Shows include Lykke Li and Lady Gaga; the Kills and Paul Simon are among the acts planning album releases

Critic's Pick: The Stagecoach Country Music Festival

The annual Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio, which turns 5 this year, is always buoyed by the richly eclectic swath of music its organizers assemble. It’s a glowing example of the possibility for peaceful coexistence between the hyper-polished acts that monopolize the country radio airwaves and the grittier acts that keep the soul of country music alive.

The former camp is well represented at the top of this year’s two-day bill April 30 and May 1 in the Jimmy Buffett-soaked hits of Kenny Chesney, the relentlessly sunshiny pop-country of Rascal Flatts and don’t-mess-with-me assertiveness of Carrie Underwood.

What makes this year’s Stagecoach lineup particularly tantalizing is the first West Coast appearance in ages by country queen Loretta Lynn, who demonstrated forcefully with her Jack White-produced 2004 album, “Van Lear Rose,” that she’s still got a few surprises up those puffy ballroom-gown sleeves she adores. Another recently rejuvenated veteran who steps into the spotlight is Leon Russell, one of the first rockers to let his country-freak flag fly in the ’70s with roots albums he made under the pseudonym Hank Wilson.

Ricky Skaggs, who helped usher in a new era of traditional country in the ’80s, has focused in recent years on bluegrass and gospel music. But the multi-instrumentalist revealed recently that he’s strapping on an electric guitar this year to revisit his deep trove of country hits.

Stagecoach also typically offers up bona fide left-field delights, and this year that includes the West Coast debut of the Cleverlys. This whimsical Nashville outfit applies no-joke instrumental chops and multi-part vocals to material including Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” and British prog-rock band Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” Gentlemen, start your yodels. -- Randy Lewis

Concerts

March 9: Lykke Li. This young Scandinavian turned heads with her 2008 debut, “Youth Novels,” a sweet pop effort with surprisingly economical, rhythmic-based arrangements. New effort “Wounded Rhymes” is a bit more ice cold, this despite largely being recorded in Los Angeles. Dance pop regularly deals with heartbreak, but rarely does it do so this primal. El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. Wednesday. Sold out. www.theelrey.com. -- Todd Martens

March 22: Raphael Saadiq. One of the neglected aspects of Mick Jagger's Grammy performance last month was his backing band. During the Rolling Stones singer's take on Solomon Burke's “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” behind him on guitar was multitalented vocalist-songwriter-style icon Saadiq as well as other members of the group that helped make “Stone Rollin'” (out May 10), Saadiq's propulsive new album. The singer, who made his name in the '90s as part of new jack swing group Tony! Toni! Toné, has, over the last couple of albums, drawn from the wellspring of rhythm and blues old and new. On “Stone Rollin',” he turns up the volume. The Who used to call this stuff “maximum R&B.” In Saadiq's hands, it's more like “R&B to the max.”  The Music Box, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. March 22, $29.50. http://themusicboxla/. Also at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Indio, Calif., April 16. Sold out. www.coachella.com. -- Randall Roberts

Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts and Carrie Underwood will headline the fifth Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio, slated for April 30 and May 1 on a weekend that also will feature country veterans Loretta Lynn, Rodney Crowell and Ricky Skaggs as well as newcomers including the Secret Sisters, Easton Corbin and Steel Magnolia.

Leon Russell, Darius Rucker, Wanda Jackson, Truth & Salvage Co., Josh Turner and Jack Ingram will help fill out the weekend bill, for which tickets will go on sale Nov. 5. The full lineup and details on camping and other arrangements are posted at the Stagecoach website.  Two-day festival passes will cost $99, and children 10 and under are free. Stagecoach is held on the grounds of the Empire Polo Field.

