By GERRY GALIPAULT

(March 18, 2001)

At some point on the all-star George Strait Chevy Truck Country Music Festival tour, drummer "Hawk" Shaw Wilson and his BR5-49 band mates hope to sit down with the country legend and talk about what it takes to stay on top of the game.

"We'd like to be one of those bands that came along and changed things and will be remembered as long as George Strait has been around," Wilson said recently. "He's one of the original rejuvenators of country music, a true country artist with a cowboy influence, a Lefty Frizzell influence, or Hank Williams."

The rockin' honkytonk band will get plenty of opportunities to corner Strait and pick his brain during his fourth annual cross-country tour, which opens March 24 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa and runs through June 10. In addition to BR5-49, this year's lineup includes Alan Jackson, Lonestar, Lee Ann Womack, Brad Paisley, Sara Evans, Asleep at the Wheel and the Warren Brothers.

Strait is a powerful source for BR5-49 to tap from: Over a nearly 20-year career, he has amassed 25 platinum albums (second only to Elvis Presley among solo male artists), 36 No. 1 country singles and 50 CMA nominations, and his box set is the second best-selling ever behind Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band's live set. He also headlines one of the highest-grossing festivals around, playing to more than 2 million fans the past three years and averaging 45,000 per show.

BR5-49, for all its hard work and playful mixture of country and swing, can't buy radio time. Its native Nashville, intent on churning out processed musical cheese, just isn't paying attention.

"I truly believe this, that there's a lot of people who listen to mainstream radio who are screaming for something like this, something different," Wilson said. "I have the luxury of being involved in music, so I listen to a lot of different types of music and get inspiration from all that. These people are working their butts off, doing whatever their job might be, and they turn their radio on and that's all they get. They're being told what to listen to.

"If we can make it through that and reach those people, they can call up the radio station and say, 'What's that? Never heard that before.' Then all of a sudden radio gets the idea that people want to hear this. That's all radio cares about, where the market is and 'how do we get them.' "

With its next album, tentatively due June 5 on Lucky Dog/Sony Music Nashville, BR5-49 hopes to break through the barriers.

Wilson says fans can expect more of the same but different. "We've been working steady between records always, honing our craft," he said. "It'll be the same mixture of country music, some shuffles, some waltzes, a couple of ballads, some real upbeat numbers. We have a couple of secret weapons that'll go for us."

Keeping it all live and real is producer Paul Worley (Wynonna, Dixie Chicks, Martina McBride).

"It's been fun recording," Wilson said. "I never liked it much myself, because I wasn't used to it, but the more we do it, the more I like it. Working with Paul Worley has been unbelievable. He's so laid-back; it's all about the music and he has great ideas.

"We like to make it as live as possible, so when you go in and you do 30 takes, it's kind of exhausting. Paul likes to get the live, fresh approach. He likes to take one of the first three. I think the most we've done is four takes. He doesn't want to wear it out, so tracking went really fast."

After BR5-49's previous label, Arista Nashville, was gutted and dissolved into RCA Nashville, it didn't take long for the group to find another suitor.

"Last year, we were touring on our own strength and it's really hard to make enough money to tour nonstop and stay alive," Wilson said. "We managed to do that, then Sony came out and said, 'We really want you to sign with us,' and we did. We put it in their hands and trust them in what their plan is, to find a way to get us on the radio. We've kind of been down that road before, but nothing like the support we've gotten this go round.

"We haven't had huge success on mainstream radio, and that doesn't mean we couldn't, but it's up to radio programmers if they want to incorporate a new sound rather than going on with the same trend they've had for the past five, 10 years."

BWF (before we forget): Rope BR5-49 on the Web @ www.br5-49.com.

BR5-49 TURNS NASHVILLE ON ITS EAR

By GERRY GALIPAULT

(July 26, 1998)

Go ahead, turn on a country music station today and see if you can identify any artist by their voice alone.

They're virtually all indistinguishable, aren't they?

You know Patsy Cline's lilting vocals by heart, and you can spot a Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Sr. or Buck Owens song by a country mile, but can you honestly tell the difference between Collin Raye, John Michael Montgomery and Sammy Kershaw? Or Terri Clark, Lari White and Faith Hill?

And how about their personalities, does it shine through in their songs? Does their genuine love and respect for the music come across? And is their musicianship a cut above the rest, not just another chip off the cookie-cutter Nashville block?

