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Nashville before Britpop with Dierks Bentley
Chalk it up as one of those “Nowhere-But-ACL” kind of moments. “This is the first time we’ve ever opened for Coldplay,” Dierks Bentley announced from the Austin Ventures stage on Sunday. “I was talking to Chris Martin backstage; we flipped a coin and I lost, so.”
Actually, it was Bentley, not the red-hot British trio that was the anomaly: Bentley was the only mainstream Nashville country act to play the 2005 edition of the festival. His past visits to Austin consisted of opening for George Strait’s sold-out show at the Erwin Center and his local debut for a couple of hundred folks at SXSW a couple of years ago. What a difference millions in record sales will make.
Bentley’s set was an abbreviated rendition of his headlining show, drawing largely from his second major-label release, “Modern Day Drifter.” Though he could probably coast on his lean good looks and curly mop of hair, Bentley obviously cares about more than the surface gloss of his aggressively commercial product (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The title track to “Modern Day Drifter,” for instance, owes more than a little bit to Waylon Jennings’ classic sound. And opening his show with a thrashing version of Rodney Crowell’s “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” followed shortly by a Buddy Miller song, “My Love Will Follow You,” seemed to show that Bentley is more than happy to tip his songwriter’s cap to his predecessors.
A couple of his ballads were crushed in the cacophony coming off adjacent stages, but the several thousand Bentley fans were there to hear his picaresque good ol’ boy tales such as “Cab of My Truck,” “Domestic, Light and Cold” and his breakout hit, “What Was I Thinking.” It wasn’t Coldplay — who, one might say, closed for Bentley — but it wasn’t bad.
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