Video: Willie Nelson, sons cover Pearl Jam's 'Just Breathe'

Willie Nelson’s latest album, “Heroes,” is out today, May 15, and for the occasion the Red Headed Stranger has been working his Willie's Roadhouse classic-country channel on Sirius XM satellite radio, giving his listeners a sneak listen to the entire CD over the last four days.

He also recorded a live rendition of one of the album’s songs, a version of Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe,” in the studio with sons Lukas and Micah Nelson, along with a couple of his longtime Family Band members,  including his sister, keyboardist Bobbie, and harmonica player Mickey Raphael. The video can be seen here.

 

“Just Breathe” is one of a couple of left-field song choices -- another is Coldplay’s “The Scientist” -- on a set that also features more big-name duet partners for Nelson, this time including Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Sheryl Crow, Jamey Johnson and (drum roll, please) Snoop Dogg. Nelson and Snoop teamed up for the lighthearted smokefest celebration “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”

Should Nelson ever decide to stage the odd-couple duet live, it’s a safe bet that Snoop won't send a hologram to inhale in his place.

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Photo: Willie Nelson and band at Sirius XM live performance session. Credit: Rahav Segev.

Stagecoach 2012: The wrap-up, stats, random moments

Final stats, thoughts and impressions from the 2012 Stagecoach Country Music Festival that took place Friday through Sunday at the Empire Polo Club in Indio:

• Indio Police spokesman Ben Guitron said his department and other city emergency teams overall were "very pleased" with new measures taken to alleviate traffic problems going in and out of Stagecoach. Shuttles to and from area hotels helped considerably, he said, even though far fewer attendees used shuttle buses than those who attended Coachella two weekends earlier. Close to 25,000 people used the shuttles during Coachalla, only around 3,000-4,000 did so at Stagecoach. But more Stagecoach-goers camp in adjoining campgrounds than at Coachella.

Guitron reported a total of 139 arrests as of 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the vast majority for alcohol-related offenses. That compared to 134 arrests on the first weekend of Coachella, and 102 on its second weekend, mostly for a combination of alcohol and drug issues. The most serious incident was a sexual assault on a 17-year-old girl, who was attacked by three men on her way into Stagecoach on Friday night. The girl was taken to a local hospital and treated. The three men fled, and Indio Police are investigating, asking anyone with information on the incident to call (760) 391-4057.

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

• One key logistical change this year was the cordoning off of several “standing room only” sections of lawn near the stage but behind the reserved/VIP seating area immediately in front of the Mane Stage where all the big guns played, including Brad Paisley, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton, Sheryl Crow and Alabama. It allowed more fans closer access to the festival’s headliners. In years past, die-hard Stagecoach goers would arrive early, much like the homesteaders of yore, and plant blankets and lawn chairs, occupying in all areas close to the main stage. The new standing room sections allowed more mobile festival goers to check out performances on the Mustang and Palomino stages and still be able to get relatively close to the main stage acts after sundown. Goldenvoice capped the ticket sales this year at 55,000.

• Favorite instrument of the weekend: the gas-tank bass cobbled together and employed Sunday by Split Lip Rayfield member Jeff Eaton, a single string variation on the old-school washtub bass, the version used a day earlier by San Fernando Valley’s Old Man Markley.

• Favorite T-shirt slogan of the weekend: “Rehab Is for Quitters.”

• Festivals such as Stagecoach and Coachella often serve as weekend soundtracks for those who aren’t totally immersed in the music. One woman sat near the back of the lawn Friday night during Aldean’s closing performance, far enough that the audio from the stage and the video on the bank of screens near her were a couple of seconds out of sync, and happily read a book on her Kindle.

