COLUMBUS, Ohio --- What music defines Middle America? On a summer-like May evening, all roads led to a soccer stadium packed with 25,000 celebrating fans in this university town. At center-stage: a fist-pumping, cowboy-hat wearing, guitar-strumming songwriter named a Kenny Chesney who likes to rock it with a suburban-hillbilly twist.
Kenny Chesney? Perhaps you’ve heard of him as one of those celebrity hit-and-run headlines. He was married for a cup of coffee (actually, nine months) back in 2005 to actress Renee Zellweger, a flirtation with the Hollywood jacuzzi crowd that left him (and a few of his fans) shell-shocked. After that, he retreated to his boat in the Caribbean, wrote some songs, and disappeared from public view --- only to return the next year to continue one of the hottest runs in country music since the Garth Brooks era.
Now casual passersby may know Chesney as that guy in a beer commercial with his hands on an acoustic guitar and his feet stuck in the sand. He strums a little campfire ditty beneath a palm tree. The shorthand: “The country Jimmy Buffett.”
And like Buffett, Chesney owns an extremely lucrative corner of the musical world right now. He has been recording for nearly two decades, and has quietly become a money-making juggernaut. Last year he earned nearly $96 million in revenue from touring and recorded-music sales, the third-ranked entertainer in North America behind only Madonna and Celine Dion, and ahead of Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles, among others. He was $20 million ahead of the next-closest country act, Rascal Flatts. On June 13, he’ll headline Soldier Field, one of the few performers in any genre capable of filling a stadium of that size.
Like Brooks in the ‘90s, Chesney has redefined mainstream country for the first decade of the 21st Century, a man who sings with a Tennessee twang but plays a high-energy brand of ‘70s-style arena rock, flavored with acoustic folk, reggae, a dash of R&B, and, yes, country.
“He’s a country singer with a lot of gritty guitar,” is how Chesney’s drummer, Sean Paddock, sums it up. “He loves the attitude of rock; he loves the island thing; it’s a conglomeration of music but at heart he’s a country singer.”
And today country really means the suburbs, the vast spaces between cities populated by a middle class who grew up with Bon Jovi and Foreigner. This is the audience Chesney speaks to because he once belonged to it: “a very ordinary guy,” as he says, “who had an extraordinary thing happen to him.”
At Crew Stadium in Ohio, it’s a typical night at the office for the headliner. Backstage he commands a small army: 11 buses, 20 semitrailers, 115 crew, staff and musicians, plus assorted high-profile fans from the sports world. NFL linebacker Mike Vrabel, ESPN commentator Kirk Herbstreit, and former major-league pitcher Kent Mercker shake his hand, exchange hugs and toast their pal with beers (Chesney abstains pre-show, limiting himself to a low-cal dinner and water). He gathers with his band in a dressing room, where a newspaper photographer is waiting outside to snap a few pictures as they make their way toward the stage.
“Slowly,” he commands his bandmates as they turn the corner to face the camera. “And be iconic.”
The singer is clad in a sleeveless T-shirt, tight jeans and a palm-leaf straw cowboy hat. He leads a 13-piece band, replete with horns, percussion and as many as five guitars. At the foot of the three-tiered drum riser, a dozen brightly colored bras dangle from a stand, collected as offerings from the audience. That’s about as risqué as the show gets. Chesney is a PG entertainer, his two-hour concert slamming rapid-fire from one hit to the next as he surveys a 15-year career that has produced 20 No. 1 country singles, from the hackwork “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” to Everyman anthems such as “Back Where I Come From.”
Not bad for a guy who came to music relatively late in life. As a kid he was obsessed with sports. As a baseball player, he modeled his game after “Charley Hustle” --- the now-disgraced baseball star Pete Rose who made his reputation with his all-out style.
He grew up hustling in Luttrell, Tenn., outside Knoxville, the son of a hairdresser mother and a schoolteacher father. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried to a construction worker. He describes a humble life that revolved around “friends, family, school, church … and girls.” He was one of 135 students in his 1986 high school graduating class
“We were lower-middle class and everyone I knew was --- we didn’t know there was anything different,” he says in his tour bus a few hours before the show. “I have this theory … this is a bit of curveball, but people who are really good kissers never have anything given to them. People who can’t kiss had everything given to them. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m a helluva kisser.”
Chesney laughs uproariously. In public, he wears his cowboy hat (or, in his more casual moments, a baseball cap) 24-7 to cover up a scalp that has been balding since he was 19. His muscular torso belies his smallish 5-foot-7-inch frame. Backstage, the 41-year-old singer could pass for a kid half his age, dressed down in baggy basketball shorts and hatless after a morning workout. He is a bundle of tightly wired energy with boyish, almost elfin facial features and ears. He is fighting a cold, but becomes animated in conversation, pondering questions while rubbing his face until it flushes red.
