Honky-Tonk Man

Northern Michigan’s newest sensation rips a page from the honky-tonk, hard-bitten, yodel-ladin’, hillbilly balladeers of country music from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Basically, the music that got your grandparents, or even great-grandparents all jiggy down at the barn dance.
They’re Rusty Blaides, a band that’s taken a purist approach to old-school country music in order to pack their Tuesday night engagements at Union
Street Station in Traverse City over the past few months. The band performs long-lost and barely-remembered country classics
by Bob Wills, Johnny Cash, Hank Thompson, Hank Williams, Sr., and
honky-tonk wanna-be Wayne Hancock, to name a few, often to standing ovations from their electrified audience.
And then there are 15-20 songs close enough to be the real McCoy’s from bandleader Mark Camp, who fronts the group with an acoustic guitar and cowboy hat. A master of many genres, from rock, punk, ska, funk and pop, Camp is a brilliant songwriter well known to fans throughout the region for his work with The Dopes over the past decade. With Rusty Blaides, he takes his songwriting oeuvre a bootstep further, nailing the sound of the honky-tonk tradition like a lucky horseshoe on the post of a barb-wire fence.

EVERYMAN MUSIC
What is honky-tonk?
“There’s a lot of elements to it musically, but the heart and soul of it is basically the lyrics,” says Camp. “There’s heartache involved, drinking and lying -- it’s all about the trials of life. You drink too much, you make a big mistake, you think about it and go out and drink again.
“It’s not all about drinking, though,” he adds. “There’s a lot of songs like ‘Tear in My Beer,’ but there are also songs about friendship and getting your heart broken by a girl. Honky-tonk is about triumphs and tragedies. It’s the everyman experience.”
Add a little hillbilly attitude and some African-American swing jazz and you’ve got tunes that get mainstream respect in the honky-tonk pocket bars lining Musician’s Row in Nashville.
Making it all work is a team of ace players, including Joe Wilson on pedal steel guitar, Dave Collini on drums, Don Julin on mandolin/lead guitar, and bassist Kevin Gills. All perform with other top bands in the region: Wilson with Steppin’ In It, Gills with The Dopes, Julin with Neptune Quartet, and Collini with local jazz artists.
“I feel extra privileged to get to play with these guys, not just because they’re great players but because they’re great people and they make what we’re doing a really good time.”

ROOTS
But it all started with Camp, 38, who dabbled in country sounds in the late ’90s on a Dopes album, adopting the moniker of Rusty Blaides. The name stuck, and through the years Camp/Blaides kept honing his country act in obscurity.
“I grew up in the small town of Blanchard and was exposed to a lot of country music by my family,” he recalls. “I learned a lot of Hank Williams songs and kept going with it because I liked the music.”
Camp started a duo with dobro guitarist Pat Ivory called Farm & Orchard Time that developed a following in the early ’00s. They played fill-in slots at the jazz scene held each weekend at Poppycock’s in downtown TC and caught the attention of house regular Don Julin.
As Camp moved on to writing new songs in the tradition of original country and recording them in Collini’s studio, a new band coalesced around the music.
“They came to me with the idea of playing,” Camp says of his partners. “I can do that yodeling Hank Sr. thing, but no one was more surprised than I am that so many people were interested in playing old-style country music.”

MAKING IT WORK
There are some essentials to bringing the sound of the ’40s to life, particularly Wilson’s vibrant pedal-steel guitar, which lifts your heart on a wave and sails it over the horizon. “You really need that Hawaiian-style steel guitar sound for the music to work,” Camp notes. (And it must be said that on the odd night that Wilson is MIA, the magic tends to fizzle.)
Then too, there’s the nostalgic groove: “Musically, honky-tonk is a cross between square dance fiddle tunes and Tin Pan Alley jazz, which is where country swing comes from,” Camp says. “What makes this music exciting and fun to me is that it has so much history to it.”
Undoubtably, Camp’s background in rock, ska and funk adds a booty-shaking X-factor that makes Rusty Blaides a crowdpleaser. Not for nothing did he spend all those years packing dance floors with The Dopes, after all. He knows how to coax a killer dance groove out of an old Johnny Cash song while keeping the sound of the Man in Black pure and true.
Unlike many current musicians who study marketing trends and slavishly copy the most popular styles to ill effect, Camp rummaged through the obscure back pages of country music simply because he liked the stuff. “It wasn’t so much faith -- what drove me to create a band like this was the music sounded like fun and I really wanted to play it.”
And before he knew it, Camp’s passion blossomed into “a smoking five-piece band with some of the best players in the area showcasing these old songs.”

CD IN THE WORKS
Early reviews have spun off the charts.
“I knew people were going to like it -- you can’t not like this music, from little kids to people in the World War II generation and everyone in between,” Camp says. “But we were shocked by the response. On our first night of performing, we were getting standing ovations at the set breaks. We haven’t even sniffed our potential yet, which is pretty cool.”
Indeed, Rusty Blaides hopes to complete their first album this November, drawing from among 14 songs written by Camp and an instrumental by Collini. For the future, Camp would like to add a fiddle player to ignite a sound guaranteed to blow the roof off their performances. From there, the festival circuit, and who knows?
Put this band on your “must do” list for the coming year, pardner.

Rusty Blaides plays the Harvest Gathering Festival north of Lake City on Friday, Sept. 15. Check the Express Nightlife listings for upcoming shows or google their site on myspace.com to hear song selections. View On Our Website