Stagecoach 2012: Brad Paisley talks Tupac image, new album

Brad Paisley, the headliner for Sunday’s closing night of the 2012 edition of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio, Calif., has always been an unrepentant techno-geek, so he followed with fascination the worldwide media generated the previous two weekends by the "appearance" of Tupac Shakur during Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s reunion performance at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

The thing is, Paisley beat them to the punch by two years, having pulled off a duet with a virtual partner at the 2010 Stagecoach Festival, where he surprised and confounded audiences with the materialization onstage of Alison Krauss, his collaborator on 2004’s “Whiskey Lullaby,” which generated multiple Academy of Country Music and Country Music Assn. awards.

“We did that Alison thing for a while, and it was as good as we could get it at the time,” Paisley said aboard his tour bus parked near Stagecoach’s Mane Stage, where a capacity crowd of 55,000 was waiting for him to go on after Sheryl Crow finished her penultimate set. “We’ve since then come up with some more tricks. It was interesting when I heard about the Tupac thing. The thing that was so interesting about that, the thing that was so shocking, of course, is that it was someone who was deceased. It’s insane. You go, ‘Whoa!’ But wait till you see what we’re doing tonight.”

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

He was teasing the recurring presence of Carrie Underwood on his current Virtual Reality Tour. After Paisley launched into the opening of their hit duet “Remind Me,” audience members gasped and then cheered when a spotlight went on and there appeared the “American Idol” grad, harmonizing her lines and seeming to trade glances with her singing partner.

But it was an illusion -- like the Shakur "appearance," a realistic-looking video projection, not a true hologram. It's something Paisley touched on before that number, when he told fans: “We call this the ‘Virtual Reality Tour’ because reality is what country music is about. But it can sometimes also take you away from reality. So between the beer and our show, you’re well on your way.”

Stagecoach 2012: Aaron Lewis talks country makeover

"Yes, it's like musical whiplash — that's a good term for it," Aaron Lewis said of his tuneful gearshift this weekend. On Saturday, he was fronting his long-running hard rock band Staind in Mesa, Ariz., and Sunday he was showing off his rootsy side at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, where Lewis performed material from his recent foray into country music, the 2011 EP "Town Line." 

Nevertheless, he said it wasn't a stretch to write and sing the songs for the EP — or another dozen or so he's written and recorded for his full-fledged country album coming this year.

"I spent a lot of time with my grandfather when I was a kid, and from the time he got up in the morning, the radio was on and I was hearing George Jones and Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings," Lewis said backstage shortly before his performance. "At 4 years old I'd stop anyone who'd listen and sing [Glen Campbell's] 'Rhinestone Cowboy.' Anyone in my family will back that up."

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

For Sunday's appearance, Lewis complimented his own acoustic guitar with a Dobro player. It was also his first trip to the Empire Polo Club, the site that the prior two weekends housed the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, headlined by the likes of Radiohead, Dr. Dre and the Black Keys. 

In addition to his hit "Country Boy," Lewis included a stripped-down unplugged reading of Staind's "Outside," which drew an electric cheer from the crowd.

"I guess we're too heavy for Coachella," he said.

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Image: Aaron Lewis performs at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.

Stagecoach 2012: The Unforgiven return with punk attitude intact

It took two years of behind-the-scenes wrangling, but the members of the '80s Inland Empire cowpunk-metal band the Unforgiven were rounded up for their first concert performance in more than a quarter century Sunday at Stagecoach.

"Some of you might know we've been on a bit of a break -- like 25 years," lead singer Steve Jones told the audience spread out across the Palomino Stage at Indio's Empire Polo Club early Sunday afternoon. 

And this reunion clearly wasn't a painless process for the band, which became the focus of a major label bidding war not long after the group formed in 1984.

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

"Some of us didn't get along so well," Jones confessed. "So we've taken to calling the rehearsals 'group therapy.' "

The reunion was the idea of Goldenvoice chief Paul Tollett, whose firm, along with AEG Live, puts on Stagecoach and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival over consecutive weekends on the Indio grounds.

"I used to love these guy so much," said Tollett, who has been putting on concerts across Southern California for three decades, looking on with a grin from the crowd. "They were Stagecoach before there was Stagecoach."