-- Randy Lewis 

Photo of Kenny Chesney at 2009 Stagecoach festival. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

Photo of Carrie Underwood at 2008 Grammy Awards. Credit Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

A half-hour or so into my recent conversation with singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier about her emotion-fraught journey to find her biological mother, a topic she explores in her new album, “The Foundling,” I asked what effect the whole episode had on her adoptive parents, the only family she’d ever known, since her biological mother had placed her at a New Orleans orphanage shortly after she was born in 1962.

“My adoptive dad passed a few years ago,” she said. “But my adoptive mom is still alive in Louisiana.”
 Has she shared this powerful new album with her adoptive mother?

“No,” she said. “I quit sending them to her about three records ago. I sent her the first one, and was waiting on pins and needles to hear what she thought of it. She never got back to me.  I asked her, and got a nothing response. Then I sent her the second one, and the third one, begrudgingly — sort of like, 'I’m going to send it to her, but I’m not ogoing to mean it,' ” she said with a little laugh.

Because Brooks & Dunn and Toby Keith played Sunday night after the deadline for Monday Calendar's Stagecoach report, coverage of their performances is being blogged on Pop & Hiss:

The most impressive thing about Toby Keith’s festival-closing performance Sunday at Stagecoach was the fact that he took the time in the middle of the set to string together several contemplative songs on a night when most fans would have been happy to spend the whole time on their feet whooping and hollering along with the upbeat stuff.

Nuance isn’t a quality that gets a lot of attention in the waning hours of events like this.

But this Oklahoma tough guy has his sensitive side too, which makes some of his more blustery songs easier to swallow in context.

It helps, of course, when his reflective nature is directed toward such subjects as his favorite watering hole (“I Love This Bar”) or the yearning to have lived a more adventurous life (“Should’ve Been a Cowboy”) using imagery his audience can fully relate to.

He’s a good lyricist and as time goes by he’s found inventive ways to show it, one of the best being “As Good As I Once Was,” a self-deprecating look at a chronic bar brawler who realizes several years down the line that a lot of things about him ain’t what they used to be.

The way he’s going, Keith is on track to wind up better than he once was.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Toby Keith at Stagecoach. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Because Brooks & Dunn and Toby Keith played Sunday night after the deadline for Monday Calendar's Stagecoach report, coverage of their performances is being blogged on Pop & Hiss:

The charitable view of Kix Brooks & Ronnie Dunn’s announcement last August that they’ve decided to call it quits as a duo, which included the detail that they wouldn’t do so until the end of a 2010 farewell tour, is that they wanted to give fans some closure, one last chance to see them live.

The cynical view is that they simply want to give a fading career one last jolt in the bank account before each musician moves on to new ventures. It’s hard not to take the cynical view when Brooks & Dunn’s long hit streak, which started to sputter about a decade ago, was built on songs that craftily — cynically? — combine time-honored country music imagery, push-button emotions and frequently derivative instrumental and melodic hooks.

All were in play Sunday night as the farewell tour touched down at Stagecoach. The set went heavy on the hits, and no production touch was too shameless for their adoring crowd, including the trotting out of three military officers in full uniform to salute the flag during 2001's “Only in America,” which concluded with the firing of confetti cannons packed with red, white and blue streamers.

Or consider the chorus of “Hard Workin’ Man,” their 1993 hit.

At the desert gathering, pop-driven acts, traditional sounds and fringe performers all have a chance to please an expanded crowd.

 The old gag about people who brag about loving both kinds of music — country and western — gets a twist at Stagecoach. Out in the desert, the annual festival serves up both kinds of country music: that which sells, and everything else.

Fest-goers generally fall into one camp or the other, and even though it often feels that the gap between is a great divide, there's not a hint of rivalry among these groups that otherwise rarely intersect.

The majority, predictably, plop down their blankets and lawn chairs — the kind with the built-in, beer-friendly cup holders — in front of the Mane Stage, where on Saturday the lineup was topped by a couple of contemporary country's more pop-driven acts, Keith Urban and Sugarland, and Sunday by the hard-charging likes of Toby Keith and Brooks & Dunn.

