Spring Fling

Concerts That Make the Holiday a Time to Party

Mark Williams
The Bulletin Music Editor

School districts and universities across the Lone Star State will ring the school bell over the next couple of months for Spring Break -- an event that has graduated from ritual to birthright in recent years; even those out of school and working a job can use a little break -- but with gas prices at the point of utter insanity and inflation on the rise, who can afford to hit the beach?

Even if you’re tapped out, you can still have some fun this spring: The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo is still going strong -- and on Monday (3/17), Texas’ country rockin’ country contessa Miranda Lambert, riding high on a recent wave of hits like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,� “Kerosene,� and her latest, “Gunpowder & Lead.�

Despite the often times volatile and violent nature of her music, Lambert swears that she has never sat waiting for her man with a cigarette and a shotgun -- or never walked into a bar, smacked some floozy and started trashing the place. It's poetic license, she says -- and she uses it a lot on her songs of drinking, smoking and white hot revenge. "It's just a song," Lambert says in her Texas twang. "It's meant to be lighthearted, really."

Of course, that doesn't mean she's never wanted to knock some tramp off her bar stool. Or whack a pool cue upside a cheating boyfriend's cheating head. In fact, she says, sometimes she really does feel like a crazy ex-girlfriend. "I've had some bad boyfriends," Lambert admits. "That helps the songwriting, definitely."

Lambert's latest album, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," is full of songs about lost love, broken hearts and revenge. It's a far cry from Lambert's sweet and innocent face on the country-music TV talent show "Nashville Star," where she finished third. Like her "American Idol" counterpart, Carrie Underwood, Lambert booted that image and went for a tough-as-barn-nails image. Still, Lambert says it was no act on "Nashville Star." She was 19 at the time; now she's 24 and she's been through more bad boyfriends and more heartbreak. "I think I've grown," Lambert says. "I've just lived a lot more since then."

Now that Lambert has two albums under her belt, she's trying to figure out what to do next. Still, she says she made "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" on her own terms and wrote or co-wrote most of the songs. She thinks she's finally on the path to being a career musician. "It's a blessing," she says. "When I started this thing, I said I wanted to stay true to be myself. So I can kind of breathe now."

Yes, Miranda Lambert is one tough cookie -- at least in her songs. The craziest thing she ever did to a boyfriend -- that she’s willing to talk about, anyway -- was in high school, said Lambert. On the phone one night, he told her he planned to stay home for the evening -- but when he mentioned he was ironing a shirt, she got suspicious. “There was this nasty bar that I knew he was going to,� Lambert recalls. “So I drove with my friends to see his car and I put a picture of myself on his windshield so when he came out he knew I was there. And the next day I dressed up really cute and broke up with him.�

Her father, who was a narcotics cop by day and an aspiring country singer by night, started a private investigation business with her mother. In fact, they were hired by Paula Jones’ litigation team to investigate Bill Clinton in the 1990s, so Lambert was exposed to two things at a young age: guns and cheating couples. “Our dinner conversations were about divorce cases and who was cheatin’ on who,� said Lambert. “My family took in abused women and their kids for about two years. So ‘Gunpowder & Lead’ didn’t happen to me, but I saw firsthand what it could do to a family.�

Sort of a one-woman Dixie Chicks, Lambert was country’s runaway critics’ darling in 2007. In a poll of 96 country critics by the weekly Nashville Scene, Lambert captured top album, single, songwriter, female vocalist and overall artist of the year. “I did a photo shoot for it and I didn’t know what it was for,� she said, “and when I saw the article it was ‘Holy crap! Nobody told me I got all this stuff.’ For me, it was huge.�

The story drew parallels between Lambert and her “American Idol� doppelganger Carrie Underwood: both are blondes who grew up on Southern farms and just released their second albums after getting their big break on a TV talent show; and each scored a big hit about getting even with a no-good guy. But the comparison Lambert liked best was one to Merle Haggard -- for her confrontational approach, rough-edged arrangements and mixed message lyrics. After she read that section, “the whole article was a blur,� she said with glee.

Along with Underwood and Taylor Swift, Lambert is one of country’s fastest-rising female stars. While Underwood cleans up at the award shows and on the best-seller charts and Swift crosses over to pop, Lambert has earned the respect of the country establishment for her blend of blistering honky tonk rockers and traditional country ballads.

Growing up on a farm in the tiny East Texas town of Lindale, Miranda was feisty as a teenager. After she failed to rejoin the cheerleading squad her sophomore year in high school, she decided she wanted to sing in the choir. Trouble was, her school didn’t have one. So she wrote a letter to the school board, lobbied the superintendent and a choir was created. “Sixty people signed up the first day,� Lambert recalls.

A lifelong country music fan, she sang in talent shows at age 16. After getting a house gig at a nearby honky-tonk, she took her GED test in the fall of her senior year and hit the Texas bar circuit, which led to “Nashville Star� on the USA Network, a third-place finish and a record contract with Sony BMG. It’s kind of surreal. How did I get all this? But, you know, it’s a really good feeling."

If your Spring Break happens in April -- and you can afford the often outrageous concert ticket prices at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands -- consider spending an evening with America’s favorite beach bum Jimmy Buffett, who plays the outdoor venue on Monday, April 21. Buffett, who turned 60 on Christmas Day, likely spent the day in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind -- and in close proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with birthday number 50; as recounted in his 1998 autobiography ‘A Pirate Looks At Fifty,’ Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia -- merrily drinking while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals: learning celestial navigation, swimming with dolphins and starting therapy.

