Hopefully, the evidence of this entire Flashback series has made a bullet-proof case that Tony Brown played an inescapably essential and vital role in country music as a record producer in the late 1980s, throughout the nineties, and into the 2000s. He, in fact, continues to produce exceptional albums right up to today.
That the argument can be made alone on the merits of his lesser stars and less- commercial and non-mainstream projects, without taking into account his multi-platinum selling work with country music industry megastars like George Strait, Reba McEntire, Wynonna, and Vince Gill, his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2025 is all but indisputable and beyond reproach.
I want to point a point on my closing statement about the special gifts Tony Brown offered country music by revisiting my relationship with Rodney Crowell’s Keys to the Highway, the second album he co-produced with Crowell in 1989.
The first project they worked on together was Diamonds & Dirt in 1988. That album only famously ran five consecutive singles to the top of the country charts. Previously, Crowell had struggled to get any of the singles from his first four albums into the Top 40.
Tony Brown said, “ Rodney Crowell’s Diamonds & Dirt was the first gold record that I ever produced. He had done two records for Columbia [sic] that didn’t do very good at all. And Jimmy Bowen said, “Why would you want to go do Rodney Crowell; he hasn’t had success with three records?” And I said, “Because he’s my hero.” I put him, as a songwriter, on the same list as Kristofferson and Dylan. So Bowen let me do it. And we had five No. 1 singles.”
Keys to the Highway is a brilliant follow-up to the unexpected tremendous mainstream success of Diamond & Dirt. Unfortunately, Keys to the Highway would not prove to be Crowell’s Ropin’ the Wind to Garth Brooks’ No Fences. Nonetheless, it is an essential Rodney Crowell album because of all the pure musical merits it brings to the table. Crowell arrives as a fully-formed singer, musician, songwriter, and producer of his own work.
Crowell basically catches twelve songs and sets them all free.
In the 1990 January/February issue of Country Music magazine, contributing editor Bob Milllard wrote, “Tony Brown must have spent weeks fiddling with electronic effects to come up with just the right echo combinations to make these tunes sound as if they were recorded during a sound check in an empty 2,000 seat auditorium. The sound is big yet intimate, and energized by the “live” feel of music and lyrics bouncing around tall walls and the sound trap under the balcony.”
So, it’s hard to believe that back in 1989 Crowell was the barbarian storming my ivory tower gates of twang.
Initially, Keys to the Highway betrayed my loyalty and trust in his version of country music. It breached our sincerity contract. A blood oath, the terms of which were apparently known only to me.
I felt I was victim of a bait- and switch. Fans of Maren Morris’ debut “My Church” know the sting but they also are blessed with knowing how this story will end.
At the time, Keys to the Highway represented a real threat to my understanding of what country music was or should be. I was no where close to being able to even consider what country music might be or could be.
That would come later.
In that Midwest- moment 35 years ago, the album upset me. I didn’t know what to physically do with the offending music in my hand. The moment felt moral. I had a decision to make.
In the spirit of misguided purity and solidarity with some remembered sacred past that never existed, I responded darkly.
Or at least as darkly as a 15 year old kid in the Twin Cities could; I segregated the album from the rest of my collection by burying the cassette in the top drawer of my clothes dresser.
I made sure that nobody else but me knew that the music didn’t belong.
Had the 1974 Association of Country Entertainers( ACE) not collapsed under the bloated weight of its own self-aggrandizing importance, the butt-hurt collection of dissident Grand Ole Opry members would have appealed to me. Had I had the chance, I would have still applied for membership in 1989. I would have gladly met with George Jones and Tammy Wynette at their home to share my teenage self-righteousness and certainty about what constituted real country music.
I was confident my carefully curated collection of country music albums was testament to that. As proof, I kept it in a wooden cassette tape holder, the magnetized cover blazoned with a Budweiser beer logo. To quote Dale Watson, “I’d rather be an old fart than a new country turd.”
Here was where you could find real country music. It was full of greatest hits collections by Tom T. Hall, Charley Pride, Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, and Mel Tillis. Increasingly, younger artists like Randy Travis, Rick Van Shelton, and Dwight Yoakam had earned their place along the masters. This club obviously had membership rules.