Stagecoach 2012: Some highlights -- Miranda Lambert, Dave Alvin

After a relatively low-key first day of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival on Friday, with just a half-dozen acts on a single stage, the music kicked into high gear Saturday. On the second day, all three stages were up and running with 17 more acts representing country, pop-country, alt-country and every other type of hybrid country music under the desert sun.

That's downright modest compared to the total sensory and schedule overload of the 143 acts that played the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for the two previous weekends, but still enough to create some hard choices among simultaneously scheduled performers.

For instance, do you catch 85-year-old bluegrass master Ralph Stanley at the expense of a rare chance to hear singer-songwriter J.D. Souther, one of the architects of the Southern California country-rock sound that's been the template for much of what's been coming out of Nashville for the last two decades? And then miss out on rising Texas singer songwriter Sunny Sweeney, who was on the Mane Stage at the same time as Stanley and Souther?

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

Such are the dilemmas of Stagecoach 2012.

One solution: in a music festival equivalent of culinary grazing, attempt to get a representative, if truncated, sampling of as many bands as possible.

Here are some highlights from the first two days:

-- Miranda Lambert: The sassy Texas singer-songwriter headlined on Saturday with a performance that firmly demonstrated why she’s become a full-blown star. All the elements are clicking for her: fresh and insightful songwriting, commanding stage presence and a wonderfully distinctive voice, all working together in service of celebrating and empowering the predominantly female crowd that makes up country’s core audience.

-- Dave Alvin & the Guilty Ones; You'd be hard-pressed this weekend, or any weekend for that matter, to hear songs that reach deeper or ring truer than Alvin's portraits of people who often struggle without earthly reward for their efforts. Whether on his old Blasters/X classic "Fourth of July" or a more recent song such as "Black Rose of Texas," Alvin unfailingly hits the mark.

Stagecoach 2012: Steve Martin goes whole hog in Indio

It was with some sense of deja vu that Steve Martin pulled into Stagecoach for a performance Saturday that had him and the Steep Canyon Rangers slotted to play immediately after bluegrass music patriarch Ralph Stanley, a situation similar to one in which he and Stanley shared a bill at Carnegie Hall a couple years ago.

"I asked who was going on when, and they said Ralph was opening," Martin said on his tour bus while relaxing on a bench seat with two banjos. "I said, 'No, Ralph Stanley doesn't open for me, I open for him.' So I came out and played a couple of songs and then he went on."

Martin has thrown himself whole hog into his music career after releasing a critically well-received, and Grammy-winning, debut music album in 2009, "The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo."

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

"I haven't given up," he said with obvious delight in his voice. "I'm still very interested, not only in the banjo-playing but in the songwriting. We've now got enough material for a third album and a fourth one. That's all in the works."

One of the songs for his next bluegrass album includes a poem by W.H. Auden, "Calypso," which Martin set to music.

"What happened," he said, "was my wife was reading this poem and she said, 'You know, this really sounds like a bluegrass song.' I read it and I thought the same thing. So after I wrote the music I emailed the song to his estate.

"The estate is one guy, a professor, and when when he heard the song he was thrilled. It was part of a group of poems that were meant to be songs, and it originally had music written by Benjamin Britten -- very atonal, 12-tone weird stuff and it was maybe great for 1935."

Martin has not given it a title yet, but planned to include it in his Stagecoach set.

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Image: Steve Martin performs with the Steep Canyon Rangers on the Mustang Stage at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Stagecoach 2012: Backstage with Dave Alvin

On his way into the Stagecoach grounds in Indio, where he was set to play Saturday afternoon, Dave Alvin recalled the last time he played the country/roots-focused event, in 2009 with the Knitters, L.A.'s rootsy offshoot of X and the Blasters.

"It was really hot," Alvin recalled. "We were on after the Poco reunion, which was so emotional. Seeing Richie Furay and Rusty Young, and they sang [Buffalo Springfield's] 'Kind Woman.'"

"And I thought, 'We have to follow that?'"

