[Nope, just our Kenny Chesney post. That pic is as close as we could get

to the guy.]

There’s

little to add to the Kenny Chesney

conversation at this point. Either you’re the type of country fan who’s down with his

mercilessly optimistic brand of rum-soaked Jimmy Buffett-core or you’re not. Most folks

at Stagecoach seem to be okay with that.

The strains of "She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy" are currently wafting through

the desert night and I think I might have figured him out. Kenny Chesney is country’s

version of Diddy. Neither have any discernable charisma beyond good-times opulence and

the generic tropes of island revelry: booze, good-looking ladies and a sense of exotica

bleached clean of any actual sense of local lifestyle or attachment to the roots of

one’s given terrain. Which is, obviously, totally contrary to the values of country

music. But still …

For the auteur behind "Beer in Mexico," the actual country to our immediate

south is a set piece for his maxin’ and relaxin’ worldview, as opposed to a place where

real people live and work. But it’s probably asking too much to expect more, because

Chesney is, like Diddy, more of an idea than an actual artist, or even a person at this

point. They exist solely to embody the spoils of the successful entertainer’s life with

none of the trappings of actually maintaining a dangerous public persona. All of that

would be too messy, and would interfere with the on-message image of oily pecs, frothy

Coronas and a respite from the grind whom so many actual Mexican citizens help make so

much easier through selfless labor.

Chesney is all that is wrong with modern Nashville, yet also the archetype of the

post-9/11 country music mentality. Namely, that fans want to curl up under a palm tree

and sip fruity drinks while the busy, ugly world washes by.

Not so fast, buddy. This genre has some explaining to do first.

[Guest blogger August Brown is ready for some pizza deliverance.]

Drive-By Truckers represent everything

right about the impulse but bad about the execution behind Stagecoach’s mix of

alternative and mainstream country. The band is closest thing we have to a modern-day

Skynyrd (they wrote a double album, "Southern Rock Opera" about them, after

all), and their filthy, witty roughneck tunes should have destroyed the Palomino Stage,

even if they were competing with the former Mr. Zellweger on the Mane Stage

(and more on him in a bit).

But like Neko Case last night, the Truckers

had the dubious honor of being having the most skewed talent-to-audience ratio of the

day. We’re all about hyperbole here, but there honestly could not have been more than

200 people watching their set. And that is just unacceptable for such a relentlessly

awesome rock group that by all rights should have packed the place. The only conclusion

is that Stagecoach needs to de-ghettoize the alt-country groups from the Palomino Stage

and have more back-and forth across the field between mainstream and underground groups.

But given the attendance atrocity, the Truckers kept their chins up and delivered as

best they could. "Shut Up and Get On The Plane" was a worthy travellin’ song

that swung like a sackful of bricks, and the laid-bare fears on closer "Angels and

Fuselage" withstood the boozy affirmations of a dude screaming

"Truckers!" after every line, even if he drove guitarist Mike Cooley to gulp

from a handle of Jack Daniel’s onstage.

I’d like to think that Stagecoach can accommodate bands like the Truckers and win

them a new audience of mainstream country fans. But until Stagecoach figures out how to

introduce the two, the bad habit of a great band being criminally ignored by a whole

festival will probably continue. And that’s a shame.

Hmmm …

[Guest blogger August Brown is putting on another pot o’ tea when he gets back

from this.]

Emmylou

Harris is the Helen Mirren of country music. Dashing silver fox? Absolutely. Been around

forever yet achieved hipster cachet in recent years? Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst and even

Mark Knopfler ("A nice country

boy") would say so.

Harris’ voice is, and has alway been, one of the genre’s most visible yet its most

adaptable to others’ idiosyncrasies. But her set on the Palomino Stage was all about her

and the graceful mother-to-the-world she’s become late in her career.

With a mostly all-female backing band, Harris staples like the hard-bitten "Red

Dirt Girl" and newer, more ethereal cuts like "Orphan Girl" resonated

with her wispy vibrato and proved that the best instruments only improve with time.

Though the set was astonishingly under-attended at first (curse you, Brooks &

Dunn), the crowd filled out with every tune until the field was rapt. Mothers’ Day is next week, and Harris, who

turned 60 last month, dedicated a song to her daughter to note the occasion. Should

every daughter and mother be so lucky to have that voice, in this valley, do the

same. 

[August Brown doesn’t want to guest blog if you don’t want to guest

blog.]

If nothing

else comes out of this weekend, I finally understand Sugarland now. The band’s chipper

country-pop never seemed to have legs outside the usual CMT retinue, and the duo of

Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush didn’t exactly radiate boisterous charisma or

roughshod authenticity.

But taken as a pure pop band shooting for summertime fun, the duo’s upbeat romps

through a teenagedom full of drinking by rivers and figuring out the right time to

smooch was just what the afternoon called for. "County Line" is one of those

universal coming-of-age-and-misbehaving numbers that actual teenagers have lapped up for

decades, full of the same detailed-yet-accessible imagery of driving too fast and

dodging cops that anyone who’s ever been 16 can get behind. Especially sloshed

early-twentysomething ladies having a girls’-only weekend. They loved this

band.

