You wouldn’t think a star like Matthew McConaughey could stroll down Hollywood Boulevard in broad daylight without being assaulted by fans. But I saw it happen recently when he was at work directing the new video for country maverick Jamey Johnson’s latest single, “Playing the Part,” which premieres Friday in its full-length cut on the VEVO home page.

The song is Johnson’s take on what it’s like for a small-town guy like himself to find himself hanging out in Tinsel Town, paralleling to an extent his rise from musical unknown to award-laden country success over the past two years. In the chorus, Johnson remembers a time:

When the only LA I knew was lower Alabama
Back when me and Hannah were wishing on a southern star
Now it’s so complicated, I really hate it, why'd I ever want to go so far
Taking depression pills in the Hollywood Hills
Acting like I'm playing the part

He contacted McConaughey, who had befriended Johnson at the Academy of Country Music Awards ceremony last year in Las Vegas, and the actor signed on to direct the video.  It involves a parade of costumed characters much like those who can be found every day outside the Hollywood and Highland theater and retail complex vying for tourists’ attention—and tips. There's also a guy in a gorilla suit.

So when a scene called for a crowd shot outside the famous Chinese Theater, McConaughey slipped on a lucha libre-type mask and mingled with the passersby relatively unnoticed. An abbreviated version premiered Thursday night on Entertainment Tonight, but McConaughey's director's cut runs about seven minutes, as he didn't want to do anything he felt would shortchange Johnson's song. 

Here’s an exclusive look behind the scenes of the video shoot, which also made use of a local bar, where Johnson and his Kent Hardly Playboys group played their parts as a house band playing to a virtually empty bar.

--Randy Lewis

Hank Cochran, the celebrated country songwriter and singer who died Thursday at age 74 from pancreatic cancer, spent most of his life immersed in music, searching for the next song to write, and it sounds like that’s the way he spent his final time on Earth.

“I spent the last day of his life at his bedside along with his family and a few close friends,” singer and songwriter Jamey Johnson told me in an e-mail he sent a few hours after Cochran died at his home in Hendersonville, Tenn. “Buddy [Cannon, the songwriter] joined us later in the afternoon and brought along Billy Ray Cyrus. We sang a range of old gospel songs and many of his own songs to him: ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ ‘Is it Raining at Your House,’ ‘Set 'em Up Joe’ and ‘Make the World Go Away.’

“My 6-year-old daughter even sang along with us on ‘The Chair,’ and she got a kick out of Billy Ray's ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ which even got Hank singing along for a note or two,” Johnson noted. “Although Hank was tired, he didn't want anyone to leave. He was enjoying the fellowship.”

Because Cochran had been struggling for a long time with cancer, many of his friends kept in close touch and spoke to him in person or by phone in his final days. Ray Price told me, “I talked to Hank on Monday and had a chance to say goodbye. This is not a real happy day; he will be missed, I guarantee it. … He was a great person in our business, and he contributed an awful lot.”

 
Music award shows such as the Country Music Television cable channel’s CMT Awards at 8 tonight exist chiefly to recognize distinguished works, typically of the recent past — and attract audiences with all the star power they can muster — rather than to provide a forum for the discovery of new music.

But tonight’s ceremony from Nashville highlighting viewers’ favorite country music videos of the past year also is giving a first look and listen to singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson’s ambitious new album “The Guitar Songs,” which doesn’t come out until September.

Johnson, who gained critical accolades and a healthy amount of commercial success for his 2008 album “That Lonesome Song” and its award-laden single “In Color” apparently has been on a writing frenzy. He’s assembled two CDs worth of new material: 25 songs, including “Macon,” the one he’s slated to sing tonight at the CMT event, an atmospheric tale of a Georgia trucker on his way home.

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

There’s a new breed of Southern rocker who's laying waste to the stereotype of the genre being the exclusive domain of beer-drinkin’, flag-wavin’ good ol’ boys.

