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Plays: 3252
Views: 10603 |
Formed: 1987
Official Site: www.chriscookmusic.com
iSound Site: www.isound.com/chris_cook
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By: Parke Puterbaugh -
Chris Cook was raised on country music, spent his teen years rocking out, and then re-embraced his country roots in his twenties. Now, at 31, Cook is emerging as a formidable country- and Americana-oriented artist with Small Town Gone. It highlight |
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| Chris Cook @ Rodi's on 10.29.04 | | Venue: | Rodi's | | Date: | 10.29.04 | | Time: | 8:00 pm | | Address: | 245 West Garrison Blvd. | | Location: | Gastonia, NC [US] | | Price: | | | Description: | Come to Rodi's to hear good music and eat good food.704.864.7634 |
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By: Parke Puterbaugh -
Chris Cook was raised on country music, spent his teen years rocking out, and then re-embraced his country roots in his twenties. Now, at 31, Cook is emerging as a formidable country- and Americana-oriented artist with Small Town Gone. It highlights his abundant talents as a singer and guitarist, and as songwriter with a knack for cutting right to the bone. There’s nothing superfluous on Small Town Gone. Every word and note is a purposeful expression of truth as regards such close-to-the-ground subjects as relationships, hometowns, old coats and guitars, and even Uncle Sam.
The first thing you’ll notice is the voice. Cook is a singer’s singer with a delivery that’s pure and natural, unforced but expressive, relaxed but full of inner fire. In finding his own voice, Cook has taken cues from favorite singers on the country side (George Jones, Merle Haggard, George Strait) and the blues-rock realm (Paul Rodgers, Jimmy Hall, Lowell George). You’ll hear a bit of Jackson Browne’s earnestness and Jimmy Buffett’s laid-back whimsy, too.
In Cook’s opinion, “The most authentic country singer of the last 15 years is Alan Jackson. He doesn’t try to copy anybody, he’ll tell you where is roots are, and he’s not faking it.” That unvarnished honesty is a hallmark of Cook’s own work. Small Town Gone is the product of a small-town boy who’s traveled the world and come back home with a sharpened perspective on life and love.
Cook was born and raised in Belmont, North Carolina, a small town outside the big city of Charlotte. “I’ve been living on the same street all my life,” says Cook. “I’ve been in my home for 15 years, and before that I lived about five houses down in my grandmother’s home.” At the same time, Cook has seen the four corners of the world. Under a program overseen by the Department of Defense, he spent considerable time entertaining American troops as a member of country and rock cover bands.
Cook toured Asia for months with a Top Forty country group called Arizona Star and then formed a classic-rock outfit that played bases across Europe. “They’d give us our orders, send us over there, and we’d work our tails off, sometimes six nights a week, all one-nighters,” Cook recalls. “We did a lot of remote places where the guy that greeted us would say, ‘You’re the first entertainment we’ve had in eight months.’ They were hungry for it.”
Cook has performed in locales as far-flung as Greenland and Guantanamo Bay. While down in Cuba, he began writing two of the cornerstone songs on this album, “Small Town Gone” and “Home.” With the kind of wisdom that comes from experience, he sings, “Traveled all over the globe/Swerving all over the road/And the one thing I know is there ain’t no place like home.”
By the same token, he realizes that all is not well at home, either. “Small Town Gone” laments the strip-mall sprawl that has been sadly engulfing small towns and open land from sea to shining sea. Cook has a message for those who have been killing off our communities: “Stay away from here, keep your money in the city/We’ve got everything we need/It won’t be long and it’ll all be gone/We’re the last of a dying breed.”
“Small Town Gone” was inspired by what Cook saw happening in his hometown, but the message is universal. “I think it’s got a lot of appeal, because anybody can relate to it,” he says. “It’s one of my favorite songs. I like the whole album, but ‘Small Town Gone’ and ‘Home’ strike a nerve with me on a personal level.”
The album was produced by Jim Brock, who also played drums and percussion. Cook credits Brock with convincing him to focus his talents in the studio. “He’s the one who said, ‘Hey, man, you need to be making records!’” says Cook. They cut Small Town Gone at Brock’s Kingswood Oven studio, so named for its lack of air conditioning. “He really made the album as listenable as it is,” adds Cook. “He’s got a golden ear.”
Renowned multi-instrumentalist David Johnson judiciously added fiddle, dobro, mandolin and steel guitar to the basic tracks. “He’s like a one-stop shop for country and bluegrass,” Cook chuckles, “and he did a great job on my record. I think he enjoyed playing on it because the songs are well-crafted. I take a lot of pride in using as many chords as I can get my hands on to make the songs more interesting. I don’t like to have just a three-chord song. The guitar’s got hundreds of chords on it, so why not find them and use them?”
Small Town Gone is actually Cook’s second album, following Heartless Road (2001), a self-released CD that sold over the Internet and at shows. Cook describes that debut album as “a lot more country-rock oriented. Guitar, sax, keys, piano, a lot of harmonica and slide guitar. I love the sound of slide!”
Heartless Road was coproduced by Randy Scott and Richard Piatt at Front Porch Studio in Wesley Chapel, NC. Cook credits them with helping get his career off the ground. “They were really the first ones to display an honest interest in me and my material,” he says. Piatt, a noted engineer who Cook met through a Los Angeles-based publishing company, introduced him to Scott. “Randy immediately took a liking to my songs and offered me my first opportunity to get some of them on tape,” says Cook. “I am forever grateful.”
“I’ve been real fortunate to have a lot of positive people around me that are real supportive,” he adds. His earliest boosters include his mother and grandmother, who he recalls singing to him and his sister when they were kids. Cook also cites his grandfather (“Pop”) and Uncle Randall, who played a little guitar around the house and exposed him to such seminal influences as Don Williams, Merle Haggard and George Jones.
These days the hard-working Cook performs anywhere and everywhere, averaging 200 dates a year with and without a band. He’s particularly proud of his unaccompanied sets. “I’ve got a strong solo act,” he says. “I play acoustic guitar, stomp a tambourine with my foot, blow harmonica and sing. It keeps me working!”
Small Town Gone deserves to establish Chris Cook as a remarkable vocalist and guitarist who takes a fresh approach to homespun sounds. Insofar as the pesky matter of genre is concerned, ‘I think I have no choice to but call Small Town Gone a country record,” Cook concedes with a laugh. “That’s where it’s going on the shelf. Still, I feel the record is as much Americana as it is country. To me, it’s kind of a mixture of country, folk and blues. It’s roots music.”
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