Brooks & Dunn Get High Speed Kicks
It seems foolhardy for two men who are making megabucks as singers to be risking their lives and earning power driving race cars, but Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn of Brooks & Dunn do it anyway.
“I think it stems from both of us having been kids with parents who didn’t let us have go-carts and motorcycles and (that kind of) stuff,” reflects Brooks. “And now that we’ve got two nickels to rub together, if we want to go have fun we’re going to go have it.”
With no trepidation about killing themselves?
“There was (trepidation) at first,” Dunn confesses. “The first couple of races there really was. I had never been in a race car as a kid, and he (Brooks) is the one who talked me into going to Charlotte (N.C.) to the race school. But I loved it. The second race we were in up at Charlotte, I flipped it, and I remember thinking, ‘OK, that’s it, you can get hurt here, I’m not going to do this anymore.’
“But the reason I’m in music is, I was a frustrated jock. In the fifth grade, when the coaches came in and said, ‘Everybody who wants to go out for football go down to the library and everybody that wants to go out for band go down to another room.’ I went out for football, but I was too small - like 15 pounds underweight, didn’t have a chance - and they sent me down to the band room. I was plenty hacked. They tried to get me to play clarinet, which made me even madder.
“But in a race car you’re all the same size, and it’s still a sport, still competitive, and, buddy, my car’ll hit yours as hard as yours can hit mine. So it just all came out for me. What a rush! It’s like, this is the sport that I could never play, and, for beginners, we’ve both gotten pretty good at it.”
The vehicles in which the duo compete are so-called Legends cars, automobiles that are slightly under-sized versions of well-known race vehicles of the past, and they circle their competitive tracks at frightening speeds. Asked how his wife, Janine, has reacted to his interest in the sport, Dunn says she “wasn’t impressed with it.
“She hasn’t been impressed with my racing deal from the start. She says, ‘Are you out of your mind? You’re doing good, you’ve worked hard all your life to get somewhere and do something and now you’re going to go off and kill yourself.’
“But nobody’s gonna get killed.”
Janine does, however, have a point. Brooks claims to think she might be influenced to feel differently if Dunn showed some of the intelligent sensitivity Brooks exhibited with regard to the sport.
“See, I made our anniversary, ‘81, the number of my car,” Brooks says with a canary-eating grin. “He put his birthday on his.”
Plugging the angelic
Randy Travis, the superstar who has been doing nearly as much acting as singing lately, professes to have a strong liking for the Saturday CBS-TV series “Touched By An Angel,” on which he made a guest appearance not long ago.
“I love that show,” Travis told Ralph Emery the other night in a Nashville Network “Ralph Emery On the Record” interview. “I think that’s one of the better shows being made today … I mean, not to preach or anything, but you listen to shows and … I’m shocked sometimes at what they get by with saying on regular TV that kids can watch. I just love that show, and I think they should concentrate on doing some more like that because it has such a good message.”
A diamond in the rough
Billy Joe Shaver, a grizzled yet perpetually youthful writer of memorable songs ranging from Waylon Jennings’ “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” to John Anderson’s “Old Chunk Of Coal” to Patty Loveless’ “When Fallen Angels Fly,” will be releasing another of his own inimitable collections Aug. 7.
A self-taught composer who only got into music after sawmilling robbed him of two fingers, his lyrics display a gritty grandeur encompassing both life’s physical glories and its spiritual ones. He now has joined Justice Records, a Texasbased firm with which Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson have previously signed.
The new Shaver album, “Highway Of Life,” is a listener’s event. Its songs include the bittersweet and masterful “Yesterday Tomorrow Was Today” and the surreal title song. The unvarnished picture of life offered by Shaver’s material is illustrated by the way the distinctive sometimes-rollicking seriousness on these is balanced by the raucous ribaldry of one titled “You’re As Young As the Woman You Feel.”
Another, “Moonshine And Indian Blood,” is a searing treatment of the subject about which Tim McGraw joked in the huge hit “Indian Outlaw”; Shaver’s Cherokee heritage probably has something to do with the fact that “Moonshine And Indian Blood” is no laughing matter.
Shaver is such a powerful writer that anytime he releases a new album it can be assumed to be worth hearing, but this one is especially so. He is accompanied by sparse instrumentation that allows all the life-experience in his hoarse, lilting voice to dominate.
Speaking of life-experience
A new performer on Giant Records has a lot more of it than most Nashville aspirants these days.
Chris Ward, born in New York City but raised in Columbia, S.C., Richardson, Texas and Spokane, Wash., started out training horses, then spent four years in the Marines followed by eight years as a policeman, detective and S.W.A.T team officer in California and Washington.
All this time he was playing country music five nights a week and occasionally taking a brief, unsuccessful shot at getting noticed in Nashville. It finally worked in 1994, after he moved his family to Nashville and began singing demonstration recordings for song-publishing firms.
Two of the hits whose demos he sang were Clay Walker’s “Only On Days That End In ‘Y”’ and Doug Supernaw’s “Not Enough Hours In the Night.” He meanwhile wrote “See Ya” for Confederate Railroad.
His first Giant Records album, “One Step Beyond,” was produced by Dann Huff, who has produced a lot of pop and contemporary Christian records.
Wake-up call
A recent Maxwell House Coffee national survey of 1,000 Americans (500 women and 500 men) found our that country music was either the first (25.9 percent) or second (16.2 percent) favorite type of music of 42.1 percent of those surveyed.
More than a third - 36 percent - of heavy coffee drinkers chose country as their favorite, while less than a fifth - 18 percent - of light coffee drinkers responded that way.