by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s CBS telecast of the 50th anniversary
American Country Music Awards was the typically lumbering sort of show
so-called “awards” programs have turned into. Aside from the Oscars, virtually
all “awards” shows these days are far more about featured performers than
actual awardees — and what seemed strangest about the ACM’s (as they were
referred to for short throughout the program) is how the awards seem to go to
the same people over and over again, to the point where the winners of the
so-called “Milestone Awards” (the ACM’s equivalent of the Academy’s “Lifetime
Achievement Awards”) seem to have chosen for the honor because they’d won so
many previous ACM’s. The other main message I got from the ACM’s is just a
reaffirmation of how what’s called “country music” today is really the sort of
sound associated with what in the 1970’s was called “Southern rock” — the music
of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. During all of last night’s program,
only two artists, George Strait and Garth Brooks, used steel guitars and solo
violins — these once-paradigmatic country instruments have been relegated to
history and most of the songs last night were powered by heavily fuzz-toned
electric guitars played by people who’ve learned shredding and most of the other
rock tricks. There was also a tight incestuousness about the awards; the
Entertainer of the Year (voted by fans via call-ins — at least if you live on
the East Coast; as usual they were showing us the program on time-delay three
hours later, after all the call-in votes had been received and tallied) was
Luke Bryan, who was co-hosting the show; and the biggest winner all night was
Miranda Lambert, whose husband Blake Shelton was the other host.
I like Miranda
Lambert but her determined perkiness is getting to be too much to take; with
her halter tops, heavy lipstick and pursuit of a car-hop’s version of female
sexiness, and with songs like “Little Red Wagon” (a nice novelty but hardly a
patch on the old blues song of the same title) she seems to be going after the
title of “the country Madonna” at a time when even Madonna herself has grown
beyond this act. The show began with Eric Clark and Keith Urban doing a tribute
to Merle Haggard featuring a medley of Haggard songs I didn’t recognize (no
“Working Man’s Blues,” no “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” not even “Okie from
Muskogee,” which is not only Haggard’s biggest hit of all time but, despite its
rancid politics, the greatest song he ever wrote) because Haggard had won Best
New Artist the very first year the ACM’s
were given, 1967 (with Glen Campbell, not surprisingly, getting voted the
Entertainer of the Year). Next up was George Strait, one of the few people out
there who looked like an
old-style country singer, with his basic black outfit embroidered with
traditional Nudie Cohen adornments, singing a medley of “All My Exes Live in
Texas” (our friend Garry remembered the original record better than I did and
said Strait actually sang it faster
than he did when he made the original) and “Let It Go” (a considerably better,
though less well-known, song), and as I noted above his embrace of the pedal
steel guitar and the fiddle-style solo violin gave his song an authentic
“country” feel missing from most of the material last night — however good it
sounded as Southern rock.
The next song was “Sipped on Fire” by the group
Florida Georgia Line (and Garry, a Southerner by birth, said there really is a very evocative difference in the scenery and the
overall “feel” of the landscape when you cross the border between Georgia and
Florida, after which this band named itself), a decent enough song for which
they ramped up the pyrotechnics: they literally sang the song in the middle of a ring of fire on
stage, and goodness knows how they coped with the heat and the lack of oxygen.
(The concert took place in Dallas, Texas, in the giant football stadium where
the Cowboys, “America’s Team,” plays.) After that Lee Brice warbled a bit of the 1985 hit “Forever and
Ever” to launch a tribute to its composer, Randy Travis, and then one of the
Best New Artist nominees, Sam Hunt, took the stage for “Take Your Time” — it
wasn’t much of a song but Hunt, rail-thin, slightly built and drop-dead
gorgeous in tightly fitted red jeans, was the hottest guy on all night
(formerly moisture-inducing jeans-clad guys like Brad Paisley and Kenny Chesney
are getting a bit, shall we say, long in the tooth to elicit that reaction),
and just to make sure we got the message he walked around the runway at the
circumference of the theatre-in-the-round stage and shook the hands of all the
… women, darnit. Hunt only got to
do about half of his song — that was the procedure for all the Best New Artist nominees: they got truncated
versions of their hits and were immediately ushered offstage so the stage could
be taken over by an established artist, in Hunt’s case Dierks Bentley for
“Riser,” the title track of his latest release and an O.K. song. After that came one of the high points of the evening: an
awesomely soulful performance by Martina McBride on her song “Independence Day”
during which I pointed out to Garry that it was fun to look at the men but the
greatest music on the show by far was being made by female artists — including
Kim Perry of The Band Perry, who weren’t on the program but a snippet of whose incredibly
soulful and powerful voice was heard during a sample of a song announcing their
nomination for Best Vocal Group (which they lost to Little Big Town, though I
can’t get too upset over that if
only because they performed a song called “I’ve Got a Girl Crush,” and there
was their female lead singer glorying over her romantic, sexual or
“questioning” feelings towards another woman — no, this certainly isn’t your
mother’s country music anymore!!!).