Listen to what has been coming out of Nashville the past decade and you might think it's the new capital of adult contemporary, but just when you think you have Music Row pegged, along comes the home-grown, homespun entertainment of BR5-49 to throw everything for a loop.

BR5-49 is just the shot in the arm that Nashville needed, and its second Arista/Nashville album, "Big Backyard Beat Show" (released July 14), will do even more to awaken that city's fat-cat ears.

The quintet's rockin' honkytonk mix of original material and sly cover versions runs contrary to what's happening in Nashville today. "Smilin' " Jay McDowell, the group's upright bassist, says that's exactly what brought him, singer-guitarist Gary Bennett, multi-instrumentalist Don Herron, singer-guitarist Chuck Mead and drummer "Hawk" Shaw Wilson together.

They wanted to play the kind of music they wanted to hear - gospel, bluegrass, rockabilly, Western swing, honkytonk, shuffles - all elements that encompass the country music they grew up on.

"We had no interest in trying to get a record deal," McDowell said recently, "because we were so outside of what was going on. We didn't pursue that at all. When it started pursuing us, I guess we were leery of that, because we knew the first thing they were going to try to do was tell us that we would have to change what we do, the way we dress. We didn't want anything to do with that. Then the more people started telling us that we could do our own thing, we warmed up to it a little bit."

In early 1996, BR5-49 - a name taken from the late comedian Junior Samples' used-car salesmen skits on TV's "Hee-Haw" - was packing them in at Robert's Western World, next to Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry. Oddly enough, their debut EP, "Live From Robert's," created a buzz in Europe, and soon celebrities and U.S. label heads were showing up at their shows.

"Even though we were right in the middle of town," McDowell said, "we felt like we were a million miles away from the country music business. Then I guess what happened was we started having a good time playing, people started dancing at the shows.

"Nashville's a very odd place in that you go to a show and nobody dances. It's like everybody in the crowd is a musician, that's the nature of Nashville. It's a great environment for a musician, like Austin, New York or L.A., but it's strange, you go to a show and the band will be tearing it up and when they're done, everybody politely applauds and goes on talking while the band's playing. I guess people are jaded or self-conscious about having a good time.

"For some reason, the club we were playing at, the atmosphere was different than the rest of the town. People were dancing, and people took notice of that. Once you walked into that door, it was a different atmosphere and I don't know what it was. People just had no inhibitions there. Everybody got along, all the different types of people.

"The record company people, not the big wigs, the ones working in the mail room or art departments, would come down and have a drink. They told their friends, and before long, it worked its way up to the top of (Arista)."

The group's self-titled studio debut album sold 175,000 copies in 1996 and generated across-the-board acclaim. They opened for Bob Dylan last year and won over more fans at European festivals, sharing the stage with Smashing Pumpkins and Beck, among others.

Now comes "Big Backyard Beat Show," another creative leap. Tracks like the first single, "Wild One," and an absorbing remake of Buck Owens' "There Goes My Love," ring clear and true to country's roots.

"We set out to make a record that's more like when we play a live show," McDowell said, "because when we play live, everything runs the whole gamut of country music. And that's how the title came about, we wanted to have some title that kind of conjured up the image of a show.

"We were surprised as we got into the studio finally that things went a lot quicker this time. We're more familiar with the studio. We weren't expecting that, really. I think we all thought we were better musicians from just playing everyday for three years together, just about. When we made the first album, we had just gotten together. For this one, we had that already under our belts, plus the experience of making the first record was past us too."

McDowell said, like the rest of Nashville, they are still shaking their heads. They can't believe they have made it.

"We ask ourselves all the time, 'How did this happen?' " he said, laughing. "It's almost like, 'Where's the trap door? If we take one more step, we're going to be out in the cold again.' We keep thinking that with every step.

"It's like the whole reason we started out was because we all moved to Nashville thinking of our version of what we thought Nashville was, this romantic vision of people playing good country music and having a good time. What we found, really, with a couple of exceptions, everybody was a songwriter trying to write a song that would get cut by an artist and get on the radio. It's complete prostitution, really. You're trying to craft something, it takes all the guts out of it. You go for the safe thing, you don't write about anything that's controversial, you don't want to rock the boat. That's not us.

"The bottom line is, we love the stuff that we play."