Country music, ranching combine at Lazy Rockin’ Stirrup festival

Published 12:00 am Thursday, July 4, 2019

Sleepless Truckers frontman Phillip Austin has been involved with music scenes in two cities: Nashville and Bend.

The outlaw country singer-songwriter got a late start in music, first picking up guitar at age 26 after an eight-year stint in the U.S. Navy. After about nine years of songwriting sessions and club gigs on Broadway in Nashville (also under the name Sleepless Truckers), Austin and his wife moved to Eugene in 2016, then to Central Oregon in 2017.

“I didn’t think that I would be able to do (a band) at all here,” Austin said. “I thought I was gonna come here and maybe do some solo acoustic gigs and some songwriting and stuff. But it’s a really nice surprise to find such a happening music scene around here with so many musicians in town. It’s amazing, actually.”

In the roughly two years Austin has lived in Central Oregon, he’s rarely had to leave Bend to find a gig. When he and the Sleepless Truckers play the main stage at the second Lazy Rockin’ Stirrup Country Music Festival in Paulina on Saturday, it will be the farthest from the city the band has yet played. (The quintet will also play the La Pine Rodeo on Thursday.)

Austin and the rest of the group — pedal steel guitarist Jozee Moss, lead guitarist Philip Wallace, bassist Noah Walden and drummer Jon Swift (Raul Romero, drummer for local country group Kristi Kinsey & The Whiskey Bandits, will fill in at LRS Fest) — landed the main stage slot by winning a battle of the bands at Worthy Brewing in June. (Guitarist Aaron Rehn, who played with Moss in Wayward Soul, also will sit in at the festival.) The group will kick off live music on the stage at 3 p.m. ahead of Dwight Yoakam’s 9 p.m. headlining slot. The full festival runs Thursday through Sunday.

“I heard about the LRS battle of the bands country showdown through some friends, and they’re like, ‘How come you’re not in this?’” Austin said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t know about it.’ So we signed up for it kind of late, and we showed up. We put together a little Merle Haggard-Willie Nelson medley and then did an original tune that we have, and it came across really well.”

Austin said the festival is one of the few he has seen that focuses on local talent. While this year the festival landed some major national headliners, including Yoakam, Craig Morgan (headlining Thursday), Trace Adkins and Sawyer Brown (co-headlining Friday), the bulk of its schedule features regional artists and groups such as Matt Borden, Redwood Son, Countryfied, Barb Nelson and more.

“The bands in the area have just been looking for opportunities to play,” festival organizer Tammy Van Vleet said. “We have bands coming from Medford, Grants Pass, Southern Washington, Portland, there’s some from right in Prineville. … We’ve got one family friend that’s bringing his band up from Central California, and they’re just a bunch of ranchers that do this on the side. So it’s just fun to see country music and the ranching lifestyle when (they go) together.”

John Giorgi, Van Vleet’s father, has owned the festival’s namesake ranch since 2003. Van Vleet launched the festival in 2017 with comedians Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy plus musicians Diamond Rio, Dustin Lynch and more headlining. Permitting issues following Crook County’s modification of its application process due to the 2017 solar eclipse scuttled the festival in 2018.

In addition to music, the festival will also include bull riding Saturday, and attendees can purchase RV or tent sites for camping. Van Vleet said the event will be a celebration of ranch life in Central Oregon.

“A lot of people don’t have access to a working cattle ranch, so it’s neat for people to be able to come out and see what’s going on,” Van Vleet said.

Three of the festival’s headliners have made the trek to Central Oregon in recent years. Yoakam sold out Oregon Spirit Distillers last year; Morgan played at the Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center in Redmond in fall 2017, and Adkins played the fair itself in 2016.

Sawyer Brown played Bend before, too, according to keyboardist Gregg “Hobie” Hubbard, but not as recently. He said the five-piece Nashville band is looking forward to returning.

“Any trip out there is a good one in my book,” he said while on the road somewhere in Minnesota.

Fans can expect a set heavy on hits from Sawyer Brown’s ’80s and ’90s heyday, including songs such as “Leona,” “Step That Step” and signature song “Some Girls Do.” The group’s 23rd and most recent album, the autobiographical “Travelin’ Band,” came out in 2011, but Hubbard said the wait for new material (the longest in the band’s career) will come to an end soon.

“It is pretty much finished up,” he said of the new album that he expects to be released later this year or early next year. “There’s some originals that I think — hopefully if someone listens to it, they’ll go, that sounds like us. And we’ve got a couple of songs from some friends that are just really nice songs; we did a couple of covers that we liked. We really just approached it about having fun.”

That philosophy has carried the group through 38 years and more than 4,500 shows with four of its five original members intact, including Hubbard, lead singer Mark Miller, bassist Jim Scholten and drummer Joe Smyth (lead guitarist Shayne Hill joined in 2004).

Childhood friends Hubbard and Miller grew up together in Florida and made the move to Nashville in the ’70s to try their hands at a music career, eventually hooking up with the other band members. Sawyer Brown started out as backing band for country-pop singer Don King before branching out on its own.

The band was ahead of its time by being an actual band in a genre that elevates solo artists, helping set the stage for modern country groups such as Old Dominion. Its big break — winning the first season of TV talent show “Star Search” in 1983 — also preceded today’s crop of artists discovered on shows such as “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent.”

“At that point after we won, I mean, labels in Nashville didn’t know what to do with that,” Hubbard said. “They weren’t sure they wanted anything that had just come from television, so it, for some of them, felt like a hindrance. And then in reality, what difference does it make? You just got your music introduced for free to a whole lot of people. … The thing we felt like we knew how to do was go play music live, so we immediately went back out on the road, and at about that same time Capitol Records and Curb Records were like, ‘Oh no, we’ll sign you.’”