Shooter guns for widespread appeal

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Just as his late father, Waylon Jennings, had enough of a cool factor to play Lollapalooza,

The younger Jennings, whose latest record is "Electric Rodeo" on Universal South, is equally at home in front of bikers and two-steppers.

"We're playing with (Lynyrd) Skynyrd, all these festivals, we're headlining some shows, we're kinda just all over the place," Jennings says.

He adds that recently opening for Alice in Chains exposed his band to a new audience.

"We were playing to an audience that had never really listened to us," Jennings says. "I just came out there and said, 'Ain't it cool that a country band can play with a rock band? We're country, but this is what we think country should sound like.' That kinda gave 'em permission to listen, and they liked it. It worked really great, and now we're trying to hound (Alice in Chains) for a tour in the fall."

Jennings' current band is a hard-touring unit, even more so than his previous band, the hard rock outfit Starrgun. "Starrgun toured a lot, but not nearly as much as we do now because we just didn't have the work," he says. Starrgun would play about 100 dates per year, Jennings says, whereas now he books about 250 gigs annually.

Jennings does not want to leave any stone unturned. "It's like we're covering all of our bases, and it's important that we do that," he says. "All three bases: Southern rock, rock and country; let's do it."

Even so, Jennings says he does not tailor his set list to his audience. "I'm not a big believer in doing that, because I don't want to lead the audience into believing we're something we're not," he says. "With Alice in Chains, even though we did play all of our rocker stuff, I definitely made sure we had some real country in there so that people could understand the whole spectrum of what we do."

Reuters/Billboard

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