Heroes of the Honky-Tonk

There is no mistaking today’s mainstream country music for much more than a business. The sound tilts toward the slick and proven to the near-exclusion of the raw and unorthodox, and the sales-obsessed leader of the pack, Garth Brooks, won’t ever be mistaken for the guy in the Neil Young song who counsels that “numbers add up to nothin’.”

Brooks & Dunn, one of Nashville’s leading profit centers in the ‘90s, makes an easy target for the mainstream’s critics, and for the progressive-country faction that sells peanuts but insists that it is the true inheritor of country tradition.

After all, the singing partnership of Kix Brooks (no relation to Garth) and Ronnie Dunn was conceived not on any hardwood barroom floor, but in a corporate office at Arista Nashville.

And the duo’s 1991 hit, “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” had a lot to do with igniting the country line-dancing craze that’s anathema to traditionalists who think the music should be about great yarn-spinning rather than about fueling a bluejeaned, pointy-booted reincarnation of the hokey-pokey.

When label boss Tim DuBois brought the two strangers together in 1990, Brooks was an established Nashville songwriter who, with his scuffed, everyman’s voice, hadn’t had great luck with his handful of releases as a singer. Dunn, the one with the classically smooth singing voice, was a recent arrival who had knocked around the barrooms of Texas and his native Oklahoma until he came to Nashville as the winner of a national country music talent contest.

It might not have been the most organic way to grow a combo, but the combo certainly grew. After four albums, plus a recently released greatest hits collection, Brooks & Dunn has 15 million records worth of platinum certifications, and 10.4 million in SoundScan-verified sales. They have done it by singing about that most traditional of country milieus, the honky-tonk. The Brooks & Dunn lyric book, most of it original songs written or co-written by the singers, reads like an index of barroom behaviors, honky-tonk division: dancing in, drowning sorrows in, letting off steam in, trying to score in. . . .

As Dunn notes during a break in an 85-date tour with co-headliner Reba McEntire that ends Saturday at the Pond of Anaheim, Brooks & Dunn know whereof they sing.

“What [people] call honky-tonks now are large, high-tech dance halls,” says the affable Dunn. “We’re talking about Texas and Oklahoma beer joints [or in the Shreveport-raised Brooks’ case, Louisiana beer joints].”

In his early days, Dunn recalls, he once was tyrannized in one of those watering spots by a customer he didn’t dare mess with.

“I remember being cornered by a big, drunk, rowdy pipeliner in this little place outside of Tulsa and being made to play the Merle Haggard song ‘Today I Started Loving You Again,’ over and over again,” he says. “A dozen times at least, every other song for four sets. He’d just say, ‘Hey, pretty boy, play it again.’ At the end, I ducked out the back door,” rather than risk having to sing Merle till dawn.

Dunn says he wrote “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” as “a take on the lifestyle of the cowboys and [other] people I was seeing at the clubs every night” during his scuffling days. “I didn’t sit down and write it as a dance song. I don’t think line dancing should be the center ofcountry music in any way. I think the music and the song and the message should be. But if it’s a healthy outlet and byproduct for people, go ahead--dance away.”

Looking beyond “The Greatest Hits Collection,” Brooks, 42, and Dunn, 44, see no radical changes in the approach that has succeeded so well. But they may be moving out of the honky-tonks in search of other subject matter.

“I imagine that every third song won’t have ‘honky-tonk’ in the title,” Brooks says in a separate interview. “Up to this point we’ve been inventing ourselves, and you tend to go back to the well on something that works.”

Dunn promises new material that “gets it out of the beer joint, and into mainstream life, period.”

While Brooks spent some of his dues-paying days in the 1970s emulating such off-the-mainstream heroes as Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine, and Dunn says he used to try to write songs like the ones Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris sang, those are paths they won’t likely revisit. Nor would anyone else in today’s country marketplace who wants their numbers to add up to something big.

“I’d love to sit down and do what we call ‘going deep and dark,’ but it’s going to wear thin on people in a hurry,” Dunn says. “The audience I grew up playing for from day one in Oklahoma and Texas would walk out if you sat there and tried to be esoteric and heavy in a club setting. That holds true today. [Most fans] don’t want some heavy cat being profound as he can be. It’s not going to get you far.”

BE THERE

Brooks & Dunn and Reba McEntire play Saturday at the Pond of Anaheim, 2695 E. Katella Ave., 8 p.m. $41. (714) 704-2500.