Life’s a struggle.  It’s the people who get us through.

Speaking of the people, get your ass out to a gig this summer.  The people watching is FANTASTIC!

I went to the Country Throwdown at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Irvine.  What a shithole.  Entertainment has gone upscale.  They’ve got Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack at Citi Field (where the Mets play, for the uninitiated) and at this venue they’ve got funnel cakes.  It’s like the whole amphitheatre’s stuck in some low rent seventies time warp, where we’ve got to eat overpriced hot dogs and beer and be happy about it.  You’d better be coming for the music, because the experience sucks.  Live Nation never heard of landscaping.  And every single surface was plastered with an ad.  You’d think back in caveman times there was no music, because there were no corporations to sponsor it.  And you wonder why the consumer is suspicious…  If you’re whoring it out to the man, collecting all that cash, why do you have to rip me off?

Twenty dollars to park.

Want to go to the show?  Let the insults begin!  The price is not the price, there are all these add-ons, which are incomprehensible.  Then there’s the print at home fee.  Makes as much sense as the convenience fee.  Why not call it what it is, A PROFIT CENTER!  People are not stupid.

And the people…  I’ve never seen so many cowboy boots in SoCal.  And the tattoos!  God, I saw enough bad ones to create a TV show.  Don’t these people do any research?  Can’t we create standards for skin art, license those wielding needles, make sure they’re up to snuff?

And the bodies!  There was this woman by the Bluebird tent, where the acts play acoustically, with a bikini top and a beer gut.  I didn’t know those two went together!

It’s a human sea out there.  Utterly fascinating.  And they knew the music.  God, the guy in the Bono outfit, even down to the same glasses, was singing along with every lick.

And the music…that’s what it was, MUSIC!  Don’t know if you got the memo, but music is supposed to be played by real people, not machines. It’s supposed to live and breathe, be different every night.  To go to a show where people actually knew how to play their Les Pauls, didn’t just sling ’em around their necks for effect (can you hear me Madonna?), was a thrill.

As for the music itself, what’s that line in the Eric Church song, "I like my country rockin’, how ’bout you?"  If only the classic rock audience could get a clue, this is where they belong, where the acts sing comprehensible songs that are closer to Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles than Kanye and GaGa.

And Kevin Lyman is trying to do a good thing.  Create an experience.  Starting is always hard, but he’s proved he can persevere.

But as much as I loved the show, really, being out in the sea of humanity was enough, and each and every act redeemed itself, the highlight of the evening was hanging with Jack Ingram.

He’d e-mailed me a few times.  Said he wanted nothing, just to meet.

I didn’t know he was such a Twitter freak.  Multiple times a day.  He tweets about USB wristbands with unreleased material hidden in the venue before the show.  But the reason I’m writing this is not to detail his new marketing techniques, but to talk about the feeling of connection I had in our conversation.

The babes all want to meet Jack.  We were constantly interrupted.  For photos, for the signing of cowboy hats (and the best hat I saw all day was a cowboy hat shaped like a six pack, yup, a circular brim with a Coors box on top…what was this woman thinking?) and I asked him…was he MARRIED?

Yup.  He’s been with his wife for two decades, from before he started playing live, he hit on her in a bar.  And he’s not about to mess it up with some pussy on the road.  Hell, looking is good enough.  He’s a lucky man, with this woman at home, and even if he could get away with lying, he’d know he’d lied, and how would he feel about that?

Because it all comes down to honesty.  That’s Jack’s mission, to lay it down true.  And although he’s hit number one on the country chart, he had years in the wilderness, did he ever want to give up?

Never.

This is the difference between someone who becomes successful and those who give up and go straight, go to graduate school.  A lifer never gives up.  He’s on a mission.  Willie Nelson didn’t have his first number one until he was 42.  You’ve got to stay the course.

But I was fascinated with Jack’s relationship.  He said he’d be with her as long as she’d have him.  This is the opposite of the hip-hop ethos, where you’re lucky to have me, bitch, and be ready to be kicked to the curb.  And it’s great that the females in rap have the same attitude, but is that real?  Aren’t relationships based on commitment and trust?

How about doubt?

Jack smiled…  OF COURSE!  He spoke about waking up in the middle of the night freaked out, he placed a hand on his wife’s back to wake her up…and she said the same thing I told my girlfriend when she did this to me…IT HURTS!  But then Jack expressed his fears, and she held his hand…

Can you express your fears?

Not that the doubt’s gonna keep Jack from moving forward.  He went from touring Texas to Rising Tide to Lucky Dog/Sony to nowhere.  I mean he could work, but he had no label, no manager…

And it’s just when most people would give up that the tough get going.  He got a new manager.  Who hooked him up with Scott Borchetta, and Jack ended up with a number one.  Was the music better?  No, he now had the right team, who’d kill for him!

Speaking of the music, now what?

Well Jack’s here.  He’d like to be up…here (he lifted his hand to eye height).  How do you get from playing Irvine Meadows as part of a multi-act bill to headlining it yourself?  He had no specific answers.  Neither did I.  This is where it gets tricky.  It demands great material and luck.  I don’t mean pure luck, I mean creating enough opportunities, being in play long enough that something unexpected can pop.

And that would be great, if he could be on the road 100 nights a year instead of 150.

And it’s not about the money.  He made a quarter million dollars a year gross without a hit, just touring Texas.  God, makes me think we should send all wannabe musicians to Texas, or Australia, where there’s a live scene that will support you…if you’re really good.

Jack’s very good looking, and charismatic, and those help, but he’s thinking about it.  Writing a song a week.  Wanting to get bigger not because he needs a bigger car, but because he wants to reach more people.  And he was of the sheer belief that it came down to the truth.  Both in his actions and his songs.

I love musicians.  They’re not like the business people.  Money does not come first.  They’re three dimensional.  They know struggle.  They know victory, but are truly familiar with defeat.  And when they encapsulate all this in a song, it truly resonates.  Because being a human being on the planet is the exact same way.  You’ve got more questions than answers, but you’ve got no choice but to keep on keepin’ on.