“Ten Rounds With José Cuervo”
Rascal Flatts
Written by Casey Beathard, Michael P. Heeney, and Marla Cannon-Goodman
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
October 5, 2002
It drives me crazy that Tracy Byrd is so defined by his novelty songs.
Not as crazy as Joe Diffie, who had some ballads worthy of Haggard and Jones but is all “John Deere Green” and “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox” on country gold radio.
But Byrd took the ball and ran with it, so it’s on him.
And let’s be honest: “Ten Rounds With José Cuervo” is a lot of fun. Byrd is looser at the mic than he was in his “Watermelon Crawl” days, and he doesn’t seem to be indulging in the corniness against his will this time around. The Tex-Mex arrangement and self-deprecating humor carry this a long way, and I must thank the songwriters for giving me a line I’ve revisited a million times in my mind since the dawn of the bro country era: “The singer couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
True, this going to number one was enough for him to devolve into the singer of “Drinkin’ Bone,” but holding that against “Ten Rounds” isn’t necessary. This is a catchy and entertaining ditty that provided so much needed levity during a dark time in our history.
Maybe he can find another one to record today.
“Ten Rounds With José Cuervo” gets a B+.
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I always thought this one was a lot of fun. He does feel a lot looser, and Casey Beathard wasn’t nearly as lazy with his melodies back then. The organic nature of the production is a pleasant surprise, given how dry and lifeless Billy Joe Walker Jr.’s production style can get at times. It also makes a great companion to the also Tex-Mex flavored “Just Let Me Be in Love”, one of my personal favorites. (We don’t talk about the shockingly bigoted “A Good Way to Get on My Bad Side”.)
I do have to wonder what kind of career Tracy Byrd would have gotten had the Haggard-meets-Marty Robbins “Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes” been a bigger hit.
Just two years ago, Tracy Byrd appeared at my county fair. And it was a fantastic show. Even my dad liked it, and he’s a tough nut to crack. But as I realized Byrd was about to wind down his set, it struck me that the two hits he still hadn’t sung were the cornball “Drinkin’ Bone” and the dreadful “Watermelon Crawl”. It’s a shame Tracy Byrd had to follow Nashville studio rules to the degree that he did to stitch together his impressive decadelong run of hits, but he managed a lot of strong material in between the eye-rollers. “Holdin’ Heaven” was probably second only to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” on my list of most effective dance-floor ditties. “Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes” was the best Marty Robbins song since Marty Robbins. And “Just Let Me Be in Love” was an excellent self-loathing, Spanish-guitar laced comeback song that I wish would have been the #1 from the album that produced the song that would eventually would go to the top.
But that’s not meant to be a putdown of “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo”. As novelty songs go, it doesn’t quite reach the creative heights of “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” but it falls much closer to that benchmark than the gutteral depths of “Watermelon Crawl”. Clever from beginning to end lyrically, the song lingers in that Tex-Mex vibe that Tracy Byrd always thrived in, and with the help of Mark Chesnutt and Andy Griggs, maintains the best “party in the studio” energy of any song since Garth’s “Friends in Low Places”. I remember there being a debate at the time if there was any artist who went longer between their first and second #1 hits than Tracy Byrd (exclusively on the Billboard charts since “Keeper of the Stars” got there on R & R). I’m not sure if this debate ever got resolved, but Tracy Byrd definitely deserved that second #1 and that he still gets some recurrent airplay with this one.
Grade: B+
Fun fact: my mom used to punish me by making me watch the “Watermelon Crawl” video, because seven-year-old me in 1994 thought it was the worst song ever written.
Nowadays I wouldn’t even put it in the bottom 20 of Tracy Byrd songs. “Pink Flamingos” was worse, and as I said above, “A Good Way to Get on My Bad Side” was downright inexcusable.
Wow. Twenty Byrd songs worse than “Watermelon Crawl”. I must be out of touch with his output! I’m not familiar with “Pink Flamingos”. “Good Way” was kind of a guilty pleasure even if I didn’t agree with much of the sentiment but there’s certainly an adjective in the song that hasn’t aged well and was an inexcusable slur even in 2001.
Intended as a reply to Bobby.
I think the only even remotely interesting thing about “A Good Way…” is that as far as I can tell, it was the first charted country song to have the word “crap” in it.
Of course, I know the slur of which you speak.
I hear a fair amount of Byrd on Sirius’ Prime Country channel–mostly Keeper of the Stars and the apparently reviled Watermelon Crawl–and it reminds me what an effective singer he is given the material (which was always a fifty/fifty proposition). I will say his novelties bugged me less than Diffie’s, who at one point seemed to make a full on career with them (though I love John Deere Green and wouldn’t lump it with Prop Me Up or Third Rock From the Sun).