Stagecoach 2010: Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Sugarland and more

Stagecoach 2010 presents something of a battle of the Keiths and country duos, with headliners Keith Urban and Toby Keith making their first appearances next April at the two-day country festival in Indio, while Brooks & Dunn return for a stop on their farewell tour on a lineup that also includes Sugarland, the twosome that’s taken over as country's reigning pair.

The fourth edition of Stagecoach will take place April 24-25 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio and also will feature country standard-bearers Merle Haggard and Ray Price as well as more recent vintage acts including Billy Currington, Gary Allan, Phil Vassar, Jamey Johnson, Joey + Rory and the Avett Brothers.

Also  on the bill will be the Oak Ridge Boys, Carlene Carter, B.J. Thomas, Mary Gauthier, Bill Anderson and the Steel Drivers, among the usual complement of classic and contemporary country, bluegrass, folk and western acts. Tickets go on sale Friday at Ticketmaster and at the festival’s website.

Last year’s event drew more than 100,000 attendees for the two days of music headlined by Kenny Chesney and Brad Paisley.

--Randy Lewis

Top photo: Sugarland. Credit: Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times
Middle photo: Brooks & Dunne at Stagecoach in 2007. Credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

Stagecoach 2009: Kenny Chesney wraps the party

Kenny Chesney made no bones about his mission Sunday as the closing-night headliner of the two-day Stagecoach country music festival in Indio, Calif.

“If you watch enough TV, you know the world has a lot of problems,” he told tens of thousands of fans spread out across the grassy expanse of the Empire Polo Field, many of them having sat in their lawn chairs under the desert sun for the better part of the weekend. “We’re not going to solve a single one here tonight, we’re just going to play some music and have some fun.”

On the escapism front, Chesney delivers. Where some of the greatest figures in country music have used uptempo numbers to alter the pace and allow listeners a little room to let the emotions settle between the cornerstone ballads that target their hearts, Chesney flips the model.

It was frothy hit after hit, a ballad with a little meat on its bones slipped in from time to time to vary the pace and give fans an opportunity to pause between gulps of their chosen brew.

That’s a big reason why for the last decade Chesney has sold more concert tickets than anyone else in pop music. Fans can count on his shows to be fun, fun, fun till their daddy takes the Ford F-150 away. Building on the nonstop party blueprint drawn by Jimmy Buffett, the student has become the master.

Following Kid Rock -- the cartoon before the feature -- Chesney came out hitting hard with adrenalin-chargers including  “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” “Summertime” and “Beer in Mexico,” interspersed with beach-bum anthems such as “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems.”

Throughout his shows, this human carom ricochets about the stage, the way Garth Brooks used to do before he bowed out of the concert scene a decade ago. Chesney has that in common with the Madonnas and the Britneys of the pop world, guaranteeing that he’ll show his fans just how hard he’ll work for their money.

He takes the occasional stab at something that reaches a little deeper, as in “Never Wanted Nothin’ More,” which charts an inner evolution where superficial desires give way to matters of the spirit. Yet there’s little hint of the struggle that necessarily accompanies that kind of transformation.

But Chesney knows fans don’t turn out for all-day music festivals to discover the meaning of life. No shoes, no soul --, no problem.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Stagecoach 2009: If Kid Rock's an outlaw, who's the cop?

Kid Rock, the unlikely rap-rocker turned grease-bucket Van Zant acolyte, thinks of himself as an outlaw. He said as much promptly into his second-bill Sunday set, reassuring the sea of Stagecoachers that there would be no "techno, new wave music" during his set. Those are about the only genres Rock didn't touch on during his long, loud and bawdy set, the breadth of which suggested that his definition of "outlaw" has less to do with music or attitude than one's self-perception.

During his set, Rock boasted in a song of landing a lover half the age and twice as hot as his last; then he was holding down a teary, bleary duet with Miranda Lambert. Rank frat-thrash buttressed hip-hop semiotics and even tender, earnest folk. If Rock is an outlaw, what genre or ideology constitutes the law? He's had hits on rock, country and mainstream pop radio, particularly the unexpectedly winsome Sheryl Crow duet "Picture" (where Lambert ably stepped in).