He loves music, and has a strong grasp of great songs and artists through the decades in a variety of genres, from Johnny Cash to Bob Marley. But he didn’t pick up a guitar until he started attending East Tennessee State in Johnson City.
“We were typical country boys who liked music, everything from classic rock to Hank Williams Jr.,” says his boyhood friend and longtime road manager, Dave Farmer. “Kenny never had a lot of patience for anything, so when he first picked up the guitar I thought it would last a day or two. But then I saw him playing even when his fingers were bleeding. He kept a notebook of songs and chords. He picked up that guitar one day and he never put it down.”
Chesney explains the motivation with disarming transparency: “I realized I could write a song about a girl and it might change my luck.” After graduating with a degree in advertising and marketing, he moved to Nashville in 1991 to make a go as a singer-songwriter, and struggled. He was a car valet by night, a starving songwriter by day, until he finally scored a record deal and put out his debut album in 1994.
He was a pedestrian talent at first, a pretty boy in a cowboy hat with a decent baritone voice.
“It took me awhile to find my place,” Chesney says. “I never felt I was a puppet, but looking back I realized I made songs to get on the radio. There was the chemistry and makeup of a hit record at the time in Nashville, and I tried to conform. I was just making records to get on the radio, I didn’t give a [expletive] what they said.”
He wanted to be George Strait, but so did just about everybody else in country music at the time. “I had a greatest hits album and nobody knew who I was,” he says with rueful chuckle. But as he let his true influences creep into his music and retooled his band, a more distinctive sound and personality began to emerge.
“He wanted a new look, a new energy --- controlled chaos, basically,” says his longtime keyboardist Wyatt Beard. “He went from a traditional country-style band with guys who stood and played their instruments to bringing in guys from out of state who didn’t know what the rules were. He allowed us to have fun, he dared us to outdo him. It took him awhile to get there, but he knew exactly what he wanted and how we wanted to present his music.”
He also personalized his songwriting by giving it a few flavors outside the traditional Nashville menu. His 2002 breakthrough song, “Young,” on the “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” album was in the heartland, coming-of-age mold forged by Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” and John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” as much as the Nashville tradition.
“When ‘Young’ came out, it was the first time there was a unique, true investment in the audience in me,” he says. “It was the first time I became something more than a song on the radio that they sang in the shower. It meant something to them. You could feel it out here [points outside to the stadium]. We would go into ‘Young’ and it was a definite moment. I focused hard on that. After that, I wanted to be the best I could be at this, in every phase. I started really trying to get better as a songwriter. I had never worked at it that much before, but I concentrated more than ever to find some commonality with emotions, to take some common experience and make it unique as well as universal.
“We were playing state fairs about a year before all that. I remember opening for George Strait at a stadium in Detroit, and the next day I was playing a club in Brownsville, Texas, and, I swear to God, there was no one there. Talk about a dose of reality. And a year later we released ‘No Shoes,’ and our lives changed. It was something none of us could’ve dreamed.”
He began spending more time sailing in the Caribbean and cultivated a love of Jamaican music --- hence the Buffett connections. The fans partying in the parking lot six hours before showtime attest to the notion that Chesney has developed a lifestyle and persona to go with the songs. They are hard-drinking college students and young adults who set up elaborate tiki bars in the afternoon sunshine, but there are also moms and dads with their sons and daughters.
Tori Wilson of Somerset, Ohio, was attending the show with her cousin and four daughters, ages 19, 16, 12 and 6. “He’s one of us,” she says of Chesney. “The songs speak for each of us.”
Another fan, Kristin Pauley of Cincinnati, saw Chesney’s songs as a soundtrack for her life and dozens of friends who regularly attend “three or four” Chesney shows a year. “He sings everything we’ve been through,” she says.
Her friend, Charlie McIntosh, of Eaton, Ohio, concurred. He is recently divorced, and took solace in Chesney’s break-up songs. “I’ve got two teen daughters, and how’s the [Chesney] song go? ‘There goes my life,’ ” he says. “That’s why I’m here today, because his music helps me deal with this stuff.”
But as Chesney has gotten more popular, his more reflective songs play a much smaller role in his concerts. Is he concerned that he might become a caricature like Buffett, who rakes in the big bucks by playing the goofy party meister but at the expense of showcasing his talents as a songwriter?
“I’m perfectly capable of being two different people,” he says. “There’s a part of me that wants to do a completely different tour, with different atmosphere, a different [lower-key] energy. But this outside here, it’s a whole different animal, and that’s how we built it and I feed off it. I think I was smart enough to record a song like ‘She Thinks my Tractor’s Sexy’ and I also was smart enough not to record another one like it.”
So, what’s more important, to be a great artist or a popular one?
Chesney pauses and smiles. “Is that a trick question? I’ve worked real hard to get better as a singer, songwriter, musician. Popularity … time has taught all of us that popularity fades. So it’d be really important to be good when it does.”
And then this tour-bus troubadour put on his cowboy hat and went to work.
greg@gregkot.com