MUSIC REVIEW : Highwaymen Hit Pay Dirt With Old West Ballads

Wednesday night’s Highwaymen concert at the Lakeside Rodeo Grounds was a musical trip back in time to the Old West.

Whenever Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson get together, either in the studio or on the concert stage, they don’t sing country music.

They sing Western music: Songs about pioneers and pioneer spirit, about cowboys and outlaws, about whiskey nights and cigarette mornings, about clear skies and wide-open prairies. Songs that put you on the Old Chisholm Trail or in some sad Dodge City saloon.

The foursome’s show, then, was a lot like watching an old black-and-white, pre-Festus episode of “Gunsmoke.” Or reading a Louis L’Amour paperback.

A romanticized account of the Old West, to be sure. But Cash, Jennings, Nelson and Kristofferson sang these songs as though they had lived them, as though the memories they resurrected were their own. And they imparted a sense of “being there” to the audience, mesmerizing the sold-out crowd of more than 6,000 people from the opening note to the final encore.

The two-hour concert, which had no opening act, got under way just 15 minutes late with a compelling version of “Highwayman,” the occasional quartet’s signature song and the title track of their 1985 debut album.

Backed by a stellar nine-piece band, the foursome then harmonized on “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” the Jennings-Nelson duet that won a Grammy in 1978.

The rest of the show consisted of a fairly even mix of tunes from the two Highwaymen collaborations--their 1985 debut and this year’s “Highwayman 2”--and the four members’ respective solo hits.

Cash, wearing his trademark black shirt and black slacks and a garish silver pendant, sang faithful, broken-voiced renditions of “Ring of Fire,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and the Kristofferson-penned “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

Jennings, who between songs was either waving or blowing raspberries into the crowd, fared best on “Luckenbach, Texas,” on which he shared lead vocals with his three compadres.

Nelson’s recital of the lovely ballad, “Always On My Mind,” was one of the evening’s finest moments; his honey tenor was equal parts mournful and hopeful, and both emotions were echoed in his excellent acoustic-guitar picking.

Kristofferson sang an OK version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” which the late Janis Joplin covered in 1971 for her only No. 1 hit. The ensemble performance of “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” gave the vintage Kristofferson hit a whole new sound--four wonderfully different voices instead of just one weary monotone.

But the foursome’s version of another Kristofferson oldie, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” was a disappointment. The powerful vocal choir essentially consumed the song, making it less of a plea and more of a demand.

The Highwaymen did best on the songs they recorded together. “The Last Cowboy Song” was something of a Requiem for the Old West, evoking rich imagery of what life out here was like before everyone got fat, satisfied, and lazy.

“Desperados Waiting for a Train” was a heart-rending remembrance of an old friend, how he lived and how he died. And “Silver Stallion” is a classic Western ballad that would be right at home in some vintage Gene Autry or other “singing cowboy” Western.

The show ended with the Cash-penned “Big River,” although the quartet promptly returned to the stage for a four-song encore that included Cash’s good-humored “A Boy Named Sue” and Nelson’s cheerleading “On the Road Again.”

There was, unfortunately, one pretty grim aspect to the evening: the venue.

Going in, the traffic situation was abysmal. An hour before the concert’s scheduled 8 p.m. start, traffic along northbound California 67, to the Mapleview Street exit, was backed up for more than a mile.

The parking situation was even worse. The rodeo grounds’ parking lot was filled up shortly after the gates opened at 6 p.m. Cars were subsequently routed to an El Capitan High School lot about a half-mile away. For $2, your car was wedged into an unlit dirt field, bumper to bumper with hundreds of other cars.

And the facility itself is a joke, with cruel bleachers and a Dust Bowl infield, where most of the crowd was herded like cattle. Human decency calls for an immediate ban on future concerts; the place was built for rodeos and isn’t suitable for anything else.

It was a great show, but too bad it was held in such a god-awful place.