Marty Stuart – The party may come to an end, but the road goes on forever
He’d also known Stuart for a long time. “I played on some of those first singles he had, like ‘Little Things’ and ‘Tempted’,” Stinson says. “He called me and said, ‘I want to try this thing, and Kenny Vaughan’s involved, are you interested?’ I would have looked at it a lot deeper if it had been anybody else. But to me, Marty is just part of the real line of country, and of real artistry, so it just made sense. This felt like something that was fun for me, and musically satisfying. Why wouldn’t I want to try something like that?”
For his part, Vaughan came up with a wild card — young Michigan-born bassist Brian Glenn, who had grown up playing in a family band. “People see ‘Michigan,’ they think Detroit, Motown, and me being as young as I am, they ask, ‘Where in the world was the country music influence in your life?'” says Glenn. “But where I’m from — Cadillac, near Traverse City — there’s a huge country base, and my dad was a Chet Atkins-style picker. So being from the family I was, and from the area that I was, it was country music all over the place, and to me, it didn’t seem to be eclipsed by any other kind of genre.”
Glenn came to Nashville at the beginning of the ’90s with a couple of singing gal cousins. “We were going to be the next trio — there was the Gatlins, the Whites, we were going to be along that line — and we just watched that horse ride over the hill a few times,” he says with a rueful laugh. When the group dissolved in 1995, he spent a few years at Opryland, then began to work the Opry itself, playing first with Jack Greene, then Billy Walker, while building up his work as a demo singer and bass-player-about-town.
“My phone rang one day, and it was Marty,” he recalls. “He had gotten my number from Kenny Vaughan, who had seen me playing on Lower Broadway, and in church, too. Kenny didn’t have my phone number, but he had enough information for Marty to track me down through the Opry staff.”
“We were auditioning bass players, because the three of us had gotten together and we knew something was kind of cooking there,” Stuart says. “But when Brian showed up, it was like, there it is, and we called off the auditions. From the first show we played — from the first rehearsal — I knew it was something special. I’ve been in bands all my life; this one’s just got something unique about it.
“More than anything else, it’s about the creativity. More than anything else, it’s about the music. Everybody gets a chance to shine here. And you know, I always thought that was a mark of a great bandleader. Lester sure never got in anybody’s way. Johnny Cash never got in anybody’s way. Bob Wills never did. Count Basie never did. Louis Armstrong never did. I get to pay the bills, but everybody’s the star. So it was a unique time, a unique moment, and there it was.”
With its lineup set, the Fabulous Superlatives hit the road in 2002. The back road.
“I went to the booking agent I was with at the time,” Stuart recalls, “and I said, ‘You have one assignment, and one assignment only, and it’s real easy: Hide me. Get me just as far back in the sticks as you can. I don’t want to compete with anybody.’ We have a band, and a point of view, and the next twenty years to put together here, and that’s all there is to it. Back roads. And the more of those back roads towns I played, the more I fell in love with the atmosphere — what was left of old America.”
The touring shaped the band’s first release, 2003’s Country Music, but it wasn’t, at least in Stuart’s mind, an unqualified success. Issued by Columbia, it was, he says, “a one-off project. It was signed to do one thing, and it kind of got sidetracked — all of a sudden, there we were, getting shoved into ‘we need to make a radio single’ again. And the vision of the record got a little split along about there.
“I think that 70 percent of that record was there,” he continues. “I thought there were moments on Country Music that were really special. I loved ‘Sundown In Nashville’, I loved ‘Satisfied Mind’, I really loved ‘Walls Of A Prison’.” That last track, which closed the album, was a cover of a lesser-known late-’60s Johnny Cash tune.
“One of my favorite memories is sitting with my hand on John R.’s shoulder, and him saying, ‘Excellent,'” Stuart remembers of Cash’s reaction to the recording. “I could see it got him. I said, ‘This is the best song you ever wrote.’
“You know, Cash told me one day after The Pilgrim, he said, ‘I really love that record, and I’ve gotta tell you, once you make one like that, you can’t go back.’ But Country Music almost started going backwards, and it just didn’t work. And I thought, when I get done with this record and get through touring this, I’m gonna take it back to the barn one more time, and forever more never compromise again.”
As it turned out, it was the tour to support Country Music that led Stuart and his band “back to the barn” — literally. This was no ordinary itinerary stopping in the usual cities and venues a country act might play. Stuart had something entirely different in mind, and he dubbed it the Electric Barnyard Tour.
The inspiration came from a gig the band had played at a firemen’s carnival in Pennsylvania. “We were playing with a Conway Twitty revue,” he recalls, “and there were John Deere tractors and bikers and babies and princesses and funnel cakes, and we were on an open-air stage next to a cornfield, and it looked like a Fellini movie to me.