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

Poco's Furay wrote "Kind Woman" during his Buffalo Springfield tenure. Of Poco's performance in 2009, The Times wrote that the act's multi-part harmonies were delivered "precisely yet lovingly," which gave "Poco's performance a sweetly golden tone.'"

Alvin, just back from a two-week tour of England. was pulled aside prior to his afternoon set with the latest incarnation of his 'Guilty' band. Now known as 'the Guilty Ones,' following earlier editions the Guilty Men and the Guilty Women.

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Image: Jenna Bonker, 11, rides high on her brother's shoulders, Ryan Bonker, 14, of Costa Mesa as they get a close-up view of Sara Evans performing on the first day of the three-day Stagecoach Country Music Festival at the Empire Polo Fields in Indio. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Stagecoach 2012: Backstage with Jason Aldean

Jason Aldean vividly remembers playing the first Stagecoach Country Music Festival back in 2007, when the Macon, Ga., singer looked out on a very different scene than the one that greeted him Friday night as the opening-night headliner for the festival’s 2012 edition.

Five years ago Aldean was one of the opening acts, charged with trying to capture the attention of a relatively sparse crowd under less than ideal conditions. That was well before he had the biggest selling country album of the year, a feat he achieved last year with his fourth release, "My Kinda Party," which also was named album of the year by the Country Music Assn. and has generated four No. 1 hits, the fifth single on its way up the charts now.

"Man, it's a tough gig," Aldean, 35, said on his tour bus a couple of hours before he and his band would perform. “You go out in the middle of the day, it's 100-something degrees. A lot of times when you play early on, not everybody’s at the show yet -- they’re hanging out in their campers or whatever they doing. It’s not like later in the night, when the weather starts to cool down and everybody comes out. It’s a tough gig, to go out and let people see what it is you do. It’s tough for an artist who has to go on early in the day, and we did our fair share of that stuff.”

PHOTOS: The scene at Stagecoach 2012

This year, however, those early slots were left to others — on Friday it was the Eli Young Band, Brett Eldredge and Sara Evans who were on stage before the sun went down on the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

By the time Aldean arrived, Alabama had pumped the crowd up with a generous dose of clap-and-stomp-along hits largely drawn from its heyday in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Aldean and the other performers Friday also had the advantage of no competition or distraction from music emanating from other stages. In expanding Stagecoach from the typical two days to three this year, event organizers served up a low-key first-day offering, with just a single stage up and running and half a dozen acts playing from late afternoon into the evening.

“To come back here a few years later and go from opener to headliner of the show is pretty cool, especially the first night when you know everybody’s excited to get it going,” he said, stretching out in the back of a tour bus parked next to the Mane Stage.

Stagecoach 2012: Eli Young Band welcomes the dreamers

The Eli Young Band just got the music off to a pragmatically idealistic start for the sixth Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio.

As the first act to play this year's expanded three-day event, the Texas band's frontman Mike Eli posed a question to the sea of cowboy and cowgirl hats splayed in front of him across the grass at the Empire Polo Club: "How many of you are dreamers?"

It was intended as a lead-in to the group's new single, "Even If It Breaks Your Heart," but it set up a no-pressure spirit out of the gate.

"Whether it's playing a guitar, being a songwriter, playing the flute or just finishing that beer in front of you," he said, "follow your dreams."

Plenty were heeding his advice on the final part of that list of dreams as the thermometer poked well into the '90s, although a light late-afternoon breeze is helping to mitigate the heat.

Either country music is a young person's passion, or festival-going in the desert is, judging by the vast majority of teens and 20-somethings who make up the crowd, which will swell to 55,000 per day once everyone arrives for the event that sold out weeks in advance -- a first for the SoCal country blowout.

Either way, Stagecoach 2012 is officially under way.

Yee haw!

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Photo: Mike Eli performs with the Eli Young Band on the first day of the three-day Stagecoach Country Music Festival at the Empire Polo Fields in Indio, Calif. Credit: Al Schaben / Los Angeles Times