Gone country: 9 pop and rock artists who tried playing country
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Despite certain theories set forth by Donny and Marie Osmond, there’s actually a very thin line separating those little bits of country from rock ’n’ roll. After all, it was country that first started us down this path of “three chords and the truth,” so it’s not at all surprising to see so many artists turn back up that road. Plenty of folks have tried on country’s boots—even people who don’t seem to have anything in common with the genre, like MxPx pop-punker Mike Herrera. Before Herrera's Tumbledown revs its sped-up honky-tonk tonight at the Triple Rock,The A.V. Club takes a look at some other “trailblazers” who made the switch, whether their cred was as genuine as freshly tanned cowhide or as suspect as faux-snakeskin boots.
Darius Rucker
Hootie And The Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker risked picking up another nickname he probably didn't want when he titled his debut R&B record The Return Of Mongo Slade. However, due to contractual issues with Atlantic Records, the record was shelved, and the peanut gallery was robbed of a chance to refer to Rucker in terms of Sidney Poitier's Let's Do It Again after Hidden Beach Recordings released the record under a new title, Back To Then, in 2002. Needless to say, expectations were not high for Rucker's inaugural foray into country, 2008's Learn To Live, which made it all the more remarkable when its first three singles went to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. People may never stop calling him "Hootie," but now he has a platinum record with which to show them what his real name is.
Country cred: Recorded with Nashville session player and Brad Paisley producer Frank Rogers, Learn To Live has already secured Rucker two invitations to play the Grand Ole Opry. Not bad for a guy whose first visible foray into country involved playing a rhinestone cowboy dreaming of a Burger King heart-attack sandwich.
Steve Harwell
Smash Mouth’s Steve Harwell is sort of a jack(ass)-of-all-trades, willing to pursue fame by any means necessary—whether that means rapping (like he did in short-lived San Jose group F.O.S.), turning Smash Mouth anthems into all-purpose filler for everything from Shrek to Mystery Men until you just wanted to jab a fucking pencil in your ear, or willingly debasing himself alongside Sherman Hemsley and Alexis Arquette on VH1’s The Surreal Life. With that in mind, it’s odd that Harwell didn’t also sign up for CMT’s Gone Country considering he’s now explicitly modeling himself after fellow ’90s once-was, Darius Rucker, even bringing him in to duet on a track on his just-announced country album, All The Way Gone. Of his new persona, Harwell boldly proclaimed, “I think it’s what people have been wanting to hear.” Actually, Steve, all we really want to hear is a huge, ripping tear in the space-time continuum erasing the day you wrote “All Star.”
Country cred: Harwell recently showed up at the CMT Awards, declaring he’d moved to Nashville and had started “co-writing with people here.” Uh, guess that’s all it takes?
Bon Jovi
Despite fronting one of the smiliest, hair-farmingest, mom-friendliest bands to ever fly under the misnomer of “hard rock,” Jon Bon Jovi has long cultivated a fascination with outlaws and gunslingers. His urban cowboy anthem “Wanted Dead Or Alive” and subsequent songs for Young Guns II and The Cowboy Way always had a certain parched-desert, spur-jangling spirit to them. So it wasn’t all that surprising when the band began inching its way toward straight country after a crossover duet with Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles made it the first rock group to land a No. 1 on the country charts. The Nashville-heavy Lost Highway featured more collaborations with avowed twangers like LeAnn Rimes and Big & Rich, and—despite moaning from critics who saw it as uninspired and pandering—it netted them even more accolades from the country-music scene, including a CMT award and an Academy Of Country Music Award nomination. Not that the band's going to try that again anytime soon: Bon Jovi’s next record is being pitched as a “return to rock ’n’ roll”—or, you know, as rock ’n’ roll as Bon Jovi has been for the last 20 years.
Country cred: You mean besides going to Nashville’s Black Bird Studios to record, hiring country producer Dann Huff, and bringing in ringers like Nettles, Rimes, and Big & Rich just to make sure everyone knew they was serious? Well… Bon Jovi once played a fixin'-to-be-hanged cowboy in Young Guns II, and in the ’80s, he did more than any one man ever did to revive leather chaps, for better or worse. Mostly worse.
Elvis Costello
27 years before Rucker did it, the man born Declan Patrick MacManus set the standard for transitioning from dalliances with R&B to waltzes with country. But while fans of Elvis Costello And The Attractions had no problem with the band getting soul in their punk and new wave (and punk and new wave in their soul), that didn't stop the ever-cheeky Costello from affixing a label reading "WARNING: This record contains country & western music and may cause offence to narrow-minded listeners" to the cover of his 1981 honky-tonk covers record, Almost Blue. While that record is steeped in weepy pedal steel and studio-honed backing vocals, Costello's subsequent country offerings have hewed closer to the pre-Nashville roots style favored by his friend T-Bone Burnett, who produced the mostly acoustic King Of America and its spiritual predecessor, this year's Secret, Profane, & Sugarcane.
