Shooter Jennings didn’t waste any time making a name for himself. One of his very first acts on Earth earned him his pistol-packing moniker: Upon arrival, Jennings urinated on the delivery-room nurse.
“Yeah, that’s true,” he says with a raspy chuckle, grinning sheepishly almost as if he remembers the moment.
Over the past 28 years, the singer-songwriter has comfortably grown into both his nickname and into the mighty heritage bestowed by the name on his birth certificate: Waylon Albright Jennings.
Jennings has just released “The Wolf,” his third album of hell-raising yet heartfelt hard-core country and Southern rock. In its unfiltered appreciation of hillbillies, honky-tonks, and the high- lonesome sound, “The Wolf” makes plain that he is a chip off the old block.
Or in Shooter’s case, blocks. As the only child of country royalty Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, the younger Jennings has been submerged in music his whole life. From rocking in a crib on his parents’ tour bus to watching them perform from the wings as a teen, Jennings lived the life of an outlaw country star long before he decided to become one.
Although it might have seemed preordained, he arrived at his decision at the end of a circuitous route. First, like all teenagers, Jennings had to go his own way, which meant away from Nashville and country music to Los Angeles and hard rock.
Sitting in a darkened Paradise Lounge in Boston recently before his gig in the big room next door, Jennings recounts how he and a few friends caravanned to the Sunset Strip with Guns N’ Roses in their eyes. “When I saw Axl (Rose) step off the bus with the hayseed in his mouth, I was sold right then,” he says of the classic “Welcome to the Jungle” video.
He fronted Stargunn, a band he describes as “more riff-rock-y than glam metal” and built up a decent following.
Jennings even sang a few times with an early version of the post-GNR outfit, Velvet Revolver. But in the wake of his father’s death in 2002, Jennings started feeling the pull of the music of his youth.
“When I was doing Stargunn, we were doing country covers and it was still running through my blood. And there was a respect, an admiration there, but I didn’t get obsessed with country until later,” says Jennings, whose goatee and tangle of shoulder- length brown hair give him a strong resemblance to both his father and Bob Seger circa “Night Moves.”
Colter says even though her husband never saw Shooter come around to country, he was supportive of Stargunn. “When Waylon saw him, he said, ‘You know the music is in good hands.’ I didn’t know that Waylon was looking for that … and then he said to Shooter, ‘You’re so far ahead of where I was at your age.”‘
As for his famous nickname, “That was Waylon’s version of it,” says Colter with a chuckle on the phone from Arizona. “I just didn’t feel like calling a little critter Waylon. It didn’t seem right. And Waylon was such an Old West buff and we were just looking for a name temporarily to put on him.” Like his dad before him, Jennings has generally eschewed the Nashville machine, choosing to work with producers and players whom he likes, including veteran steel guitarist Robby Turner, who logged many miles alongside the elder Waylon.
And also like his dad before him, Jennings, who is expecting his first child with his girlfriend, actress Drea De Matteo (“The Sopranos”) – has discovered resistance on radio to his brand of gritty but tuneful odes to women, whiskey and the wide-open road.
Although the rousing “4th of July,” from his defiantly titled debut, “Put the O Back in Country,” was a minor hit in 2005, he has yet to feel the love for either the 2006 follow-up, “Electric Rodeo,” or the first single from “The Wolf,” a countrified take on Dire Straits’s ’80s hit “Walk of Life.”
“I don’t know if it’s that they don’t want the way it’s going to change,” says Jennings, clearly exasperated at not being allowed into what he calls “such a small, tight community” of programmers and tastemakers.
What’s ironic is that there is nothing “experimental” or “alt” about what Jennings is doing.
