ShareThisBy WAYNE BLEDSOE
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Shooter Jennings isn't too concerned about what's been written about him, but one term does bother him.
"Saying that I'm an 'outlaw' kills me," says Jennings. "There ain't no outlaws, you know?"
Jennings is the offspring of country legends Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter _ artists featured along with Willie Nelson and Tompall Glaser on the 1976 album "Wanted: The Outlaws."
The disc was a benchmark for country artists who rejected the slick country sound coming out of Nashville at the time, and the term "outlaw" has since been applied to nearly any artist who stood outside the Nashville norm.
"My dad was trying to run away from that then," says Jennings in a slightly exasperated voice.
Born Waylon Albright Jennings, Shooter earned his nickname as a baby either by urinating on his nurse (his father's account) or because of his parents' enthusiasm for Western lore (his mother's explanation). Whichever it was, the world knew of Shooter long before he took account of the world. Until he was 5, Shooter traveled with his parents on tour and was occasionally seen onstage.
He began playing drums and piano, still his primary instruments, before he was a teen.
"When I was 13 or 14, I knew I was going to play music," says Jennings. "I started making my own music, and I was really inspired by the ol' boy from Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor."
Reznor is known for playing all of the instruments on his albums himself.
"I thought, 'If this guy can do something this cool by himself, then I can do this,' " says Jennings.
Jennings also began to explore the history of rock, digging into the Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Guns N' Roses.
He started the rock act Stargunn and moved to Los Angeles. After several years, he disbanded the group and returned to Nashville.
Jennings' father died in 2002. Around that same time, Shooter was exploring some of the musical legacies of his father and his father's friends.
"In my early 20s, I started falling in love with old country," says Jennings. "It seemed much deeper than rock 'n' roll, but I loved rock's aggressiveness and boundary-less-ness."
Jennings says his own musical intention is along the lines of mixing Hank Williams Jr. with Led Zeppelin.
His first album, "Put the O Back in Country," was released in 2005 and earned enthusiastic reviews. However, Jennings thinks his latest, "Electric Rodeo," is an improvement over its predecessor.
"When we got to 'Electric Rodeo,' we were much more mature," says Jennings. "As we move along, the sound's developing and we're playing off our influences better and expanding on them ... Rolling Stone panned it, but the fans get it. Of course, Rolling Stone gave bad reviews to Led Zeppelin's first three albums."
Jennings, though, does feel kinship with a musical movement that seems to be springing from the Southern underground.
"I used to call this the music that falls between the cracks," says Jennings. "Drive-By Truckers, Hank III, the Deadstring Brothers. ... This is a voiceless genre - we don't have a voice on the radio. But eventually, something is gonna happen."
He likens the current state of the nameless genre to what happened in rock between the mid-1980s and 1990.
"The time between the Pixies' 'Doolittle' and Nirvana's 'Nevermind' was five years. If there wasn't a Pixies, there wouldn't have been a Nirvana," he says.
Jennings says some sound words of advice from his father have always helped guide him.
"He always said, 'Just try and be yourself. Don't try to be like anybody else, because you're not gonna be. And don't let anybody make you feel like you're supposed to be something else.'
"It took me a long time to learn how to do that. I'm still learning how to do that."
