DAVE'S DIARY - 26/11/ 2006 - GRETCHEN WILSON DVD REVIEW
GRETCHEN
WILSON
UNDRESSED (EPIC-SONY-BMG).
 |
Don't
expect to see Redneck Woman country superstar Gretchen Wilson naked
in this behind the scenes DVD. After working honky tonks, first as a teenage barmaid-single mother in Pocahontas, Illinois and later as a singer, Wilson is the real deal. |
"We
call it undressed because the dressing room is the centre of our world
when we're on tour," says the Grammy award winner who released her
autobiography I'll Tell You What A Redneck Woman Is in November.
"We spend most of our time in the dressing room. We share it very
day."
Wilson and band also share digs and bus with a stuffed moose head, catfish
and other redneck props.
"We can travel 1200 miles overnight on the bus and wake up in different
cities each day", says Wilson, 33 who has sold five million copies
of her debut disc Here For The Party.
"We eat, drink and live music."
And to consummate her labour of love, albeit a lucrative romance after
a decade of rejection, she fits 10 acoustic songs into this working day.
| That
doesn't include the hour-long electric set before headliner Kenny
Chesney that we don't see here. Her music - organic live cuts of down home songs Skoal Ring, One Bud Wiser, Been Kicked By A Mule and Me And Jesus - paint her pigment. She pays homage to hero Merle Haggard, reviving Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down - a band member plays Merle's vocal role in duet hit Politically Uncorrect, enriched by mandolin and fiddle. As the night rolls on she is joined by members of Chesney's band and observes "all of us are tired, some of us are drunk, some of us are both." So their fitting finale is California Girls - a parody of west coast heir heads including Paris Hilton. |
 |
"The bigger this Gretchen Wilson thing gets the more I have to fight to be myself," says the woman who has now sold six million plus albums and doesn't frock up for this curio.