 Maybe the idea of orthodoxy is what Rock's riding against. But it's not as if he's using the tropes of Southern rock, rap and country in unexpected ways -- he almost prides himself on the rough edges and friction between them in his sets and songs. He's not subverting rules, just abiding by many different ones at once. "Picture" and "Bawitdaba" have absolutely nothing in common sonically, yet make sense coming from the fringes of the same psyche.

Stagecoach 2009: The Knitters -- X marks the spot

To understand the great debt that first-wave punk rock owes to the early “hillbilly” country music of the Appalachian Mountains, one need look no further than the Knitters. Led by ‘70s punk legends Exene Cervenka and John Doe of X, the Knitters played a host of unassuming country classics, including “Poor Old Heartsick Me,” by the Carter Family, with admirable purity of purpose on Sunday night in the Palomino tent.

Mellowed by age in the edgy way that only former punkers can be, the two seasoned performers bantered back and forth with each other and the crowd like a bizarro Martin and Lewis.

“You guys rock!” yelled a guy in baggy shorts from atop one of the many hay bales in the tent. “Thank you, so do you,” said Doe, before asking Cervenka, “What should we play next?”

“I thought we’d play some Carter Family,” Cervenka said sweetly, in her odd maid’s uniform with polka dot apron, red-and-white-striped tights, loose-fitting boots, red bangles with lipstick to match and stringy hair just a shade more fierce than her lips -- the only indication that she has not spent her entire life baking cookies in the high plains.

“Carter Family, who’s that?” deadpanned Doe. “They’re not related to Mötley Crüe are they?”

Stagecoach 2009: Southern California country rocks

Backstage at Stagecoach:

What an extraordinary collective of Southern California music history backstage following Poco’s reunion performance tonight.

There was Poco’s Richie Furay (also representing Buffalo Springfield), Jim Messina (Loggins & Messina) and Timothy B. Schmit (Eagles), along with John Doe and Exene Cervenka (X/Knitters), Dave Alvin (Blasters/Knitters/Guilty Men and now Guilty Women), James Burton (Rick Nelson, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis), alt-country singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale and ‘70s country singer Lynn Anderson.

Anderson had joined Poco for “Listen to a Country Song,” which she confessed she’d forgotten about while thinking she’d be invited to join in on Poco steel player Rusty Young’s “Rose of Cimarron,” a song  she recorded years ago and recently re-recorded for a new album of western music.

Cervenka was enthralled by Poco’s performance, having come straight to Indio from her set with Doe the night before at the Getty Center, and the one common thread between Stagecoach and Coachella the previous weekend, where X played.

Schmit had to leave his bass aside because his hand was bandaged from an injury. After starting to spin a tale about a battle with pirates, he smiled and explained it was actually the result of a snap from the family dog.

There ought to be a country song in that.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Poco at Stagecoach. Credit: Allen J. Schaben

Stagecoach 2009: Lady Antebellum reconstructs country-pop

Occupying Stagecoach’s coveted aspiring country-pop, pre-sundown main stage slot, Nashville’s Lady Antebellum showered its willing audience with candy-coated hooks and anthem-driven rock licks on Sunday afternoon. Lead singers Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley emanated comfort on the huge stage, tossing memorable lyrical riffs back and forth like softballs.

The pair possesses remarkable vocal clarity. Scott’s voice conjures a bit of the powerful, lilting wistfulness of Alison Krauss (who earned accolades when she appeared onstage with Brad Paisley last night), but there is much more to her than sweetness. She belts out tunes from deep within her diaphragm, with a bit of a low-end growl. I’d like to imagine Taylor Swift will be like this when she’s all grown up and a Jonas Brother is no longer capable of breaking her heart.

“Since I’m the only lady in Lady Antebellum, I feel like singing a song for all you ladies,” Scott said late in the set. “If you’ve been through heartbreak and you want to tell your ex-boyfriend where to go, this song’s for you.”