Far across the Empire Polo Field grounds in Indio, tradition-loving fans ensconced themselves in front of the Palomino Stage, where standard bearers such as Merle Haggard, Ray Price and Bobby Bare held forth on Saturday, while Sunday's offerings extended from the searingly dark folk country of Mary Gauthier to the Band-influenced Avett Brothers to those country-gospel hit makers of yore, the Oak Ridge Boys.

And in between, at the Mustang Stage, fans of the fringe were served by boundary-blind Americana musicians including Victoria Williams, Trampled by Turtles, Truth & Salvage and Black Prairie; Grand Ole Opry stalwarts Bill Anderson and Little Jimmy Dickens; and cowboy poets Waddie Mitchell and Baxter Black.

It's a catholic mix that draws no distinction between acts that just want to party and those more concerned with the inner workings of the human heart. But the difference is there for anyone attuned to it, and for many, the gift of Stagecoach is the ability to experience both schools in the same place. 

Plenty turned out to savor that gift: Preliminary estimates put the average attendance at 50,000 each day, a significant uptick from last year's record of 40,000 per day, Goldenvoice chief Paul Tollett said Sunday.

Bobby Bare got Saturday off to a rousing start with several of the Shel Silverstein narrative tales he's recorded over the years — sterling examples of detail-rich songwriting that avoids cliché at every turn. Silverstein excelled in the tradition of tall tales from the American frontier going back to poet Robert W. Service and beyond, such as one concerning a chump who's had one too many and decides to pick a fight with the toughest guy in the bar, only to get a lecture on what it really means to be “The Winner”: “He said, ‘You see these bright white smilin' teeth, you know they ain't my own / Mine rolled away like Chiclets down a street in San Antone.'”

Just as attendance for Coachella saw a significant jump this year over 2009, the turnout for Stagecoach is also up substantially.

Goldenvoice chief Paul Tollett said Sunday that preliminary figures put total attendance for Saturday and Sunday over 100,000. The average daily attendance over more than 50,000 people tops last year’s record of 40,000 per day, which count as sellouts.

A reconfiguration of the stages allowed more territory in front of the Mane Stage, headlined this year by Toby Keith and Brooks & Dunn on Sunday and Keith Urban and Sugarland on Saturday, potent 1-2 punches both nights.

There also appeared to be a noticeable increase in the number of merchandise vendors this year, and the food merchants also were out in impressive numbers.

[Updated at 8 p.m.: Indio Police spokesman Ben Guitron said arrests for the two-day Stagecoach weekend total 10, most of them for alcohol-related charges, including drunk and disorderly behavior. This compares to last weekend's three-day arrest total of 49 at Coachella, most of those drug-related, Guitron said.]

--Randy Lewis

Photo credit: Gina Feazzi / Los Angeles Times

I must confess I’ve had a hard time connecting with the Avett Brothers’ latest album, "I and Love and You,” despite the number of trusted colleagues touting its virtues. Something about the Rick Rubin-produced collection hits me as a bit too studied, too earnest for its own good.

So it’s a relief to report that their Stagecoach performance Sunday night at the Palomino stage was brimming with the infectious energy that I can't find in the grooves--OK, bytes--of the album. “Tin Man” picked up an infectious bounce absent from the recording, and the energy in several of their other numbers could barely be contained on the stage by North Carolina-reared siblings Scott and Seth Avett.

As has been the case with other newer generation acts, the Avetts tipped their hats to country music past, in their case a rollicking version of the Flatt & Scruggs standard “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” Their own “The Fall” was a happy mash-up of a Cajun two-step and an Irish jig, infectiously embodying the spirit of a song that postulates “only good things can come to those who practice reason and recognize good fun.”

It’s a worthy philosophy.

--Randy Lewis

Click here for photos from Stagecoach.