After that things came back down to earth,
more or less, with co-host Luke Bryan’s “I See You,” and then came Miranda
Lambert doing her country-pixie act with a medley of “Mama’s Broken Heart” and
“Little Red Wagon.” Then came Jason Aldean with another medley (it seemed like
the Milestone winners were not going to be allowed to be content with
performing just one song!) of “Tonight Let’s Go,” “My Kind of Lonely in a Big
Town” and “She’s Country” — I’m guessing at these titles because, though some
of the names of the songs were announced in front, most weren’t — and after that came the biggest surprise of the night: Reba
McIntire, long since descended from the empyrean heights of her career but
singing with a surprising degree of passion and soul. The songs were oldies
from her career peak — “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” “Fancy” and
“Goin’ Out Like That” — but she sang with such incredible commitment and power
she obviously still cared about
the material and wasn’t thinking, like some other artists of her vintage do
when confronted with their old songs, “Oh, shit — I have to sing that again?” After that the “Little Girl Crush” song by Little Big Town
seemed woefully anticlimactic, and after the “Girl Crush” song Cole Swindell’s
(the Best New Artist winner) “You Ain’t Worth the Whiskey” — a breakup song in
which the person he’s breaking up with isn’t even worth getting drunk over! —
seemed even more offensively sexist than it might have in a different context.
Next came another Best New Artist nominee, Thomas Recht (I’m guessing at the
name, too), with a song called “Make Me Wanna,” and after that Blake Shelton
sang a song called “Your Lips Taste Like Sangria” which was as silly as you’d
expect from the title. (No wonder he lost in his category and Mr. and Mrs.
Shelton did not get to take home
his ’n’ hers ACM’s. I couldn’t help recall how Kenneth Branagh and Emma
Thompson broke up over his jealousy that she won an Academy Award before he did
— though somehow it didn’t faze Paul Newman that Joanne Woodward won an Oscar
28 years before he did, though Newman’s debut Academy win was for one of the
worst films he ever made, The Color of Money, even more disappointing because it was a sequel to
one of the best films Newman ever
made, The Hustler.)
The run of
good but not great songs continued with one of those Grammy-style matchups (or
mashups), Christina Aguilera (yeah, one of the all-time greats of country
music) teaming up with the group Rascal Flatts for yet another medley, this one
joining two songs that appeared to be called “Hard Road Ahead” and “Riot,” and
after that there was one of the
most ballyhooed parts of the show, a new appearance by one of country music’s
most famous recluses, Garth Brooks — who’s about to embark on a new concert
tour with Trisha Yearwood as his opening act. (Since she’s Mrs. Garth Brooks,
that’s not exactly the world’s biggest surprise.) Brooks’ selection was
“All-American Boy” and it was turned into a huge celebration of our military and the way they’re
fighting in far-flung corners of the earth for our “freedom” — the song is about
an All-American high-school football player who turns down offers from big
colleges, “signs with Uncle Sam,” comes back alive and relatively whole (a
surprise since the payoff in this genre is usually that he comes back either missing some parts or in a box),
and then Brooks goes into a final chorus lamenting the boys who go to war and don’t come back alive. Had they just presented the song
simply, they might have made the point, but instead they way overdid it, from having Brooks play the song on a red-white-and-blue
guitar to having actual servicemembers march through the audience in uniform
for the final chorus and using the video screen to show more or less
appropriate images just in case we didn’t get the point. After that Kenny Chesney came on for a couple of songs that
appeared to be called “Mostly Young” and “Wild Child” (I quite liked “Wild
Child” even though it’s hardly the best thing ever written in its genre) and then Lady Antebellum did a song called “Long
Stretch of Love.” I still don’t like their name — “antebellum” literally means
“before the war” and is a word usually used by Southern sympathizers to
describe the wonderful aristocratic slavery-driven plantation system they had
before the Civil War — when I first heard there was a group called Lady
Antebellum I grimly joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery
Was Cool?” — but I like their music,
especially when their female member, Hillary Scott, is front and center; alas,
“Long Stretch of Love” was a duet between her and Charles Kelley, the male
singer (the third member is Dave Heywood but he doesn’t sing leads), and every
time he came in instead of (or over) her the energy level dropped considerably.
