Shooter Jennings article - DOH mention

[Capt_Redneck]

Found this really good article about Shooter Jennings . He talks about the DOH movie and what he tried to do. Interesting on what he has to say about the movie( I highlighted it for ya'll). I think it is a good read and wanted to share it with ya'll..

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/04/Weekend/Honoring_his_father.shtml

Honoring his father

Shooter Jennings isn't one to reject his famous parent's legacy. On the contrary, he'd like to bring some of Waylon's sensibilities back to country music.

SEAN DALY

Published August 4, 2005

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As a sly-grin salute that would make his late, great papa proud, country wild child Shooter Jennings wants to congratulate the "No. 1 dope dog" in Texas.

The four-legged narc, an 11-year-old Belgian Malinois named Officer Harley, recently retired from the Seymour Police Department. Harley's most high-profile case: nailing Waylon Jennings' tough-toking son in 2003.

"That dog found a single joint buried deep in our U-Haul trailer, under guitars and a piano seat!" a laughing Jennings says, calling in from Baton Rouge, La., just another stop on the singer-songwriter's quest to bring a no-holds-barred ethic back to safe-and-sorry Nashville. "It made me feel good that they put that in the dog's bio."

Keep in mind that, because of Officer Harley, Jennings and his then-fledgling country band were strip-searched and tossed in the clink. No matter: The episode inspired Busted in Baylor County, one of the best cuts on Jennings' debut album, Put the O Back in Country, an appropriately raucous introduction to country music's boldest new star.

"It was pretty funny, man," Jennings says. "And it's all true."

Born Waylon Albright Jennings, the 26-year-old doesn't hide his affection for smoking, drinking and raising a law-bending ruckus. You can find a litany of preferred sins on Put the O Back in Country, a whiskey-bent lesson in riff-fueled Southern rock, old-school country and a little Led Zeppelin thrown in for good measure.

That O stands for outlaw, of course.

"That's what I miss, the danger of individuals like Hank Jr. and Waylon and Johnny and Willie," says the true son of a man who did whatever he darn well pleased. "They were dangerous to themselves, and they told stories, songs you could relate to. ... Rap is the same thing as country, urban blues in different places."

Jennings is the opening act on Toby Keith's Big Throwdown II traveling show (also featuring Lee Ann Womack), which rumbles into the Ford Amphitheatre on Saturday.

At first, Keith, himself a throwback soul, was allowing Jennings 15 minutes of stage time. But now Waylon's kid is up to 25 minutes ... and counting. Instead of just focusing on a few songs, the prodigal son has been hollerin' out a medley of his album, a cheeky bit of Opry-style showmanship that builds up to show-closer 4th of July, an epic shot of road trip adrenaline with a poignant twist. The Springsteen-esque song is about Jennings' relationship with his girlfriend, former Sopranos siren and current Joey star Drea de Matteo.

"(Drea and I) took a road trip together on the Fourth of July to go see Willie Nelson's Picnic (an annual bacchanal of food and music) in 2003," Jennings says. "We rented an RV and took it down there and just had such a wonderful time. It was one of those songs that reflects being in a perfect place in a relationship."

Jennings doesn't gush about much - except de Matteo. "She's killer. She's just the best," he says. He jokes that a long-haired country boy and street-smart Italian girl make the perfect couple. "We like the same (stuff): Cadillacs, gold jewelry and home-cooked meals."

Jennings and de Matteo have been together three years now and share a home in the Hollywood hills. Not that he has been there much lately. It would be entirely accurate to say that Jennings has spent most of his life on the road. You could even say he was born between the yellow lines.

The only son of Waylon Jennings and singer Jessi Colter, a benevolent Bonnie-and-Clyde tandem that jump-started Nashville's outlaw musical movement in the 1970s, a wee lil' Shooter would often sleep in a crib on his parents' tour bus. Like the von Trapps sponsored by Wild Turkey.

(Oh, and about the nickname: Colter has said "Shooter" came from her husband's love of cowboy art. Waylon, however, always said his son earned his moniker seconds after being born - and urinating directly onto a nurse. Shooter prefers his dad's version.)

"When I was a kid, they had started to settle down a bit," Shooter says about his parents, who, along with such pals as Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, were as famous for their rowdy parties as their swaggering music. "Well, I guess they were wild until I was 5, but I don't remember most of it. ... My dad told me later they were doing drugs and all that stuff, but I had no clue."

