"It's the long fin on a '61 Cadillac, the chrome tips on your boots,
the sunglasses that look like they come from a truck stop, but DON'T.
It's a twang you can't get enough of, the banjo from Appalachia that cuts into you.
It comes from a beer joint, truck-driving kinda place…
and the deluxe to me takes the white trash out of it.
Hillbilly Deluxe is the long highway, the lonesome dreams,
where hearts aren't broken, just not quite satisfied, not quite settled down."
- Kix Brooks
With Red Dirt Road, Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks began a soul search that saw them strip away much of their bulked-up honky tonk in the name of a more organic kind of country. Not the archaic Smithsonian-type, per se, but something that rocked harder and dug deeper into what the music meant to them as men, musicians and writers. It was the beginning of a journey that would bring them to Hillbilly Deluxe, a potent cocktail that merges the influences, moments and reasons for kicking up a cloud of dust in a beer joint in the first place - and in these 13 songs, the pair offer up a collection of songs that run the gamut and hit the mark of what lights up the night and saves the morning-after every time.
Rowdy. Bawdy. Raucous. Revel-ready. Hillbilly Deluxe is music for late nights, jukeboxes, car radios and anywhere that people jettison expectation in the name of high-timin' and good-livin'. Hillbilly Deluxe is a state of mind and a frame of reference that's about scraping back the high tech, drop and rolling into the arc of Saturday night and the occasional pounding in one's head on the way to church on Sunday morning.
"It all started with 'Play Something Country'," Dunn confesses. "Writing that made me want to go back to what we do, where we come from…. you know, the root of this sound 'cause it's always at the source where it's most intense. And the way I grew up on country - whether it was Cash or Haggard or whomever - they didn't hide inside a lot of production and they hit hard. "And in a lot of ways, too, 'Play Something Country' became a mission statement for this record… in a very simple redneck way. It was as much a reminder to me of what matters as anyone. It's what we do, who I am - and that hardcore country thing is something we can wear comfortably 'cause we know it. That's what we do naturally - and it's a pretty extreme deal."
Indeed, one listen to the buzz saw guitars that open "Play Something Country," the band's fastest moving single in a history of fast moving singles ("My Maria," "Ain't Nothing 'Bout You," "Red Dirt Road"), it's obviously a call to arms for the people who believe in beer joints, buzzing neon, sweating long necks, longer nights, good looking women, fastbacks. And during the course of Hillbilly Deluxe, Brooks & Dunn take their fans on a survey course of the music that got in their blood and drove them to redefine the possibilities of what modern honky tonk music could mean.
Whether it's a vintage jukebox weeper like Dunn's tear-stained "She's About as Lonely as I'm Going to Let Her Get," Brooks' Tom Petty-esque gamble on love "One More Roll of the Dice" or Dunn's rap/rave/wailer about the transformative power of brown liquor "Whiskey Do My Talkin'," Brooks & Dunn reach back to their roots, even as they push the envelope to create a hybrid that merges what's happening in American music now with the sounds, songs and aesthetics that originally inspired them. Ronnie Dunn grew up in 13 schools in 12 years, a vagabond son of a man looking for his place in the world and a mother who clung to her Bible as the only permanence in a transitional world. His father was all hard-hitting honky tonk music - and his oldest son found himself torn between the worlds of salvation and sin.
After almost finishing "church school" - a degree intercepted by the invitation to either pick school or playing in beer joints - Dunn set out to chase the music. Landing in Tulsa during the height of the Shelter Records/Mad Dogs & Englishmen/Leon Russell/Eric Clapton era, the quiet bass player was set on fire - quickly becoming a local force to be reckoned with as a genuine country singer.
"I was the only one in that world doing what I was doing," he admits. "But they got it, and they respected it - and I saw a whole other way of approaching music, too."
Meanwhile Kix Brooks was growing up in swampy Louisiana country, where beer joints weren't reverential temples to high honky tonk and country, but more combustive places where the people onstage were just an extension - and even instigators - of the party everyone had come to have.
"People didn't come to dance so much as to raise hell and have a good time," Brooks remembers. "It was about having fun…. And we played everything from Hank Sr. and Johnny Horton to Frank Zappa songs, Tom Waits, Willis Alan Ramsey. Sometimes I'd get to open for folks like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Asleep at the Wheel, George Thorogood - all these great midlevel rock/country/blues acts."