Diamond & Dirt could stay there but Keys to the Highway had to go, such was my warped sense of country music whiteness. Maybe I was reading Orwell’s “1984” in school and had subconsciously applied the novel’s clarifying mantra “four legs good, two legs bad” to my own internal monologue, spewing country music propaganda and mythology.
I was a budding genre gatekeeper and night watchman, full of clannish certainty.
If putting Crowell in solitary confinement with my socks and underwear sounds strange, it was a better fate than what befell my cassette copy of J.C Crowley’s RCA 1988 debut Beneath the Texas Moon.
I purchased that album based upon a glowing review from John Morthland in the May/June 1989 edition of Country Music magazine. Morthland wrote, “ [It] is a magnificent debut. If Crowley can sustain such an inspired level of musicianship for a few more albums, the sky will sure be the limit for him.”
But how could Crowley reach the sky if he couldn’t even escape a suburban basement bedroom in Minnesota?
After listening only to side A, I remembering ripping the cassette out of my Fisher dual deck audio component system in disbelieving rage and cracking the case open with my hands because it didn’t pass as country enough to my ears. I had a country half-breed mongrel to bring to heel.
Had I actually read Morthland’s review thoughtfully, I would have seen that he also said, “These songs also show that Crowley, like most artists of his generation, has been influenced by voices from all across the AM and FM airwaves – the ghosts of everyone from Jerry Lee Lewis to Joe Ely, from the Eagles to B.J. Thomas echo through the music on Beneath the Texas Moon.”
Nonetheless, I was selfishly indignant his influences were neither country nor authentic nor sincere. I stripped loops of the magnetic tape from the spools and balled them around my frustrated fists. I had purchased the album through my BMG Music Service subscription and felt betrayed. Never had a penny purchased so much rage and so little country music. I tossed the tangled mess of disappointment into my bedroom garbage can.
So close was Crowley to Crowell that perhaps Rodney was simply guilty by alphabetical association in the small world he sang about. Yet, somehow he survived my incoherent juvenile fury. I would spare Crowell’s musical life and merely sentence his latest album to solitary confinement rather than execute him outright like I did Crowley.
But why?
What was it that stayed my hand and made me stay with the album?
I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel The Passenger. To turn the author’s words in on themselves, when I finally came around to listening to Crowell’s album again, Keys to the Highway would ask me to consider country music’s future as much as its past.
I was increasingly getting lost in the history of its past. I was lost in the catacombs of the Mother Church of country music, its “cathedral,” trying to consider “the deep foundation” of the genre knowing it has “its being” in the historical sorrows of her listeners.
In doing so, I had become blind to the narrative assumptions Nashville made in the origin story it loved to tell about itself. More disconcerting was my increasing deafness to the voices still singing out their part in the story.
Doesn’t the steeple, in fact, demand we turn our eyes to the sky, and always end in the most familiar symbol of resurrection and rebirth?
Isn’t listening to country music with the ears of faith salvific and full of grace?
The universe, or at least a confluence of country music and literature, eventually told me to snap out of my fearful rigidity and just listen to the damn album again. Loosen up!
Do that and there would be no shortage of things to consider.
Which I eventually did because in addition to loosening up, I grew up.
When I did finally find the courage to pull the cassette out from my dresser drawer and listen to it, something like scales fell from my ears. I put away childish fears and insecurities. Country music was bigger than my expectations of it. In this one listening, I realized it has an almost infinite creative capacity similar to Dr. Who’s Tardis or Snoopy’s doghouse.
I’m serious.
Country music instantly became full of potential imaginative energy. It was alive and more consequential than I had ever considered. It was forward looking without forsaking its past; it offers the capacity for forgiveness.
The album mattered because Crowell invited me to go “soul searchin” and to “tell me the truth,” knowing “the truth shall set you free.”
He sang about “long and lonesome highways,” about having his “eyes wide open” and his “feet on the sand.”
In “Things I Wish I’d Said” a tribute to his conflicted relationship with his father, Crowell says, “Thinking about the work we done/You were strong and I was young/Man, we had our fights/And everything I felt for you/Has been turned to something new/This is love I feel today/It will never go away.”
I love this album today.
Thank you Rodney Crowell.
And thank you Tony Brown.
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