Who: Trace Adkins
When: 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Las Vegas Hilton Showroom
Tickets: $45-$70; 732-5755
Country singer Trace Adkins' new book, "A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions of a Freethinking Roughneck," isn't what you'd call a tell-all.
It's more of a tell y'all, a friendly monologue by the Louisiana native who embodies blue collar. He mixes his opinions with anecdotes about a life that could have ended abruptly several times on his road to success. Adkins writes about his struggle with alcoholism and conflicts with his wives, including one who shot him through the heart - not with Cupid's arrow but with a .38-caliber pistol.
The big (6-foot-6-inch) baritone grew up in a small town playing football but blew out a knee during his freshman year of college. He followed in the footsteps of many other young men from that part of the country, working as a roughneck in the oil fields and on offshore rigs.
Along the way he became a pretty good singer. He's sold millions of records since his debut "Dreaming Out Loud" in 1996 and hit it big with songs such as "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," "Ladies Love Country Boys," "Hot Mama," "(This Ain't) No Thinkin' Thing" and "Arlington." His latest CD, "American Man," which came out this week, is his second volume of greatest hits.
Adkins performs Thursday through Saturday at the Las Vegas Hilton. He's among the country entertainers headlining in Las Vegas during the annual National Finals Rodeo, which runs at the Thomas & Mack Center through Dec. 15.
He recently spoke to the Sun by phone from Norfolk, Va., where he was looking through his hotel window as an aircraft carrier passed.
Why did you decide to write a book?
A few reasons, and none of them are that I had this burning desire to enter the literary world. One of the reasons was so that the people who had been urging me over the past few years to write a book would shut up. Another one was a lot of people seemed to be interested in what I thought about things and I don�t believe the stage is the place to get up there and espouse your political views. I don�t think that artists, entertainers, singers should use the stage with their captive audience and take advantage of that situation. I don't do that and I quite frankly kind of resent other artists that do. That guy that worked hard all week long to pay for a ticket for himself and his wife, they don't want to come in there and listen to me puke up my political opinions. They want to hear "Badonkadonk" and "Hot Mama" and "Arlington," the songs they�ve heard on the radio. I thought if people are actually interested then I will put it in the proper arena, the proper venue, and that is the book. That's why I did this.
Do you think you speak for the common man?
I tried to come at this from a purely pragmatic, common sense kind of cowboy approach, kind of the way I see things. It's going to offend people on both sides of the aisle. I'm an equal opportunity offender. I call them like I see them. I just laid it out there the way I believe it.
Was it a satisfying experience?
It was. It was a cathartic, therapeutic experience for me as far as the autobiographical stuff that's in the book. There's stuff in there I hadn't thought about for years. I never had taken the time to put this stuff on paper and write about these experiences. In so doing I got some type of relief from it. It was a purging kind of process.
You keep up a hectic schedule touring and recording. How do you relax?
I go to my farm outside of Nashville. It's a place where I can feel like I'm a contributing member of society. I've always been a blue-collar guy, up until I started doing this silliness. I always earned my living by the sweat of my brow. That's the way I was raised. My father only this year retired from the International Paper Co. after having worked at a corrugating plant for 43 years. So that's my family. That's who we are. We're hardworking people. So from time to time I have to go down to my farm and run a chain saw all day or stay on the tractor or build something or tear something down,where at the end of the day I can look behind myself and see tangible results from my efforts and see something I did make things look better.
This is the political season. You express some strong opinions in your book. Do you have any favorites in the presidential race?
I think it's just so confusing right now, so wide open. People haven't made commitments to anybody, and I haven't either. I've sung at a few Fred Thompson events, but I also like a few other of the candidates. I found the Democratic debates (in Las Vegas) mesmerizing. It was so funny to watch it play out, just watching them go at each other. A couple of those I found myself being drawn to because of their style. I know he doesn't have the numbers, but I dig Joe Biden. I like his style. I like the way he's a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-bone kind of guy who just lays it out there. He knows he's going to make people mad but I dig that about him.
You worked in the oil fields and offshore for years. If you were president how would you solve the current oil crisis - with gas now more than $3 a gallon?
The oil companies haven't found an absolute ceiling yet on price per gallon. Until they do they're going to keep raising the price. What I mean by that, I imagine them sitting around the table in some boardroom somewhere going, "Well, we raised the price to $3.75 this week and we sold just as much gas as we did last week so I guess they don't care." That's got to be what they're saying. They haven't found a price yet that we aren't willing to pay, and until they find that price they're going to keep raising it.
We need to build more refineries and we need to be smart about it - build them farther inland instead of building them on the coast so every time a hurricane comes through it shuts the refinery down. That's incredibly stupid to me. I don't know how to nicely put this, but slap the environmentalists in the mouth and say, "Shut up." We've got to drill some wells so that we're not so totally dependent on foreign oil - and stop talking about the renewable resources and all that kind of stuff. We're aggressively trying to find those things but we don't have them yet and the economy in this country is driven by fossil fuel. I'm sorry but that's just a fact.
So if you want to shut this country down then just keep on putting roadblocks in front of us so that we can't get to our own oil - and that's what we need to do. We need to drill some wells. I come from a part of the country in Louisiana where there are oil well locations all over the place, all through the woods. You can be out there hunting and you're inevitably going to walk upon an oil field location and there's going to be deer tracks and everything else all over it. It doesn't affect the wildlife, it just doesn't.
What's your opinion of the dwindling supplies of gas and oil?
Down in the Gulf of Mexico, when I was working on a drilling rig, we never drilled a well where we didn't hit natural gas. We may have drilled wells where there wasn't huge oil reserves but there was always natural gas. That was back in the late '80s, early '90s. Back then it was not economically viable to run a pipeline out to the well just for the natural gas so they would just pour cement in it, concrete it up and there you go, we'd move on and drill another well somewhere else. The Gulf of Mexico is full of natural gas, almost an inexhaustible supply of it, to be quite honest with you. But we need to use other resources we have. Like we have deserts in this country - why don't we just floor them with solar panels? Nobody goes there anyway. What's the big deal? What are you talking about? Nothing lives there but lizards and horny toad frogs. We need to build more hydroelectric dams. We need to dam up every river possible and that can be engineered to put a hydroelectric dam on the river. We ought to do it. Electricity is free, it's clean. What else do you want? OK, speckled salmon can't swim upstream and spawn. OK, let's eat more bass.
Do you see any rational justification at all for gas being $3 and $4 a gallon?
No. That was one part in the book. After I had submitted the final draft, Random House's attorneys went over it with a fine-tooth comb and sent it back with three or four red flags. One of them was in that particular section of the book where I accuse oil companies of working together. I used a particular word and the lawyers said I had to take that word out. So I had to replace it with "coziness." The oil companies were "cozy."
But all the prices seem to rise about the same and the same amount. Isn't that saying something?
OK, let's say Shell refinery was closed down for maintenance. OK, I see that maybe Shell needs to charge a little extra for their gas for a few weeks until they're back on-line. So would somebody explain to me why Exxon raised their price too? Did their refinery go down too? I don't think so. It's good old American greed.
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