Shooter Jennings Takes Aim At Country Music Industry

By Will Jordan

His father was one of the most legendary country music “outlaws” that ever climbed the stage and his mother’s name resonates throughout the halls of country music, but Shooter Jennings doesn’t live in his folk’s shadows. He’s always been bent on creating his own identity, though there’s no question his upbringing influenced his musical paths.
The only child of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, Shooter lived his first few years in a crib on his parents’ tour bus.
“I thought everybody's family was like mine,” he remembers. “We'd check out of hotels and travel all night. Songwriting, shows, stage setups, the band, the crew, the bus, the trucks - all that stuff was normal. And I loved it. To this day I sleep better on the bus than anywhere else.”
It’s a good thing he’s comfortable on the road. With the release of his debut album, Put the 'O' Back in Country, Shooter and his band the .357s embarked on a slough of tours dates and it hasn’t slowed down one bit. In addition to gigging, he’s also been back in a Nashville, Tenn. studio working on new material
“I’m working my ass off, but I love it,” he says.
His voice is hoarse over the phone, a sign of late nights, many drinks and tokes and singing his heart out.
“We do a lot of partying on the road,” he laughs. “We’ve always got smoke. It keeps me grinning.”
While Shooter’s music definitely has its own rock ‘n’ roll edge, he’s rooted deeply in country and doesn’t try to shake that banding.
His songs are broken down in description on his web site, “The passion on ‘Southern Comfort,’ scraped raw from the walls of some backwoods church...the guitars on ‘Daddy's Farm,’ stacked, harmonized and slathered in deep-fried soul...‘4th of July,’ a crank-it-up summer celebration sweetened by a sprinkling of George Jones...the tread-shredding, back-road, hairpin spin of ‘Busted in Baylor County’...and, above all, "Put the ‘O' Back in Country,’ which jabs a finger in the eye of everything that's wrong with America's music today.”
“I’m the first one to say it’s country,” he says about his music. “Nobody gave me a manual for what country music is supposed to sound like. An artist can play rock stuff and still be country. It's country music. And I'm going to push it as far as I can because it's that important”
Country music has always run through Shooter’s veins. In addition to touring with his parents, he also picked up instruments nearly before he began walking. By age five he was playing drums. Between tours, back in Nashville, he took piano lessons, didn't like them, stopped, then started teaching himself and enjoying it more, according to information provided by Shooter. He picked up his guitar at 14 and hasn't put it down since. He and his dad recorded a few things together when they happened to have some microphones set up and the tape recorder plugged in. Then at sixteen he discovered rock & roll.
Shooter left after high school to shake a stereotype and to seek his fortunes in L.A.
“I had to get out of Nashville because I didn't feel it was my place at the time,” he explains.
In L.A., Shooter assembled a band and named it Stargunn and for six or seven years they tore up the local clubs.
He realized he was going down the wrong road and remembered one of the many lessons of life his father passed down to him. “The most important thing he ever said to me was, ‘Don't ever try to be like anybody else, because you ain’t never gonna be.’ Then one day I was trying to describe what I wanted in this one song, and I said something about David Alan Coe, and everybody was like, ‘Who?’ That’s when I realized that about 75 percent of my story wouldn't work with this band.”
On March 30, 2003, Shooter dissolved Stargunn and went to New York City to spend some time with his girlfriend and sort out what he wanted to do next.
A few weeks later he was invited to play to play at the House of Blues in May. “I was certainly not ready,” he remembers, “but I said yes just to inspire my ass to get a band together and try. We did that show, and it wasn't terrible, but it was enough to pump me up and get me to start writing the songs I wanted to write.”
Once he had his material together, Shooter went back to L.A., found some musicians who could connect to his true, new sound, dubbed them the 357s, and locked himself into a studio with them. Six weeks later they emerged with Put the 'O' Back in Country.
Recently he’s been back in the studio working on another album, which he says should launch in the spring, and Shooter says it will have some unexpected guests and songs.
“It’s been good man. I always love working in the Nashville studio. We're definitley going to have some surprises,” he says.

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