Sat 11/23 @ 9PM
Akron-born county artist David Allan Coe is now 72, but he hasn’t lost his rough-edged redneck attitude. He makes blatantly appeals to the hard-drinking, Harley-riding roadhouse crowd.
He’s earned a reputation for bluster and b.s., which is part of his charm. Even though they’ve long since been debunked, he’ll still tell his stories (probably with a wink) about his reform-school childhood and is later years in prison and the guy he supposedly killed there.
He was finally busted by Rolling Stone Magazine, which learned he’d briefly been in a reform school-type setting as a teenager for a low-level offense. Mostly, he’d been kicking around in pioneering country rock groups like Cleveland’s Eli Radish.
Despite that, he continued to regale audiences with stories about his hard living. Onstage at the Agora in 1984, he told a room packed with bikers that he’d been snorting coke backstage, that he’d killed a man while he was in prison, that his father had gone to prison for killing a man, and so had his road manager. They cheered appreciatively. They’d apparently been drinking so heavily that they’d de-activated their bullshit detectors.
All the wildman imagery and myth-making aside, Coe is an astonishing songwriter with a catalogue any Nashville hack would envy. He wrote the workingman’s anthem “Take This Job and Shove It,” Tanya Tucker’s massive hit “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone),” and several of the theme songs of the outlaw country movement, “Longhaired Redneck,” “Willie, Waylon and Me,” and “If That Ain’t Country.” His most successful recording, “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile,” is a tender, heart-wrenching ballad.
There probably won’t be as many Harleys in the parking deck as there were lined up outside the Agora in 1984 when he plays the Tangier Cabaret in Akron this week. And whether or not he tells stories about his rough-and-tumble pass, you’re in for an evening of great country tunes.
Tickets are $35-$45.
www.officialdavidallancoe.com/