Although I lived in Texas until the age of 12, I’ve never been much of a fan of country music. It’s only been lately, with the Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swifts of the world, and a weekly obsession with Nashville Star, that I’ve opened my mind to giving the genre a chance. Guess what? I like it.

Near the end of the Nashville Star season I had the chance to fly out to Nashville for a taping and interview country star and Nashville Star judge John "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" Rich on his tour bus before the show. I caught up with him again last week to follow-up on a video shoot he did for a song he penned for presumed Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Check back tomorrow for part two!

Setting: On John’s tour bus just after he drove more than ten hours back from Canada. Country legend George Jones (who told me I’m ‘pretty as a peach’) and his wife are looking on. John has an unlit Cuban cigar in his hand, a bottle of Crown beside him and a stash of cowboy hats behind him.

Have you enjoyed being on Nashville Star?
It’s exciting to watch people go from zero miles an hour to 100 miles an hour in ten weeks, it’s an exciting process. It’s especially exciting for me because I take the winner and I produce their record, so I have to decide if I can go into the studio and make a hit record with this person.

The last time country music was on network television was the Barbara Mandrell show in the 1980s and an entire generation of country music fans have grown up and songwriters have erupted and new sounds have come into country music and new fans, that no one has even heard about. They’re still calling it country and western in some parts of this country and it hasn’t been country and western since the cowboy movies. It’s country by god music, it’s the largest format of music in the United fans; the most loyal fans in any genre of music and more artists with 15+ careers in music than any genre on Earth. That is country music. It is truly America’s music, music for the country. So to be part of its re-launch onto network television is a very prideful thing for me, I took a lot of pride in being a part of Nashville Star and love seeing country music get to that stage to show people what we’ve got.

I hope that it brings millions of people into country and I think it will. I think there are millions of people who will watch it flipping through TV that have never turned on a country radio station and they’ll hear it and be like, “I don’t know if I like country music but I like that guy, and if that’s country music, maybe I like country music.’ That’s what I’m here for, I’m here to watch it grow.

Do you think the Carrie Underwoods are helping make country more mainstream?
I think Carrie Underwood is one of the best additions to country music in the last decade. How do you dispute her talent or her integrity as an artist? The songs she puts out are just flawless and Carrie as an entertainer just grows and grows and grows. I think she’s like a Reba, someone who could be around into her 40s still cutting hit records. I think she’s that caliber of artist.

How did you get your break?
Have I gotten it yet? I grew up in a trailer park in Amarillo, TX. My dad’s a preacher and I used to listen to songs off the radio and play them until I could play then note for note off my guitar when I was six-years-old. I blew off college to get in a van pulling a trailer to play with a bunch of guys playing in casinos all over North America and then got a record deal with Lonestar. I played bass in that band for six years, so that was my first break. From there it’s been up and down and now thank goodness it’s up and going very well right now. I’ve written close to 1300 songs and I’ve had 36 Top 40 singles that I’ve written over the years. It’s funny, the harder you work, the luckier you get, interesting concept.

Is it hard deciding which songs you write you want to keep or give to someone else to sing?
No.

That easy, just no?
Yup, if I write a song and someone wants it I give it to them because I figure if I’m worth my salt I’ll write another one. There’s nothing more flattering than another artist singing something you wrote because when another artist sings something you wrote they’re basically betting their career that that’s a hit song and that song’s going to propel them for six months and sell them hit records and keep them on the map, so when someone’s willing to do that, it’s more flattering for me as a songwriter. It’s a huge pat on the back and I’ll write more.

Where do you write?
I could write a song anywhere. I could write a song right now in this interview.

Do you ever sit down and write a song with a certain person in mind to sing it?
No. The only time I did wrote specific songs for artists was Mississippi Girl for Faith Hill, because nobody could sing it besides her and Redneck Woman for Gretchen Wilson because who else is going to sing that but Gretchen. Other times you just write, you try to write something great and it just goes where it goes.

Cut to: John talking to George Jones…

John: I wrote a couple of songs for George Jones but he turned them down. But I might write a couple more because you never know.

George: Yeah, I could play them for the old folks home.

John: Trust me, remember the comeback that Tony Bennet had about 15 years ago and somehow or another he ended up on MTV. He came out of nowhere and all these young people went, ‘Tony Bennet is one of the smoothest cats I’ve ever seen,’ He’s my grandad’s age. The next thing you know Tony Bennett is hip, just being Tony Bennett. Pop music and rock got so superficial that a real cat struts out on the stage and lays it out like it’s really supposed to be laid out and everyone goes, ‘Oh, that’s right, that’s right, that’s how it’s supposed to be done. I completely forgot for the last ten years. George Jones is one of those type of people. He’s one of those people in country music that could still come out and show people how it’s done and do it with class and do it with integrity just like they always did.

That’s what I aspire to be like. How ever long I live I aspire to be someone who can always engage that audience, connect with that audience and tell them something that they didn’t know before they showed up and send them home feeling better than they did when they came. That’s what I aspire to do.

I heard you were thinking about writing a song for Jessica Simpson?

They approached me to work on her record early on. I actually went to lunch with her and her dad and got to know everybody. I think she’s one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met and she’s one of those people that as she’s grown up pop music is so much for teenagers right now that as a grown woman she doesn’t have anything to say over there right now. She’s a Texas girl on top of that and a country music fan, so it makes sense for her to have a go at the country audience and so far she’s having a lot of success at it. I like to see if reverse from the country singers go over and think they need to grab the pop crowd. I like to see the pop singers try to grab that country crowd. That’s good news for country music, hat means that the tables have shifted. The tides are turning in our favor and that’s because when gas is $4.50 a gallon and it’s all you can do to get an extra $15 to go buy that record or to get a ticket to that concert, you want to go hear something that means something to you, country music means something to people. It makes them even in hard times come together and have something to cling to and bond to. That’s why country music is surging right now. I think if you go back through history, the harder the times got, the bigger country music got.

