Modern Day Drifter has emerged, in effect, as a theme album, full of songs with different takes on a guy’s response to leaving a relationship — or being left. (It’s clear enough in talking with Bentley that he’s experienced his share of both situations.)
The most likely singles on this one are far from retreads of “How Am I Doin'” or “My Last Name” from the first one. There is, for instance, a strong sensuous, Conway Twitty style ballad, “Come A Little Closer”, that’s as far from pandering to par-taying saloon guys as “Lot Of Leavin'” is to those Music Row focus-group-targeted “soccer moms.”
On both albums, Bentley employs a number of the best session players in Nashville, rather than simply augmenting his road band. Such a choice which would not be so typical in the alternative country universe, but Bentley has specific reasons for doing so.
“It’s because those guys are perfect in that setting — creative geniuses,” he explains. “They create all day long; when I have a new song I want ideas for, they’re the best. That doesn’t mean the guys in my band aren’t great musicians, but they’re ‘Go out there on the road, get it done,’ which is a different thing. Those guys [the session players] are now used to working in a studio; they can’t get a crowd to drink tequila and raise hell, entertain a crowd. And my band knows how to do that!”
That road band consists of pedal steel guitarist Gary Morse (who does play on the CD), Steve Misamore on drums, Rod Janzen on guitar and background vocals, and Robbie Harrington on bass.
“When you’re out on the road, and reach places where this is the big night they’ve been waiting for, sometimes for a year, and they’ve spent that money, it’s a huge deal to them,” Bentley emphasizes. “So I want to give those people the best show imaginable, and let them forget things that are going on a little bit — with the little bit of extra effort that takes.
“So I may be the worst musician in the band, but I’m the band leader — and if there’s a problem with it, you go through me. We hang together offstage, and when we go onstage it’s not going to be some fake smiling show. We’re real.
“I had one day off the other day, and was going to be seeing this girl, but I got a call from the bus driver and tour manager about a problem with the bus, so I spent an hour or two sorting out that. There are people who get a record deal and let others around them do those things. You walk on the bus the next day and everybody is smiling at you, but you don’t know the real story. I want to know what’s going on in every aspect of the whole deal.”
I happened to catch, over a year ago, Bentley’s first arena-size show, ever, opening for George Strait at Nashville’s Gaylord Arena — just across the street from some of the small clubs he’d been playing a few years before. He charged to the stage and was soon turning the cavernous place into his band-size saloon.
“That’s the goal!” he affirms. “I’ve learned from George; he makes you feel like you’re in a Texas dancehall, and you want to get up and dance in the aisles. In our case, we try to make you feel like you’re in a little rowdier country-rock bar. A few weeks ago, we played the Kemper Arena at Kansas City for 20,000 people, and that same night we drove to play a frat house for 200 people. With the same show.”
Bentley and his band did 35 such arena shows last year. He says they’ll now be focusing on small-to-midsize venues for what could be the next several years.
“That separates me, to a degree, from a lot of people in Nashville, and on the charts,” he acknowledges. “And that’s sort of the same reason that I wanted to talk to No Depression magazine. Not just because you didn’t ask me about my dog. It’s not stupid for me to do this — because we do play places where I go to the owner and say, ‘Did you ever have a country band in here before?’ And five out of seven times it’s, ‘No.'”
Not that he doesn’t hope to have his own arena shows someday — but he’s sure, right now, that they’re years off, if they ever happen. That he’ll get there would be no surprise. Nor would it be surprising to see his music progress from its current emphasis on “young guy” material to songs where all that partying brings a price, or to country story-songs that look at the woman’s experience on the same terms as the man’s (and in the same song).
You can get that from something he said about the George of influence that came before Mr. Strait. “I once listened to George Jones because my Dad liked him — but now he’s my favorite because I do,” Bentley says. “I understand the warble of his voice, I understand his phrasing, I understand the breaks….He hears a song, and it goes through his ears, to his heart, and it comes out his mouth. After whiskey, cocaine, heartbreak — he pretty much owns his heart.
“Add lyrics to that, and that’s country music.”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor is at work on a book about artists who have been underestimated for not fitting in with over-hardened genre definitions.