"Want To" flips the occasion, where a young couple is tentatively

navigating the line between kissing and being rejected, and the band backs it up with a

cheerfully expert swagger that perfectly suited the occasion. Nettles was a firebrand on

stage, and call me crazy, but it didn’t seem wrong that they had today’s Arcade Fire

late-afternoon-anthem set time.   

[The last time guest blogger August Brown owed Willie Nelson and Kris

Kristofferson a favor, he wound up in the Norman, Okla., clink for six days.]

There’s

seriously no excuse as to why we didn’t spend more time with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson this

weekend. The tail end of Kristofferson’s set (which he performed with just his bad self,

a guitar and the odd harmonica) was dusty and earnest, full of Biblical metaphors and

the hard-bitten charisma that earned him an unlikely film career. His voice is as ragged,

barely tonal and welcome as ever in these heady Cashville days. Wish we caught more of

it.

And Willie! Jeez, we passed on Willie twice in two weekends! Inexcusable, I tell you.

Hope he won’t be a red-headed stranger for too much longer. There’s a handle of George

Dickel waiting for you if you let us make it up to you, Willie.

Brooks & Dunn are playing right

now and I’m trying to care more than I do.

[Guest blogger August Brown can’t wait to be 70 and just not care

anymore.]

Part of being a country-influenced musician is that you have to be crotchety before

your time. Scamps like Conor

Oberst, Jeff Tweedy and Ryan Adams put on airs that a life

of hopping trains, slugging Old Granddad and chasing black-hearted women left them

beaten into the dust by the age of, what, 24? Sorry dudes, dating Winona Ryder and/or

Parker Posey is a pretty instant disqualification from playing that card.

Maybe when you get to be Ramblin’ Jack

Elliott’s age (born 1931, natch), you’ll have earned the right to sit by your

lonesome on a stool in the Mustang Stage and tell meandering stories about Spanish

gambling and kicking it with Woody Guthrie.

Among old-guard folkies still living, there is Elliott and there is everyone else. His

work influenced everyone from Dylan to Springsteen to Pete Seeger, but today his songs

are almost beside the point compared to his treasure trove of stories and happily

haggard charisma. Elliott can stop a song mid-verse to say "now this song is where

that song came from" and start a whole new tune without losing a beat or the

audience. He even kicked out an obnoxious photographer who lingered to long at the front

of the stage. A singer who doesn’t like his picture taken? Youth sure is wasted on the

young pearl-button crowd.

Hey! We didn’t know Catharine MacKinnon was

selling shirts at Stagecoach!

[Guest blogger August Brown has lived in China, but was not the subject of any

naughty local folk songs.]

As jingoistic

as country artists can seem sometimes (word, Darryl Worley),

it’s easy to forget that it’s essentially acoustic folk music, which comes from a long

line of music from other far-flung ethnicities. Abigail Washburn is out to right that

wrong, trekking all the way to the Sichuan province of China and the feminist

mythologies of Tori Amos to make a wholly unique folk music of her own.

The short version of Washburn’s

biography is that she plays hill-country music while writing and singing lyrics in,

oh, fluent Mandarin Chinese. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; Asian instruments like the

pipa and koto are distant cousins of her preferred banjo, and the sing-songy phonetics

of Mandarin are an unlikely but apt fit for the melodies and cadences of bluegrass.

With backing band the Sparrow Quartet (banjo god Bela Fleck was her sideman), Washburn

stomped and skipped through firey Appalachian takes on the local songs of Sichuan. Her

bilingualism’s no gimmick; she nails the dips and peaks of pitch while leading her band

in scorching variations on simple, repetitive traditional melodies.

But anyone who stops at the gosh-wow factor of a pretty white banjo player singing in

Chinese misses the nuance of her English tunes. "Red & Blazing" and

"Eve Stole The Apple" are slow-burning torch songs, steeped in subtle but

powerful feminism that only deepens the folkloric and storytelling qualities of her

songs. But she knows from bluesy ’sugar-in-my-bowl’ double entendres as well; she ended

one Chinese song about the pan-ethnic subject of baby-making by saying "That’s some

hot stuff from the Sichuan province there." Her album "Song of the Traveling

Daughter" is just as hot, and you’d do well to search it out.

[Guest blogger August Brown is actually an auxiliary member of New Pornographers

too. They roll deep.)

At least Neko Case had a sense of humor about

playing in tonight’s "Lemo

nheads spot" opposite George Strait.

Her criminally tiny crowd wouldn’t have filled the Echo, and one gets the sense that

someone at her booking agency is kicking themselves that they didn’t get her on the

Coachella bill instead. We were hoping for Case to have a breakout set, but that’s hard

to give when your sound crew nearly outnumbers the audience. Yet Case kept her spirits

up, covering a Strait tune while his actual songs bled over to her stage, and did her

darnedest to appease the alt-countryites who stuck around for a virtuosic, if a bit

autopilot, set of haunting originals.

Case’s last album, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," was a strangely

beautiful song cycle loosely based in half-remembered Ukranian folklore and backed by

members of Calexico. Case looked a

bit scruffy after a rough day where her bassist was hospitalized after a car accident

earlier, but she gamely ran through resonant, twangy highlights like "That Teenage

Feeling" with grace and sheepish good cheer. Case’s voice is always a welcome force

of nature, but many forget that her songcraft and lyrics are as dense and rewarding as

her harmonies. If only more folks were there to hear them.