“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+.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
Previous: Keith Urban, “Somebody Like You” |
Next: Rascal Flatts, “These Days”
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).
I agree with the “B+”. I am usually not a fan of novelty songs but every now and then someone will win me over with one. This is one of those examples. I sometimes forget that music is also about fun, lol.
I too agree with the “B+”. I tend to be a fan of good novelty songs, but most novelties are dreck. This a decent song, with a good melody, good production and good vocals
This is my favorite novelty song of Tracy Byrd, though I don’t detest Watermelon Crawl like most of the other commentators do. I recall this song being the entry in the Sirius 1000 songs list right after Coat of Many Colors and the hilarious reaction that ensued.
I had never heard Good Way to Get On My Bad Side before, and I was not expecting it to turn into a country protest song. And yeah, I’m a little embarrassed for both Tracy and Mark Chesnutt (especially) that they recorded that song.
This song was….OK. I don’t hate it like I do ”Watermelon Crawl” and ”Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous.”
Funny you should mention Joe Diffie; I also had the thought over the years, and when he died, that he was a great singer hamstrung by the novelty songs. My favorite from him was ”Ships That Don’t Come In.” (Not-so-fun bit of trivia: that was also the favorite song of NASCAR driver Davey Allison, and Joe sang it at his funeral 32 years ago yesterday.)
Difference is that Diffie’s “novelty” songs were great and Tracy Byrd’s “novelty” songs were generally crap. (“Watermelon Crawl” belongs in the “WC.”) “John Deere Green”-pegged as a novelty song above–“Pick-up Man,” “Third Rock…,” “Prop Me Up…” didn’t hamstring Diffie–They MADE him. “Ships That Don’t Come In” was a great one-off, but most of his slow ballads were weak. (“Is It Not Too Much to Ask.”) There was no point in him trying to be Vince Gill, when he could never do that. (Heck, Toby Keith said that his label pressed him to be “another Vince Gill” and he told them off.) There’s only one Vince.
“Ten Rounds with Jose…” was a great song for Byrd and I’m glad it revived his career in the 2000s, after many of his more successful ’90s contemporaries had already been pushed out.
“Pick-up Man,” “Third Rock…,” “Prop Me Up…” didn’t hamstring Diffie–They MADE him.
OK, so that was a bad word choice on my part. They may not have hamstrung his career, but much like Tracy Byrd, the reliance on those novelties made his catalog, shall we say, not as good as it could be.
But I stand by the rest of what I said. Diffie’s novelty songs may have been better — although it deserves to be said that’s just a matter of opinion — but as far as I was and am concerned they were just two different kinds of stuff that wears out its welcome more quickly than other kinds of songs, especially if an artist loads up their catalog with them.
most of his slow ballads were weak.
Even if that was the case — and again, that’s just another matter of opinions and different tastes — it’s more than a little bit disingenuous to defend it by saying that Diffie’s only other choice was “trying to be Vince Gill.” Now, I don’t think, say, ”trying to be George Strait” (as so many of the ’90s hat acts seemed to be doing) would’ve been a better option, but there were other artists — Mark Collie comes to mind — who carved their own niche and had their own sound and didn’t need those novelty songs to do it.
Those records were so important for him commercially, but they also undercut his credibility in the industry in a way that he never recovered from.
He managed to break into the CMA male vocalist race on the strength of his early work, but he was never a serious contender again once he made the novelty pivot.
It was unfair but it was the perception of him at the time: Joe Ditty.
Unfortunately, the concept of being a “starving artist” is hugely overrated so many artists are willing (or forced) to accept lesser material in hopes of achieving those elusive radio hits. In Tracy’s case he probably made the right decision in terms of making money and future personal appearances. I was associated with the Florida Sunshine Opry for years and believe me, possession of a history of hit records definitely affects the price an artist can get for bookings. If you check his website, you will see that Tracy still has a lot of bookings
For what it’s worth, I suspect that better quality material might have extended his chart presence for a few more years but it would not have prevented a traditionalist like Byrd from being wiped out by the bro-country tidal wave that arrived full steam in 2010. Even the fabulously successful George Strait saw his radio success crash after 2012 despite no diminution in the quality of material recorded.
Trace Adkins pretty much followed the same template a decade later.
Those hits did enough damage that the Diffie awards show tribute was done by Jason Aldean, ERNST, and Morgan Wallen instead of Chris Stapleton and Patty Loveless.
Those hits did enough damage that the Diffie awards show tribute was done by Jason Aldean, ERNST, and Morgan Wallen instead of Chris Stapleton and Patty Loveless.
Savage, but spot-on. I remember hearing about that and thinking, ”OK, at this point we’re just being trolled.”
I always enjoyed Byrd championing the working class, even in the most absurd of ways. His novelty numbers lingered somewhere just this side of insipid which kept them interesting to my ears. It mattered that the sentiments sounded sincere.
This single is similarly silly fun. It is enthusiastically delivered and the narrator sounds likeable as he loses his match with tequila.
The self-deprecating tone works so much better than some chest-thumping bravado. Imagine the pseudo-sneering menace of Jason Aldean or Brantley Gilbert chewing through this scenario.
That Byrd sang this later in his career matters as well. He is vocally up to the task.
I like this song. It’s fun and I still like it even after my roommate in college played it obsessively from my copy of the album that it was on during our junior year in college. At the end of the school year, I just gave her my copy of that album, since she practically wore it out anyway.:)