Anyone who has heard a Jimmy Buffett record will know that therapy is totally unnecessary. Buffett has been writing and singing confessional songs for three decades, but he's never shown the slightest sign of discontentment -- shrugging away the world's sadness, and his own indulgences, with an amused "I know it's all my fault" while oozing over to the bar for another round.

And who can blame him? Buffett is one of the music business' singular success stories: he has parlayed an unlikely subject -- getting plastered while cruising the Gulf Coast in your power boat -- into a multimillion-dollar industry, a perennial place on Forbes' list of highest-grossing entertainers, and the most passionate concert audience this side of the Deadheads. Buffett has done all this without altering his music one iota -- actually, without any evident effort at all. He's a bard of hedonism -- the sun baked, can't-be-bothered-to-stir-from-this-beach-chair variety. His songs are nudged along by lazy rhythms and gentle country-rock acoustic strumming, and accented by the rounded ping of steel drums -- the universal sonic signifier of Caribbean languor; he takes the stage of sold-out arenas and baseball stadiums in the same T-shirt and baggy beach shorts that he wears aboard ship and can't even bring himself to put on a pair of shoes.

Buffett sells a lot of records —- his latest album, “Take the Weather With You,� topped the country charts when it was released last October; but it's touring that has made his fortune -- his rabid legions of fans have long been known as Parrotheads. "Parrotheads are known to begin their preparations early," Buffett says -- and indeed, much of the audience is usually and unmistakably blotto well before the first steel drum sounds. Video screens flank the stage as Buffett and his longtime Coral Reefer Band, displays footage of the Parrotheads' famous parking lot antics.

Sure, a Buffett concert may look like a giant frat party -- a “Girls Gone Wild� video, with the part of the 19-year-old co-eds played by paunchy middle aged men -- but for Buffett, Parrotheads are heroic nonconformists, and their loyalty has a vague spiritual overtones.

Parrotheads are as devoted as Grateful Dead fans -- known as Deadheads -- and fans of the Dave Matthews Band -- but musically, Buffett has nothing in common with jam bands. He fronts a slick 12-piece band and they breeze through the same songs, in the same way, note for note, night upon night, year after year. Buffett has a knack for ingratiating sing-along melodies and sharply detailed lyrics -- and he's ruthlessly single-minded.

Few pop stars have carved out so distinct a theme and stuck to it unwaveringly for so long, with such fearless zeal for bad puns: "Last Mango in Paris," "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes," "Off To See the Lizard," "Floridays," "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful," "Jamaica Mistaica" and "License To Chill."

Buffett is not the first American pop singer to sell tropical fantasies: the musical tradition stretches from Tin Pan Alley's Hawaiian ballads of the early 1900s, to Bing Crosby's and Elvis Presley's revivals of the theme, to '50s and '60s exotica and Don Ho -- on down through Buffett to country beach bum Kenny Chesney. But where the other performers have mystified the islands, Buffett is unsentimental and journalistic.

In admirable detail, his songs depict tourist traps, where the locals exist only to pour your drinks and cheeseburgers in paradise are on the menu. Buffett is not ambivalent about this ugly Americanism -- in fact, he's all for it. Buffett's music is often hideously tacky -- downright objectionable on both moral and aesthetic grounds -- but you have to give him credit for capturing a milieu and a mindset.

Buffett will never get the respect given to his generation's more celebrated troubadours, but he may prove more valuable to future social historians as a chronicler of late-20th-century American folkways. Go to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for poetry and pretty tunes, but if you want to know how baby boomers ate, drank, and screwed around on vacation, reach for albums in the Buffett catalog like “Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads.�

By all accounts, Buffett lives the life he sings about; for his fans, the experience is mainly vicarious: the closest many will come to a Caribbean lagoon is a kiddie pool in the parking lot of a Jimmy Buffett concert. Yet Buffett's songs are not so much about an escape to a place as a flight from time. Buffett's tunes are sunny and easygoing, but they have a desperate undercurrent -- a musical midlife crisis: the hopeless hope that the party need never end, that you can, as one song put it, "grow older but not up" -- remaining reckless and free of responsibility deep into adulthood.

On the new tour, dubbed ‘A Year For Still Here,’ Buffett continues to support "Take the Weather With You," which became his second consecutive number one debut on Billboard's Country Albums chart. He also recently released out a couple of live recordings: "Live in Anguilla," which captures two recent shows on the Caribbean island, and "Live at Texas Stadium," which revisits Buffett's 2004 Dallas concert with Alan Jackson and George Strait.

Meanwhile, Buffett, who also holds the title of bestselling author, is getting ready to release his next literary work in May. "Swine Not?" is a humorous tale based on the true story of a friend who moved a pig into her Manhattan residence. "It's like a comet," Buffett says of his long career. "I come rolling back through every now and again.�

Buffett has had some big success in recent years in Nashville -- but he is no stranger to Music Row; the Mississippi native initially moved there in the late '60s, when he didn't have enough money to make it all the way to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi. He signed with Barnaby Records and recorded his first album, ‘Down to Earth,’ which had "grand total record sales of just over 300 copies," Buffett says. After that experience, he took a job in music trade publication Billboard's Nashville office.

Jimmy Buffett has popped up periodically in country circles for nearly 30 years -- which leaves the Parrotheads with this head scratcher: now that he has had more singles reach the country top 40 than on the pop charts, should he be considered a country singer? "Again, people can't figure me out," Buffett says. "But I'm still here. At least I'm on the radio while they're trying to figure me out..."

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