“I had to tell the crowd (on his last Oz tour) we don’t have CDs, I flew over here in Tiger Airways and they lost ‘em,” Watson recalls. Three months later, home, still CD-less and without a cent refunded to him, Watson did what any good scorned musician would do: wrote and recorded song criticising the airline, then made a video clip for it.
He’s critical too of the state of country music, because, as he puts it, ‘country’ now means commercialised country like Kenny Chesney or Taylor Swift. “They’ve taken the term over,” he laments. He’s not scathing in his delivery though – wry humour and that great Texan drawl makes him come across as more a dismayed observer. “It’s monetary and materialist. It’s not about music and that type of thing, more what makes money, what sells to teenage girls.”
Watson is so disillusioned by what people were associating with ‘country’, he essentially coined a new genre term: Ameripolitan – which is more Jimmy Rogers and Johnny Cash than Woody Guthrie or Steve Earle he tells me. “Even if you say you do ‘old’ country it sounds like you’re doing retro stuff that doesn’t matter anymore,” he says as way of explanation.
Though it’s been a long career and Watson is famous in his own right, he’s never had an album chart in the US. But where albums like Whiskey or God, Cheatin’ Heart Attack and I Hate These Songs (to name a few) have failed, his new album El Rancho Azul debuted at 57 on the US Heat charts and 36 on the Country Charts.
He can’t quite explain why this album, and not others has made such an impact. Maybe due to the fact he’s been around so long, “or maybe people are starting to get more savvy in the way they listen to stuff and the kind of stuff they want to listen to rather than being force-fed the stuff corporations want them to hear.”
El Rancho Azul is a real ranch too he informs me. “Friends of mine own it and we go up there an play shows sometimes, kick up dust, have a dance. It’s a good Texas time.” Does that explain then why there are so many drinking songs on the album? “It would explain that,” he responds, laughing heartily.
Appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman for the first time may not have hurt either; Watson noting it was a ‘huge gig’. “It helped the shows and the attendances and our recognition out there definitely,” though it’s not as if Watson hadn’t had brushes with fame before. Watson fan Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame directed and starred in a video clip for the aptly titled Hollywood Hillbilly a few years ago.
“I went up to his house in the Hollywood Hills and you can literally see Sunset Boulevard from his porch. He’s got his iPod connected to his house sound system which is louder than anything I’ve ever heard, and he’s got it blarin’ Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, the police had to come tell him to turn it down,” Watson laughing his disarming laugh as he conjures the memory. “He’s got a three-legged dog and we played pool and drank moonshine. It was surreal being in the Hollywood Hills and feeling like you were in Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Though artists might perhaps feel obliged to talk highly of the country they’re about to visit when chatting to the press, Watson seems genuine in his love and interest for Australians as he recounts how fans and truckers offered to help get his CDs from the airport, and how he’s written a song about a petrol station worker from Wagga Wagga. “I’ve never had a bad experience in Australia, and the people are just fantastic. I really look forward to going back.”
BY GARY WESTMORE
