New Year's Eve Live: Nashville's Big Bash (CBS-TV, Nashville Live Productions, 2023/2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Cynthia Erivo show on PBS ended just before 11 p.m., and then I put on the CBS New Year’s show, New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. My husband Charles and I joined the show while it was already half an hour old, and I’d hoped that it would present a wider range of modern country-music artists than it did. Actually the two hours we watched were focused almost entirely on two acts, woman singer Lainey Wilson and 1970’s-era Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd. The show – or at least the part of it we watched – opened with a Lainey Wilson song called (I’m only guessing here because few of the song titles were actually announced) “It’s Only Because I’ve Lived Through Hell.” Then Kane Brown came on to do “Bury Me in Georgia” (a song title I’m sure of because it was announced) before Wilson returned with “Had Enough” and a duet with Jackson Dean called “I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love.” That song also featured a quite good woman guitar player named Grace Bowers, whose solo was actually the best part. Then the show cut to another venue – a bar (virtually all the satellite venues were bars, some of them quite famous, which figures given that drinking, especially drinking to get over a romantic or sexual breakup, is one of the main themes of country music and always has been) – for a great performance by Cody Johnson. Though Johnson’s bass player is tall, rail-thin and built like a stringbean, all the other band members – including Johnson himself – are hot, sexy Bear types (yum!). Johnson sang a song whose title I couldn’t quite figure out but I noted down, “If You Don’t Like the Way I’m Living, Just Leave Me Alone.” It was a nice screw-you to all the moralists who like to tell other people how to live. Then the show cut to other bars for other performers like Morgan Wallen with Trombone Shorty (the song was called “It Ain’t My Fault” and it was actually quite good, though Shorty’s trombone interjections didn’t add much) and HARDY (according to his Wikipedia page, the name is supposed to be spelled in all caps), who got his start opening for Wallen on tour and he’s also written for Lainey Wilson and Blake Shelton.

HARDY actually got to do two songs, one called “The Wrong Side of the Truck” from his album The Mockingbird and the Crow and another called “By the Way, My Name Is … Jack.” Aside from HARDY’s two songs and a piece by Old Dominion which I noted down as either “She’s Gone for the Summer” or “I Was On the Phone That Day,” the second half of the show belonged to Lynyrd Skynyrd, or what’s left of them because their last surviving founding member, guitarist Gary Rossington, died in March 2023. Given that all the original members are dead, which started with the legendary plane crash in 1977 that took the lives of original singer Ronnie Van Zant (his brother Johnny took his place) and guitarist Steve Gaines, the band members apparently debated over whether they should continue as a group but ultimately decided to go ahead with their tour plans. The rump Lynyrd Skynyrd did some of the band’s biggest hits over the years: “What’s Your Name?,” “Sweet Home Alabama” (on which Lainey Wilson joined them), “Gimme Three Steps,” “A Simple Man” (a quite haunting ballad and not at all what you’d expect from Lynyrd Skynyrd) and the inevitable “Free Bird.” Lynyrd Skynyrd has a Right-wing political reputation largely from “Sweet Home Alabama,” which the band members wrote as a response to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and includes the lines, “Watergate don’t bother us none/Does your conscience bother you?” In 2009 Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded a song called “God and Guns,” written by country songwriters Mark Stephen Jones, Bud Tower and Travis Meadows, and made it the title track of their then-newest album. I heard them play it on an episode of Austin City Limits and hailed it as the greatest Right-wing song since Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” in 1969, and as much as I loathe its politics it’s still a great song and I wish they’d done it on the New Year’s Eve show. (One irony is that two of Skynyrd’s original members, Ronnie Van Zant and bassist Ed King, had written a song in 1974 called “Saturday Night Special” that condemned gun violence.) The show ended with the “note drop” indicating it was 2024 in Nashville (which is in the Central time zone and therefore New Year’s was an hour later than it was in New York), along with the Times Square ball drop an hour earlier, and Charles and I rang in the new year with our usual toast of sparkling cider (since I don’t drink alcohol) and an uncertain outlook as to whether this will indeed be a good new year.