MANCHESTER, NH – If you’re free Friday night you should click this link and get yourself a few tickets to see Gunnar and Matthew Nelson at The Rex for Ricky Nelson Remembered tribute show.
That is, if you like good music and storytelling, have some nostalgia for “Ozzie and Harriet,” and Rock ‘n’Roll Hall of Famer Ricky Nelson, and perhaps even were smitten with Nelson from the 1990s when they and their incredibly long blond locks took MTV by storm.
Even if that last sentence doesn’t mean much to you, trust me, just go. Here’s why.
I had a chance to talk with the Nelson brothers earlier this week and I’m so glad I did. Not only do I check all the boxes (watched Ozzie and Harriet on TV, remember Ricky Nelson’s magnetic smile and thought he was Elvis, and was a youth section news editor in the 1990s when teens were swooning over Nelson) but theirs is really just a beautiful human story of how the stuff that makes us who we are, namely our DNA, is inescapable. The music is definitely in them, and it goes deep.
Their dynamic on stage, as described by Matthew Nelson, registers somewhere between The Smothers Brothers and the Everly Brothers – taking to heart something their dad told them: Don’t lose your sense of humor, be undeniably good, and don’t be a jerk – “but he didn’t say ‘jerk’,” he adds, reciting what seems to be more of a mantra for the brothers.
They also try not to take themselves too seriously. And yet, theirs has been a journey with plenty of solemn twists and turns.
Before we got to the meat-and-potatoes of Friday night’s show at The Rex, the conversation moved like a lovely spread of appetizers swirling on a lazy susan – what it was like for them when their record label at the time, Geffen, did them dirty and left them high and dry for five years after their early success, and how that led them to launch their own indie record label in 1994, Stone Canyon (a nod to their father’s original Stone Canyon Band).
But they also took me in the Wayback Machine, to their musical roots that took shape in another set of family twins – their grandmother Harriet Nelson’s mom was a twin and those sisters, Hazel and Hattie McNutt, were rockstars of vaudeville in their own way – as much as a couple of women in bloomers at the turn of the century can be rockstars.
They talked about their love and admiration for their grandparents, Ozzie and Harriet, who became the American gold standard for “perfect family” based on the window into their actual family life as seen through 14 seasons of their hit TV show, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”
Yes, it was scripted; but it was also grounded in something very much for real.
“Ozzie truly respected Harriet,” says Matthew Nelson. “People don’t know this, but she was singing at the Cotton Club at 16, she raised herself in show biz and her parents were vaudevillians, some real old school stuff. When Ozzie met her she was filling in and hosting at Cotton Club – which at the time was not friendly to Caucasians for somehow she stepped in for the MC that night, he saw her and he hired her on the spot for his band, and that was it. She was the first female lead singer in a Big Band and they were musicians before they were anything else. They had mutual respect for one another that lasted their lifetime.”
The show they bring to The Rex is one of a few they have developed over the years celebrating various aspects of the family’s musical legacy.
“We put this one together about 25 years ago and it just keeps going,” says Matthew Nelson, who explains that the idea of a themed show featuring their father’s hits came from a friend who was in the Navy and stationed in Japan. It didn’t really matter if most of the recruits were too young to know about the music of Ricky Nelson or his sons.
“The idea was just to give them some Americana – and the fact that it was in Japan was good because no one would know if the show sucked. So we flew over there and within two minutes of singing “Hello, Mary Lou,” and “Travelin’ Man” – and more of our Pop’s more than 40 Top 40 hits, we looked at each other and knew we were on to something.”
They both speak freely about the loss they still feel so deeply, losing their father in a Dec. 31, 1985 plane crash. He was on his way to a New Year’s Eve gig.
“We were supposed to be on that plane with him,” says Matthew. They were 18 at the time and had finally been able move in with their dad after many strained years due to their parents’ messy divorce.
“We were making up for lost time, and for three and a half months before he died God cleared his schedule out. We were inseparable,” Matthew Nelson recalls.
They even had the chance to play a sold-out gig at a Hollywood bar that their dad attended discretely so that he wouldn’t steal their thunder.
“Our Pop was tough to miss – he had this Elvis magnetism, but he didn’t want to upstage us,” Matthew Nelson said. That show was during their New Wave/punk phase, before the big hair Nelson era.
After that show the three sat up and talked all night. Their dad told them how it felt to welcome them back into his life, not just as sons but as his musical peers.
Days later their father was off to do a handful of gigs culminating in a New Year’s Eve show in Dallas. Their father never made it to that final gig.
“And we’ve never played a New Year’s Eve gig since he died,” says Matthew Nelson. You’d think it’s a great night to do a show but it’s a weird night for us.”
They believe their father had some sort of gut feeling or premonition, and that’s why at the last minute he told his sons not to fly with him but to take a commercial flight to meet him in Dallas.
“Our dad was our best friend and the music is what keeps us connected. When you play music and write songs – when we’re at our best we have one foot in this world and one foot in another place, it’s like an antenna. There are so many songs I’ve written that at the time I felt didn’t come from me, but from someplace beyond me,” Matthew Nelson says.
Over the years some critics have tried to dismiss them as “sons of celebrities who have a hobby.”
“Music was always our life. It still is, and all these years later if it were about the money, let’s just say there are other ways to make money, things that would keep me at home where, by the way, I love to be,” says Matthew, who is raising the next generation of Nelson men in Ozzie Matthew Nelson, age 9, who inherited the family musical genes.
Audiences seem to love them – even more as time goes on.
“Apparently now we’ve become nostalgic, Gunnar and I. It’s not 1990 anymore but we were singers and wrote songs – and we can actually still sing because we’ve taken care of ourselves,” Matthew Nelson says.
“We’ve always had each other. We needed each other and it’s saved our lives a few times,” says Matthew Nelson. He explains that while identical they are a genre of twins known as mirror twins. Aside from Gunnar being a lefty and Matthew being a righty, that means they may not always finish one another’s sentences and they’re capable of living separate lives.
“Gunnar played lead guitar for Cat Stevens, and I was Avril Levine’s music director for a nanosecond. We’ve both written hit songs for others,” says Matthew Nelson. “If you go into Wikipedia, you’ll find that we used to have individual wikis because we led individual lives, but someone at some point decided to combine us.”
And that’s okay, he adds.
“Truth is we’re extremely similar but very different. We’re sweet and sour, or so Gunnar says.”
I asked them what can people expect from a Ricky Nelson Tribute show.
“Every time people come to this show, they come with a curiosity not knowing what to expect. If they don’t know who we are they do by the end of the show. They will feel a connection to our father. The father and son thing is an intense bond for us and we found our communication through music. We’re two sons who’ve done our own thing but this is our source material, if you will. When we represent our Pop or his music and tell our very personal stories, we take you through the beats of his life, of our life, and what’s happening in the world,” says Matthew Nelson.
“What you get is a musical journey that, for two hours allows you to escape the ridiculousness of this world and be connected to a simpler time, a time when you had to be more honest and you had to be undeniably good you couldn’t fake it. For Gunnar and myself, we grew up with that music and with our Pop and the spirit of what it’s about and bearing the torch for our family.”
Beyond whatever fame and fortune has blessed their family, they are two brothers doing what they love because of who they love, and who has loved them.
“We’re Scandinavian and so there’s a Swedish proverb that goes something like you die two deaths; one is the physical body the other is when the last person who remembers and loves you dies. In our family, we have a vehicle – our music – that can allow us to live a bit longer.”