things turned out, Kimberly Perry was by far the strongest
singer on the program (next to John Fogerty, and one expects that kind of authority from him!); singing the Band Perry’s latest single, “Done” —
a typical goodbye-and-good-riddance song addressed to a former relationship
partner — she turned out to have a great voice, powerful, bitterly emotional, encompassing both the anger and
the sympathy one would want from a breakup song. Taylor Swift sang exquisitely
on the song “Half the Way Home,” which she recorded as a duet with McGraw and
was performed that way last night (with Keith Urban supplying a quite good
guitar solo), but she didn’t get a solo number. Lady Antebellum’s female
singer, Hillary Scott, wasn’t showcased because they chose to perform a song, “Nothing but a Goodbye
Town,” on which their male singer, Charles Kelley, sang lead (and he’s a good
pop-country singer but their strongest records have been the ones that featured
her).
As for Faith Hill, her husband did her no favors by introducing her as a
combination of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and Brigitte Bardot, and while the
all-in-one black leather suit she wore on stage emphasized her sexiness (for
all the welcome beefcake on this show, Faith Hill’s was about the only segment
of this show that would have made a straight guy cream!), her song choice was spectacularly
ill-advised: “Piece of My Heart,” a piece with not only Joplin but also
Franklin connections (the first record of it, in 1967, was made by Erma
Franklin, Aretha’s sister). The result sucked: Faith Hill has a spectacular
voice but this was not the kind
of song she should have gone near; Janis Joplin’s voice may have been more
ragged and less conventionally “beautiful,” but it not only gave this song its
wrenching power but Joplin was even more technically secure on it: time and
again Faith Hill had to rewrite the melody to duck the killer high notes Joplin
nailed on her version. (Then again, if she were still alive Joplin would
probably have to rewrite the song similarly, the way Stevie Nicks can no longer
sing “Rhiannon” the way she wrote it originally because she doesn’t have those high notes anymore.) It wasn’t
always easy to tell the various tall, skinny men in tight jeans apart from each
other, particularly since they all had pretty similar voices and approaches to
music, and aside from the songs by the Band Perry (why didn’t they just call
themselves “The Perry Family” à la The Carter Family?) and Brantley Gilbert, there wasn’t anything on the
program that would make me want to run out and buy their CD (of course today
all the “running” you do to buy music is to wherever your computer is to order
it online, now that the brick-and-mortar record store has gone the way of the
brick-and-mortar bookstore!).
