Dale Watson doesn’t drink often — or so the red-eyed crooner claimed throughout a swift set of anti-Nashville compositions Friday night at The Bluebird Theater.
Seamlessly mixing comedy and country, Watson churned through a number of classic covers by Merle Haggard and his original country idols, and presented his birthed in elements of western swing, rockabilly and outlaw.
Watson is a semblance of the past, and he doesn’t try to hide it. With each shot of whiskey offered by the crowd-and there were many-his smile grew wider and his stories longer. “This is not a chaser, Lone Star Beer is a better,” he said during one such impromptu break as he admired a bottle of Texas’ national beer and the name of his three-piece backing band consisting of stand up bass, drums and pedal steel guitar, as if in an old time commercial.
No tune defined him more than “Country My Ass,” which he said George Jones once complimented him for in another of his prolonged tales. While his tirade on the modern state of country music came as no surprise, the drunken rallying call came off bitter by the end as he trounced upon acts like Jason Aldean, Shania Twain and Rascal Flatts. Tunes like “I Lie When I Drink” captured the original country feel he strives for, but one could only wonder how much he fabricated as the whiskey, beer and tequila kept flowing.
He kept it going with favorites like “Nashville Rash,” and “Whiskey or God” before telling us that we had not listened to country tonight, but Ameripolitan music. The comedy revue had the crowd keeling over, but the incessant Nashville bashing and genre-boasting pride teetered into near-drunken rambling.
While he might have carried on in his malaise towards the state of the industry for too long, Dale Watson is a modern day torch bearer of what original country out of Nashville used to sound like. Judging from the cowboy hats in the crowd, Denver has more honky-tonkers than you’d think, and every one of them sang along to the shuffled arrangement of “Mama’s Don’t Let Your Cowboys Grow Up to be Babies” before heading out for another round.