Country cred: Costello released the Southern Gothic song cycle The Delivery Man and the loosely wound quickie Momofuku on the Universal Music Group's alt-country outpost Lost Highway.
The Waco Brothers
It’s actually a bit disingenuous to assert that Jon Langford’s lark-turned-fulltime gig is an example of the Mekons frontman “going country”: Truth is, Langford went country—and helped kick-start the whole “alt-country” movement in the first place—around the time of the Mekons’ Fear And Whiskey. But while the addition of fiddle and pedal steel to the mix may have helped the Mekons evolve from their “Never Been In A Riot,” Clash-baiting punk days to something a bit harder to pin down, Langford didn’t fully embrace the heartland until he formed The Waco Brothers, a group of fellow British expatriates and dabblers (including members of Revolting Cocks and Jesus Jones) who were similarly fascinated with the Wild Wild West, and obsessed to the point of loving parody with singing about cowboys and honky-tonks. Well, that and cleverly screaming about their fiercely liberal politics, but don’t tell the shit-kickers.
Country cred: Also a renowned painter, Langford has designed dozens of album covers for the alt-country bands on Bloodshot Records, but he’s even better known for his portraits of “hard country” icons like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Buck Owens that have been displayed in galleries all over the world, helping to push back the virulent spread of pop-country dross wherever it may land.
Mike D (Beastie Boys)
Any quote from a Beastie Boy (short of "Woodstock 1999 should have had better security" or "I have cancer") should be taken with a grain of salt. So when Michael "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "MCA" Yauch began livening up post-Hello Nasty conversations with tales of a forthcoming country record, even the most fervent Beasties fan could be excused for thinking said record would never see the light of day. And they were sort of right: Country Mike's Greatest Hits didn't receive a proper release, and the few vinyl copies that turned up on eBay went for hundreds of dollars. To this day the Internet offers your best shot at sampling Country Mike's goofy wares, as most of its tracks have made their way to YouTube.
Country cred: Little to none. From its poorly Photoshopped cover to its easy redneck jokes and affected twang, Greatest Hits is more of a countrypolitan "Cooky Puss" than any sort of crate-digging tribute. It's pretty funny, at least.
Jewel
Born with a yodel that would make Slim Whitman jealous, Jewel held off on making a full-on country record until 2008's Perfectly Clear, at which point the Bon Jovi-paved road to late-career country reinvention must have looked like more of a sure thing than the dance-pop route she took on 0304. The record received modest airplay from country radio, but, befitting an artist who was discovered when she was living in a van, Jewel has seemingly moved on from country, releasing a children's record with the help of toy manufacturer Fisher-Price earlier this year.
Country cred: She appeared on the final two seasons of the singing competition Nashville Star, and fellow judge John Rich co-produced Perfectly Clear, though that job mostly entailed weaving steel guitar and fiddles into what is otherwise Pieces Of You, Mach II.
Ben Kweller
Formerly the wunderkind frontman of Greenville-based Radish—which was hailed as “the next Nirvana” by more than one hyperbolic critic squeezing every last drop out of that angle—Ben Kweller fought his Texan tendencies for years, graduating from angst-ridden grunge to a quirkier, twitchier pop sound in the general wheelhouse of The Lemonheads and Violent Femmes. This year’s Changing Horses is exactly that: An artistic reversal, albeit a familiar one in the midst of other folk-leaning indie kids who have been encouraged by too many generous comparisons to Dylan and the like (Conor Oberst, for example), with Kweller adopting a ’70s-inspired “rambling man” weariness in his lyrics and bringing in some pedal steel and dobro. Like most of Kweller’s trend-chasing output, it sounds decidedly filtered through—and pales in comparison to—all the better stuff done concurrently and immediately before it, but it’ll do on a lazy sunny afternoon.
Country cred: Kweller relocated to Austin to re-up on his claims to Texan authenticity, which he’s also pursuing by wearing lots of plaid Western shirts in photographs—though, to be fair, plenty of us do that. He’s also adopted the common country trick of dropping all the “g”s from his song titles (“Hurtin’ You,” “Wantin’ Her Again,” etc.).
Jessica Simpson
Despite what all these examples of recent crossover success may lead you to believe, country music fans aren't deaf to desperation. That's one of the reasons Do You Know failed to give Jessica Simpson's recording career a shot in the arm; the other being that it's just as bland as any of her pop records. Titling a song "Come On Over" doesn't automatically transform her lackluster voice into Christina Aguilera's, and matching it up with Dolly Parton on the title track doesn't help much either.
Country cred: Simpson prefaced Do You Know with an appearance in the video for Willie Nelson's "You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore." Hillary Lindsey, Brett James, and Gordie Sampson—who wrote Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take The Wheel," among other country hits—each make songwriting appearances, but this is clearly not their "A" material.