Not that the emerging generation is opposed to waving Old Glory or downing a brew, but there’s greater nuance as well as musical and emotional shading in the cream of this crop, spearheaded by Jamey Johnson, Randy Houser and Eric Church.

The intriguing part is that they’re selling respectable quantities of their freshmen and sophomore albums and drawing the kind of critical accolades often more commonly heaped on brainy alt-rock bands or sensitive folk-rooted singer-songwriter types.

Church gave a strong example of how these threads are being pulled together in a vibrant package with a private show this week in the outdoor foyer of the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood.

The North Carolina singer, guitarist and songwriter has been building a solid club following in the South and Midwest, one that he’s increasingly expanding into the Eastern Seaboard and Southwest. But he hasn’t had a major show yet in Southern California. He’s scheduled to get here in December, though label officials may push to get a showcase for him earlier than that.

Pop & Hiss brought you insta-reviews of all the ACM live performances, typos and all.

1. Brooks & Dunn & Taylor Swift & Sugarland & Carrie Underwood & Rascal Flatts. Here's one for those with short attention spans. Nearly everything the ACMs have to offer in a tidy little seven minutes! Host/country royalty Reba McEntire introduces the show by informing us that duo Brooks & Dunn is one of the most acclaimed acts in the history of the awards, but what follows isn't their time to shine. Instead, Brooks & Dunn become the anchor for whizz-bang medley. Swift rocked out with "Picture to Burn," looking more assured than ever. Underwood showed off her near-perfect vocals with a brief turn at "All-American Girl," Sugarland was delightfully poppy and Rascal Flatts represented some country good ol' boys. "That's what I call a stimulus package," McEntire said. We'd rather have cash, but it was a solid opening. B+

2. Kenny Chesney's "Out Last Night." The lead single from his upcoming greatest hits package is a pleasant enough up-tempo rocker, representing immediately how country award shows are different from the Grammys. Less than 15 minutes in, and we have an ode to being drunk. Rather than approach anything dangerous or reckless, Chesney spins this tale of hangin' at the local bar into a neat little slice of nostalgia. B.

Jamey Johnson's songs tell it like it is, and folks are taking notice.

When Alabama-born singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson went in to record his latest album, "That Lonesome Song," he had no intention of crafting a collection that would be hailed as one of the best country music efforts of the last year. The studio time was originally conceived as a reunion with old friends, but it also offered Johnson the chance to reclaim a sense of normality -- something he'd lost after a hit single and sudden fame threw his life into chaos.

"We didn't have a plan, and we didn't have a record deal. We didn't even have a reason to go in and make a record," he said from the road recently before a show in Fort Walton, Fla. "It just had been a long time since I'd seen a lot of my buddies."

"We started tossing a football around, and passing a bottle of whiskey around, and it was two or two-and-a-half hours before we finally decided to [record] something . . .," Johnson, 33, recalled. "We sat there and just made music."

The music that emerged from that session garnered three Grammy Award nominations for country song and male country vocal for the single “In Color,” and country album in a field that pits the relative unknown against such heavyweights as George Strait, Randy Travis, Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless.

Those nominations add industry accolades to a work that appeared on many critics' top 10 lists for its uncompromising look at a life spiraling downward. The album is a bracing yet somehow ultimately uplifting tale told in songs free of the sentimentality and the easy optimism that characterizes much of what's played on country radio.

It's structured as a thematically linked piece, a high-concept approach that largely went out of fashion in country circles after Willie Nelson's watershed examples during the 1970s, "Phases and Stages" and "Red Headed Stranger." But Johnson and his cohorts, who whimsically started calling themselves the Kent Hardly Playboys, weren't concerned with what was in fashion.

"We didn't want to be affected by any outside influences," Johnson said. "We wanted it to come straight from the musicians, to come straight from our hearts. Even before we were a band together, we came through the honky tonks learning how to play our instruments. This is the kind of music we all wanted to make, even though we've run into everything from disrespect to downright discontent for what we did."