After that the show did another
mashup, this time with Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, who had their 15
milliseconds of fame in 2008 or thereabouts (it’s hard to keep track of boy
bands because, like people in Oz, they come and go so quickly; I couldn’t help
but think when I saw a poster for an upcoming concert by New Kids on the Block
that by now they’re pretty old kids on the block, and one wonders how much
longer One Direction can continue before their career direction is down) with
the country duo Dan & Shea for a couple of songs called (I think) “I Still
Get Jealous” (actually according to my online search it’s just called
“Jealous”) and “Chains” — both titles that were previously used for
considerably better songs, “Jealous” and “I Still Get Jealous” for songs in the classic era and “Chains” for an
old R&B song the Beatles covered on their first album. Nick Jonas seemed
overpowered by Dan & Shea even on his own song, “Jealous,” and I thought
his brother Kevin was the cute one anyway. Then came what was by far the most
moving portion of the show, a sort of back-handed tribute to the victims of the
Oklahoma City bombing (it took place on April 19, 1995 and was the most serious
terrorist incident on U.S. soil until the 9/11 attacks six years later, and as
I recall it was originally blamed on “Arab terrorists” before the culprits
turned out to be closer to home: two disaffected veterans, Tim McVeigh and
Terry Nichols, who’d read William Pierce’s Right-wing screed The
Turner Diaries and wanted to make its
fantasy of a race war and the ultimate imposition of a white supremacist government
to replace the so-called “Zionist-Occupied Government,” or ZOG, that supposedly
rules this country now) that presented Alan Jackson doing his famous song about
9/11, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” It was everything Garth
Brooks’ song should have been and wasn’t: a simple, eloquent, surprisingly
non-judgmental piece of material, presented with no frippery, just a few video images and Jackson singing and playing
acoustic guitar, and doing his song in an understated way that was far more
effective than the patriotic breast-beating from Lee Greenwood, Lynyrd Skynyrd
(though I thought their Right-wing anti-Obama song “God and Guns” was the best
conservative political song since “Okie from Muskogee” — and how do you do a tribute to Merle Haggard without
including “Okie from Muskogee”? It’s like doing a tribute to the Rolling Stones
and not doing “Satisfaction”!), Toby Keith et al.
The show should really have ended there but there
were still a few awards to be presented and a few celebrities to be trotted out
in non-singing roles, including Taylor Swift (who actually sort-of apologized
to the country crowd for making a pop album — which just underscores how silly
and arbitrary the whole salami-slicing of the music world into genres is; it has far, far more to do with marketing than artistry) and Steve
Tyler (who claimed Buddy Holly as an early influence, which may have explained
why he was wearing similarly ugly glasses) and three more songs: Brad Paisley’s
hit “Crushin’ It” (which appears to be what you do with a beer can after you
finish drinking its contents), a much-ballyhooed reunion of Brooks and Dunn on
a song apparently called “My Maria,” and an ensemble finale in which all the
performers who could crowd on the stage of the Dallas arena at once did the
Louis Jordan “Let the Good Times Roll” —not especially a country song and a
weird way to end this lumbering and bizarre spectacle in which, as usual, the
artists who did not trick up
their performances with pyrotechnics, elaborate dance spectacles or light shows
on the stage floor came off better than those who did (though thank goodness
for one thing: the plague of Cirque du Soleil-style gymnasts and acrobats that
afflict all too many pop acts’ stage shows these days hasn’t yet hit the country
world) and the show dragged on way
too long (3 ½ hours) for its slender content — though at least it did come in on schedule and didn’t suffer from the
impromptu bloat (as opposed to the planned bloat) of most awards telecasts. And
I was certainly amused to see the final credit to Dick Clark Productions — the
king is dead but (like Walt Disney) his production company lives on!
