We’ve already witnessed Chris Stapleton’s star-making CMAs crossroad. Seeing him play for a packed house at L.A.’s El Rey Monday night (Nov. 16), it was easy to pick out the possible germ of a Grammy moment, too. During his encore, Stapleton sang “Tennessee Whiskey,” the song that turned him into a much-faster-than-overnight sensation on the CMA Awards telecast. But he wasn’t done yet. “You guys okay if we play the blues here?” he asked before launching into the real climax of the show, “Sometimes I Cry,” a slow, thoroughly stripped-down gut-punch of a soul ballad. It made women go weak at the knees, men tremble, and God sniffle. Up in the balcony, sitting next to Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams nodded his head as if he’d finally found the voice.
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Not that anyone at the Grammys has asked us for February programming advice yet. And not that Stapleton is necessarily yet the frontrunner for best new artist, or even guaranteed a nomination. We’re just saying: if the producers don’t find a way to squeeze him doing that number onto the telecast, someone will be asleep at the switch.
The El Rey crowd was so over-the-top effusive, it felt like a homecoming for a local hero, not the L.A. embrace you’d expect for a stringy-haired, straw-hatted Kentuckian who was only half-joking when he brought up his hillbilly bona fides. But Stapleton has a way of inducing a severe rooting interest. His songwriting chops, mountain-moving voice, and humble presence made him a legend within the Nashville city limits. Throw in the right TV exposure and suddenly you’ve got someone poised to claim the triple crown of support from critics, awards, and average Joes. “You’re the real deal, Chris!” yelled one of the crowd’s designated spokesman. They were shouting him on, and maybe implicitly cheering themselves for having been smart enough to nab tickets before the CMAs drove secondary-market tickets for the El Rey into the $250-and-up range.
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Stapleton didn’t overtly acknowledge his suddenly changed fortunes in any way, other than to say “It sounds like a few of you have heard this record I have” after the first couple of numbers became sing-alongs. The only real effect on his touring show is that “Tennessee Whiskey” has finally been moved back from its third, fourth, or fifth position in the set to an inevitable encore slot. He opened Monday’s show with “Might as Well Get Stoned,” which, with its references to troubles around the world as well as personal ones, might have been his subtle nod to the current troubles in Europe. Despite that Waylon-esque sentiment, love is stronger than both death and weed in the Stapleton canon, and he reinforced that by spending a good third of the show locking eyes across the stage with his backup singer and wife, Morgane Stapleton. (Serious “cute couple alert,” everyone.)
He had Morgane sing lead on an extended slow-burn version of “You Are My Sunshine,” and otherwise she harmonized choruses and half-verses on the vast majority of the material. A newly penned number, “Tipsy,” ventured into Black-Crowes-doing-Stones territory, with Morgane being the Lisa Fischer to her husband’s hard-riffing Keith Richards. When she occasionally took a break, there was just a trio on stage, which made this “Tennessee Whiskey” very different from the horn-driven soul-revue version Timberlake helped mount for the CMAs. Even Stapleton’s nicely underproduced debut album, Traveller, starts to sound overproduced once you’ve heard him play the stuff in trio format. There’s no danger of it sounding too small, even when he moves to the bigger halls that are probably being booked as we speak. His sweet-grits voice takes care of that.
There are actually frightening moments in a Stapleton show. It’s a good kind of scary, but it is a little jolting initially. His vocals come with a turbo-boost feature where, a couple of minutes into certain songs, he’d suddenly go up an octave for a phrase or two, which would be only mildly startling if he didn’t also at that same instant start singing twice as loud. If the compression of recorded audio compression has made you forget what kinds of dynamics a live sound system can provide, hearing Stapleton launch into overdrive on a dime can leave you looking for the shoes you got knocked out of.
He’s not always about vocal gymnastics — that wouldn’t be true to the Mussel Shoals-style soul that had to have been an influence on him. And there’s no need to go over the top on a tune like “Nobody to Blame,” which, not surprisingly, is his new single for country radio, being the closest thing to traditional country in his set. Much has been said about how Stapleton might be too left-field for that format, but actually, the Southern rock flavor he favors on much of the Traveller material is pretty in-the-pocket for modern country. It’s more his Gregg-Allman-on-steroids voice that makes him a bit of an odd man out… and live, more than on record, the fact that everything gets distinctly bluesier.
The only disappointment of the set was that Stapleton didn’t augment it with any of the hits he’s co-written for country stars over the years, although you can understand that he might not want to confuse the rockers who are coming out to see him with a Kenny Chesney “cover.” Not did he do any material from his old bluegrass band, the SteelDrivers, although those numbers have been showing up at other stops along the tour. He made up for any of that Monday by going the extra mile on real covers, going directly from “You Are My Sunshine” into a delightfully unrecognizable arrangement of Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know What It’s Like,” rendered here as a cheerful rock shuffle. He gave the crowd a verse and a chorus of “Free Bird” — and if you know anything about Stapleton, you know he didn’t play it for irony — and finally, in the encore, the wild card of Waylon Jennings’ “Amanda” and the inevitability of the George Jones hit “Tennessee Whiskey.”
At 80 minutes, the show would have seemed over too soon if not for “Sometimes I Cry,” a true mic drop of a show-closer that would have to send any crowd home sated, no matter what preceded it. Crying could only be understood as a theoretical construct, of course, in this particular moment, with everyone feeling they’d just caught the tail of one of the happiest comets of the year — an actual musical miracle passing by the Miracle Mile.
Set list
Might as Well Get Stoned
Traveller
Fire Away
Was It 26 (Charlie Daniels Band cover)
Nobody to Blame
You Are My Sunshine
You Don’t Know What It’s Like (Tom Petty cover)
Parachute
Tipsy
Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd cover)/The Devil of Music
When the Stars Come Out
Outlaw State of Mind
Encore:
Amanda (Waylon Jennings cover)
Tennessee Whiskey (George Jones cover)
Sometimes I Cry