Fri 6/24 @ 6:30PM
Akron-born country singer/songwriter David Allan Coe is now 76, but he hasn’t lost his rough-edged outlaw attitude that attracts a hard-drinking, Harley-riding 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 decades 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.
But he loves to tell those extravagant stories about his hard life. 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.
Redneck attitude 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.
He’ll be playing the Agora — the new Agora at 50th and Euclid, not the long-gone one on E. 24th where back in 1984, the Harleys were lined up 100 across in front of the building. Tickets are $25 in advance, $29 at the door.