What followed was a soaring, empowered rendition of “Long Gone,” about a woman who no longer takes any guff or accepts any heartache from a thoughtless man. “That girl is long gone. Boy you missed the boat, it just sailed away…. Betcha thought I’d never be that strong,” sang Scott, reminding her audience of the delicious tang and bitter bite of a feisty, female-driven, country power ballad.

Kelley graciously took over where Scott left off, his voice deep, rich and smooth as toffee, with just the right amount of cactus scratch. Also his hair, along with the locks of every other band member, was a perfectly coifed vision of fluffed, intentionally mussed loveliness. (Somewhere in WeHo a hairdresser is shivering but doesn’t know why.)

The only problem with the band’s nearly hourlong set was that they played too many covers. Spirited but otherwise unremarkable versions of “Hurts So Good” by John Mellencamp, the Doobie Brothers classic “Long Train Runnin’” and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” only took away from the time the band had to hammer home its own easy-feeling brand of lite-country rock.

-- Jessica Gelt

Photo: Getty Images

Stagecoach 2009: Ralph Stanley*

Backstage at Stagecoach

Mountain music patriarch Ralph Stanley just arrived at the traditional-music themed Mustang Stage sporting a nastily bruised right eye, bandaged above and below.

I asked if he's OK, and the 82-year-old quipped, "You should see the other guy!"

Ricky Skaggs, having just wrapped a scintillating set with his band, joined the conversation and extended a heartfelt, "I'm real sorry to see you like this, Ralph."

The claw-hammer banjo master said he'd been standing on a stool cleaning an air conditioner back home in Virginia when the stool slipped, sending him to the floor.

That was Saturday, yet he still boarded a plane for the transcontinental flight west to make his Stagecoach return appearance. Talk about a trouper.

-- Randy Lewis

*Update: An earlier version referred to Stanley's home in West Virginia. He lives in Virginia.

Stagecoach 2009: What's up with dubious day-after covers?

File this under "Sketchy Stagecoach Song Choices" for this year and last: The Zac Brown Band just covered Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" on the Mane Stage about an hour ago, and less than a day after Daniels himself did a much superior version last night. Someone covered "Fortunate Son" the day after John Fogerty's set last year, so we have to ask: Are these folks paying tribute or simply stealing thunder?

-August Brown

Stagecoach 2009: The Duhks are soul-ed out

After long nights of beer-ponging, barbecue-gorging and general festival hell-raising, it's hard to imagine anybody in Indio this weekend has the stamina to tear through an early-afternoon set of supercharged Southern soul. But the Winnipeg, Canada-based group the Duhks just went above and beyond the bleary call of duty in the Palomino tent today with one of the more inspired sets we've seen at Stagecoach.

Showcasing the gilded pipes of new singer Sarah Dugas, who split the difference between Reba and Aretha, the quintet built a formidable wall of sound out of simple instruments -- banjo, fiddle, guitar, drums. The country-rock crossover is one of the big stories out of this year's Stagecoach, but the Duhks were one of the few bands to do justice to both sides of that equation. It was loud, but not angry, fierce but inviting and, above all, totally compelling and unexpected so early in the day. 

-- August Brown

Stagecoach 2009: Day 1, by the numbers

Backstage at Stagecoach:

Saturday's opening of this weekend's Stagecoach country music festival drew a sellout crowd of 40,000, the biggest turnout yet for the 3-year-old event, Goldenvoice chief Paul Tollett said near the end of the day, which featured headliners Brad Paisley and Reba McEntire. There's good reason to expect that today's closing show, topped by Kenny Chesney and Kid Rock, will do every bit as well. Year in and year out, Chesney sells more concert tickets than virtually every other act in pop music.

In addition, arrests were down from last year's pace, according to Indio police spokesman Ben Guitron, with 14 arrests Saturday and three on Friday among those who had arrived early to set up in the adjacent campgrounds. Last year, when Stagecoach ran three days, Guitron said there were 80-plus arrests over the course of the event.

Saturday's results represented quite a turnaround for Stagecoach organizers and brought another dose of good news following the response to last weekend's three-day Coachella Music and Arts Festival. That event drew 160,000 total, the second-highest turnout in the decade-old festival's history.