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I hadn’t met Taylor, and she called me right after that,” he says. “It was actually one of my favorite moments.
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What ever happened to her, you know?”Ĭhurch’s candor about the whole thing is a testament to country’s increasing dichotomy within the genre: there wasn’t any doubt that the crowd was a devoted one and the slot was a tremendous opportunity, just not for him. “It’s just this group that listens to everything from Americana to metal, and we just started finding a little bit of an identity in those rooms.”Īs for the Flatts tour, things worked out. “You go into these punk bars and rock clubs at 11-that’s what time we would go on, so we had no prayer of getting anybody at the radio station to come out and see us-and I started seeing these people that listened to AC/DC and they also listened to Waylon,” Church says. Late nights at dirty bars wound up being that type of hard work that suited Church and the band much better, and while the road was less glamorous and the crowd less groomed for country artists, he says he tapped into a demographic that country as a genre just wasn’t serving at the time. We went to these places and we found people that I would have never found had I stayed in those big rooms.” “We were black-balled in the country world, so the only places that would book us were rock and punk clubs. “Post-that, post-getting fired, we ended up going from big places that we hadn’t earned yet-those weren’t our fans-to little teeny tiny rock clubs,” Church says. But Church’s show was too loud and his sets were always going over-he admits readily that he’s never been keen on being told what to do. But at the time Church was supposed to be filling the same role that countless other major label newcomers had carved out before him: nab a spot on a big tour, behave yourself, play your couple hits and and sprinkle in some covers as the crowd rolls in for the big names who sold the tickets. In recent years, Church’s live shows have been known to include everything from wild pyrotechnics to enormous Satan inflatables, so it’s not tough to see how even an earlier, scaled-back version of his gritty aesthetic wouldn’t be a fit for Rascal Flatts’ sticky-sweet love songs. In retrospect, the pairing seemed destined to go down in flames. I felt like I was out there not gaining any ground, and there were a lot of rules.” “You can’t tell our story and not tell that, and I’ve said that many times,” says Church.
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#ERIC CHURCH THE OUTSIDERS SERIES#
It’s easy to begin the tale of Eric Church: He became a country-music outsider in 2006, when he got fired from a coveted gig on the Rascal Flatts tour after a series of too-long, too-loud sets that culminated in a meltdown at Madison Square Garden.