Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 3, 1993 TAG: 9312030022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That's why, Dunn says, he hasn't done much songwriting lately with Brooks. That's also why during a long-overdue break over the Thanksgiving holiday they went their separate ways.
They spend plenty of time together as it is.
On stage, as the country duo, Brooks & Dunn, they are always together. They will play the Roanoke Civic Center on Saturday night.
They travel together - with their road band - on the same cramped tour bus. And in the recording studio, they share the responsibility - together.
So, Dunn said in a recent telephone interview, when they're back in Nashville for a day or two, they try to get a little distance on all the togetherness.
"We run to our houses," he said.
For Thanksgiving, when they had a rare five days off, they retreated even farther apart. Brooks went home to visit family in Louisiana. Dunn went home to family in Oklahoma.
He planned to do some quail hunting, catch up on his sleep and bond with his children.
As for songwriting, Dunn said after countless days and nights on the road, the prospect of sitting down with Brooks and writing together just doesn't suit either.
It isn't that they don't like each other.
Although they might seem like polar opposites, Dunn said they actually have very similar interests. They really like each other just fine.
It's just that distance thing.
Dunn, 40, finds much of his off-road solace in his children, Whitney, 12, and J.W., 9, and his wife, Janine.
"You try to bring everything down to normal as much as possible," he said.
For them, that often means the mall. "We cruise The Gap and all the clothing stores."
Or go-cart racing. Last summer, J.W. traveled with him, and they would arrange for nearby go-cart tracks to stay open late for them to use after each concert.
Dunn was asked whether either of his children is musical.
"I hope not," he said. "I don't want them to go through all this."
He doesn't like the idea of them spending half their lives in bars and honky tonks. "That's the only education you get in the music business."
Much of Dunn's education was spent at Duke's Country in Tulsa, Okla. Duke's was one of those mega nightclubs that popped up during the "Urban Cowboy" craze of the early 1980s, he explained.
Dunn and his group, the Screaming Ranch Band, were the house band there.
Earlier, Dunn also spent time on the nightclub circuit around Abilene, Texas, where he was a student at a religious college.
He eventually left the school because it didn't like its students frequenting the bars - particularly as performers. "My profile was just a little too high," Dunn said.
Brooks put in his honky-tonk dues around New Orleans and, for about a year, in Fairbanks, Alaska, when he worked on the oil pipeline.
He also spent a few years as a Nashville songwriter, penning tunes for the Oak Ridge Boys, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ricky Van Shelton and others.
Brooks and Dunn got together only shortly before they made their debut as a duo in 1991.
They were persuaded to team up by a mutual friend, Tim DuBois, chief of Arista Records in Nashville.
At first, they planned just to write some songs together and then try to pitch them to other artists. But when they came back to DuBois with the song "Brand New Man," he convinced them to form a duo.
The timing was right.
With the Judds bowing out as Nashville's top duo, Brooks & Dunn filled the void. Their hard-rocking "Brand New Man" album became the biggest-selling debut by a duo in country music history.
Its follow-up, "Hard Workin' Man," also has done well. A third album will be recorded in January and released sometime next year.
It will differ somewhat from the first two records, Dunn said. First of all, there will be fewer songs co-written with Brooks.
Instead, Dunn has been co-writing with his songwriting hero, Dean Dillon, who is best-known as George Strait's main collaborator.
Dunn said he just called Dillon up one day, they went fishing and then wrote. He came away with about half-dozen new songs, and they plan to get together again.
The next album also will mark the first time they will record entirely new material. Dunn said some of the songs on both "Brand New Man" and "Hard Workin' Man" were written before he ever even teamed up with Brooks.
In fact, some of the duo's bigger hits, including "Neon Moon," "Boot Scootin' Boogie," "Hard Workin' Man" and "She Used To Be Mine," Dunn said he wrote during a 3-week period in 1987.
As a songwriter, Dunn has a simple goal.
"I'd love to write just a real hard-core country classic," he said.
In the studio, he said they split the duties, each singing lead vocals on about half the songs. "Generally, you sing what you write," he said.
Dunn said neither tries to take more than their fair share.
"That is an unspoken rule at this point."
Meanwhile, he sees Brooks & Dunn continuing as a duo indefinitely. He said their styles compliment each other well.
Brooks is the cowboy hat-wearing wild one with his wild western shirts and wild onstage antics. Dunn is more reserved and hatless, but vocally no less energetic.
He said their biggest weakness is singing in harmony. "There's always a mountain to climb there," he said.
But it will come. After all, they have only been a team for a relatively short period. Maybe they just need to sing a little longer - together.
by CNB