So whose tour bus is wilder, father's or son's?

"Our bus is pretty wild, man. We're definitely keeping up with them. We're having a good time out there."

A little too good sometimes. It's hard to tell what his father would say about Shooter's partying stamina - Waylon died in 2002 from complications related to diabetes - but his mother worries that he just won't shut up about it.

"She sees that I have his sense of humor with all of that stuff," says Jennings. "She's always calling me, saying, "Quit talking about pot in your interviews! You're going to get in trouble!' "

"Shooter's so much like Waylon in my eyes, sometimes I wonder who I'm talking to," says Colter, whose 1975 song I'm Not Lisa climbed all the way to No. 1 on Billboard's country charts. The 62-year-old lives on a "ranchette" in Scottsdale, Ariz., and tries to see her son at least "every six weeks or so."

"Shooter has always had his own style, from dressing to playing. He's always danced to a different tune. There are times that I worry about him, because I know the weight of that burden."

Asked how she feels about a song such as Busted in Baylor County, Colter says, "We hide nothing from each other, because we have nothing to hide. We talk very openly. (In terms of maturity), Shooter and the guys are years ahead of Waylon and Willie and all those boys I was hanging around with. I'm amazed at their ability to keep very level-headed."

At a time when such famous show biz kids as Hank Williams III and Jakob Dylan are reluctant to talk about their parents, Jennings fully embraces his legacy.

Colter and her son performed a gospel song together for an album released in conjunction with The Passion of the Christ. They're talking about doing an album together - Jessi would sing, Shooter would produce. "He's got the Waylon vibe, but the Shooter genius," Colter says.

In November, Shooter will play his father in the big-budget Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. (Joaquin Phoenix will be the Man in Black.) "If you blink, you're going to miss me," Jennings says about his acting debut.

Purists may accuse the son of milking the father's fame, especially since Shooter started his musical journey as a metalhead, moving to Hollywood when he was a teenager and starting a band called Stargunn. After seven years without a major label record deal, Jennings realized that head banging wasn't his destiny after all.

"It wasn't even that conscious of a decision to switch over to country," he says. "I had gotten a lot more into country my last few years of Stargunn. With this album, I was just trying to cut a record that was the most me it could be, you know?"

So intent on his new direction, he even turned down the chance to be the lead singer in Velvet Revolver, the bestselling hard rock group composed of former members of Guns N' Roses and Stone Temple Pilots.

"Yeah, when the Velvet Revolver guys were getting together, they were trying to find a singer. They auditioned Sebastian Bach, and they did a show with Josh Todd from Buckcherry. And then (GNR bassist) Duff (McKagan) called. Stargunn was opening for Duff's band at this big club gig, and Duff said, "We're going to do a surprise GNR thing. Do you want to be Axl?'. ... I did it, and we ended up doing a second gig at Sundance (Film Festival)."

By then, however, Shooter was too far country to stay in rock.

"I saw (Velvet Revolver drummer) Matt Sorum at a show a year ago, and he says, "So you had to go solo!' "

Not everyone is buying into his full-throttle approach. Case in point: Even though his father performed the original Dukes of Hazzard TV theme and narrated the show, Shooter says he was shot down for both jobs when he found out Hollywood was making a big-screen version, which opens Friday.

"We did (the theme song), and we gave it to (the film's producers), and it sounded killer, and they didn't use it. I auditioned to do the voiceovers, and they didn't take that, either. They're using Busted in Baylor County in the movie, but they didn't put it on the soundtrack. You know, it's Hollywood. And it's pretty hard to crack Hollywood."

Nashville, on the other hand, just might be coming around. Jennings, who plans to release a second album in March, has already filmed a reality-style pilot for Country Music Television. It centers on the singer's need to live outside of country music's milquetoast boundaries, doing things like driving around in his Escalade and playing music with such anti-establishment pals as David Allan Coe. It promises to show people that, for all his tough talk, Shooter Jennings is actually a pretty mellow dude.

"Everyone thinks I'm out to bash people. Everyone seems to think I'm either an idiot or an a------."

He lets out another smoky laugh: "I'm probably somewhere in between."

- Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or 727 893-8467.