Photo: Scott and Seth Avett. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Four songs into Keith Urban's headlining set Saturday night at the Mane Stage, the New Zealand-born country star offered up "Stupid Boy," a track from his 2006 album "Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing" that took on new meaning after he checked himself into a rehab facility for backsliding on substance-abuse problems.

It was, and remains, a clever choice. The song was written by Sarah Buxton as a slice of empathy from one girlfriend to another. But tackling it from the male perspective, Urban turned it into a self-dialogue about a guy who ignores the great blessing of his relationship with a good woman, ultimately losing her by ignoring the unique gifts she brings to the table. (The song stirred thoughts of “Tiger Woods” but Urban, ever tactful, made no mention.)

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Who’d have thought?

Looking to indulge my hankering for a bona fide beignet, that heavenly French doughnut native to the Café du Monde in New Orleans, I beelined for the booth that was offering them up as Sugarland was wrapping up its Mane Stage set by digging deep into its repertoire of classic-rock influences.

While waiting for a fresh batch to be yanked from the vat of boiling cottonseed oil before being buried under a powdered sugar avalanche, I asked the proprietor how things compared with last weekend at Coachella.

“The hippies ate better than the country crowd,” he said. “I’m dying out here.”

Perhaps it was partly due to his location in a comparatively remote quadrant of the Empire (Polo Field), where patrons have to battle upstream to find him.

Across the grounds, adjacent the Mustang and Palomino stages, at the Stagecoach’s annual barbecue cook-off among a few dozen purveyors of all things smoked and scorched, the offerings were sold out well before I made it around 5 p.m. in hopes of sampling this year’s entrants.

Well, as some country wag surely observed at some point, each tomorrow brings a new sunrise. And with any luck, freshly smoked pork butt as well.

Click here for photos from Stagecoach.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush of Sugarland perform at Stagecoach. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Parking is a journey to the dark side for all concerned this weekend. Several acres were set aside for free parking for those coming to Stagecoach just for the day, and the three-lane-wide jam of cars and, mostly, pickup trucks jockeying to get in earlier Saturday was breathtaking. 

Even a musician of Merle Haggard’s stature got caught in the fracas, his bus pulling in about an hour behind schedule to the area in back of the Palomino Stage, where he would play later in the evening.

But the esteemed singer and songwriter was relaxed when I caught up with him on the bus, as Tiger Army lead singer Nick 13 launched his new roots-country side project just a few feet away. (Nick 13 paid earnest homage to Haggard and 84-year-old Ray Price, both of whom would be following him shortly on the same stage.)

Haggard’s new album “I Am What I Am” came out earlier this week, and he spoke about the intimate tone of many of the homespun songs. There’s no flash, little outward fire in the gentle collection.

“It’s pretty personal,” Haggard, 73, said softly, sitting at a small table at the back of his bus, while other members of his entourage hung out in the front -- joined by Bobby Bare, who climbed aboard after finishing his own set a few minutes before.

B.J. Thomas played a mini-game of Six Degrees of Pop Music Separation during his Vegas-friendly Stagecoach set Saturday at the Palomino Stage.

Along with several of his signature hits, including "Hooked on a Feeling," "I Just Can't Stop Believing" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," Thomas dropped in a cover of the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby."

The connection?

"Hooked on a Feeling," as you may recall, became a hit again a few years after Thomas' version made the charts, in the wacky "Hookah-chukka" version by Blue Swede. The story goes that the geniuses behing Blue Swede's take got their inspiration from one of the much bootlegged snippets of the Beach Boys' "Smile" album, which had been shelved amid much internal and external resistance to Brian Wilson's grand sonic experiment.

Blue Swede latched onto one piece of tribal-like vocalizing and ran with it in reimagining Thomas' recording.

That made his nod to Wilson an especially savvy tip of that hat.

Then again, maybe he just liked the song.

Click here for photos from Stagecoach.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: B.J. Thomas performs at Stagecoach. Credit: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images