What’s the biggest perk to being John Rich?
I get to hang out with George Jones on my tour bus and smoke illegal Cuban cigars…The biggest perk to being me is I’ve spent my whole life wanting to do nothing other than what I’m doing right now which is making great country music and being involved in great country music, whether it’s producing, singing it, being a conduit helping people meet other people, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do and I’m waking up every day and doing that.

I had a concert last night in Ontario. I drove 14 hours up there, did the concert and turned around and drove 14 hours straight back to be here tonight. I’ve been in Los Angeles, Atlanta coast-to-coast and in Canada in the last six days.

Yet you look refreshed, how?
I take my vitamins (holds up a bottle of Crown and a Cuban cigar).

 

What are the top three things you like on your tour bus?

Crown, Cuban cigars and George Jones are the top three.

 

Are you dating anyone?
Am I dating anyone? Yes.

To be continued...

Sorry for the delay...An emergency (the brake lights were out on my car) kept me from the office Friday and unable to post this political part to my John Rich interview. But, without further delay... 

 

Barak Obama has half of Hollywood and now John McCain can claim John Rich. Hours after crowning mother of five Melissa Lawson the next Nashville Star, John Rich, one-half of the duo Big & Rich, hit a stage in Nashville to film the music video for “Raisin’ McCain,’ a song he told OK! he wrote in 30 minutes as ‘a rally battle cry song for McCain that says what a tough man he is and what a great Patriot he is and all these things that are so great things about him.” John said the video, performed in Nashville in front of a crowd of true McCain supporters, “will feature a cross-section of America to really represent the red, white and blue.” John admits, “I don’t think I have in a million years the influence to convince people to vote for anybody, that’s not my point here. My point is to get people to learn about John McCain, go learn about Barak Obama, go read what they’re for, what they’re against and their life stories,” but adds, “When it’s all said and done I think you’ve got a guy in John McCain who’s got the experience that’s unparalleled in the United States. Obama is one of the most charismatic people in the world, but he’s just a freshman senator and I think it’s the wrong time for him to be president of the United States of America.”

Now that he’s part of the McCain media train himself we asked him what he thought about McCain’s controversial video featuring Paris Hilton and he said, “I think it was accurate. To me Barak Obama comes off as more into the hype of everything than into the substance of it and I think it took a shocking image like that to really make people start talking about that fact.”

What’s the Raising McCain video going to be like?
I’m really excited about it because it’s a high energy song, country and rock & roll all rolled into one and what we’re shooting tonight is the performance piece where I’m up on the stage and playing it for a big crowd of people and everyone in the crowd is actually a John McCain supporter because I put the word out and I said I need a crowd to shoot this video, if you’re a John McCain supporter, come on down. I think it’s going to be a cross-section of all kinds of people.

There are going to be cameo pieces of all different kinds of Americans mouthing to the words. I’m sure we’ll have a Vietnam veteran on a Harley and a cross-section of Americans to really represent the red, white & blue.

Did you sit down to try to write a campaign song for John McCain or did it just come to you?
You don’t accidentally write a song called ‘Raisin’ McCain.” I wanted to write a song for McCain because I’m so passionate about his run for presidency and being a songwriter that’s what I do, I write songs and I didn’t hear any songs out there about McCain or for McCain and I thought he needed that rally song and that battle cry song that said what a tough man he is and what a great Patriot and all these things that are so great things about him that really fire me up as an America, so I wanted to write a song that mirrored those feelings.

How did you get the song to McCain?
I sent it to his daughter Meaghan McCain, who’s like 23-year-years-old and asked her what she thought and she flipped out, said it was awesome and forwarded it on to everybody else.

Did you know Meaghan prior to this?
No. I met Meaghan once in Nashville when John McCain had a town hall meeting in Nashville and she came up to me when they were about to leave, told me she liked my music a lot and we exchanged email addresses.

How long did it take you to write the song?
It took about 30 minutes. I knew exactly what I wanted to sing and the words just came slammin’ out, then there was the music and boom, boom, boom. I took it into the studio about five days later and recorded it and put it up on johnrich.com for free download and you can make it a ring tone now. In the first four days there were 15,000 downloads of the song. By the convention we should have over 100,000.

Had you met John previously?
I met John McCain the first time in San Antonio at a hospital called The Center for the Intrepid, the largest privately funded center for the rehabilitation of soldiers in the world and I made my way up to him and my friend Georgette Mosbacher who owns Borghese Cosmetics introduced me to him and I said, “Senator, I’m John Rich with Big and Rich and he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Like I don’t know who you are.’ I asked him if he was a Country music fan and he said, ‘I’m a big time County music fan.’ That was our first meeting, over a year ago.

Why do you think people should ‘get on the train’ for McCain to be president?
I don’t think I have in a million years the influence to convince people to vote for anybody, that’s not my point here. My point is to get people to learn about John McCain, go learn about Barak Obama, go read what they’re for, what they’re against and their life stories. When it’s all said and done I think you’ve got a guy in John McCain who’s got the experience that’s unparalleled in the United States. This is a guy who was physically tortured in Vietnam and had his bones broken and had to reset his own bones. If you ever see him behind the podium you can see that his arms are really stiff, like he couldn’t raise them if he wanted to, that’s because when they broke his arms in Vietnam and threw him in solitary confinement he had to reset his own bones and never had a doctor touch him. His bones grew back like. This guy experiences the pain of that every single day, he’s served our country every single day for 30 years in the senate. This is the kind of experience that I personally want to see at the guy behind the wheel. I think Barak Obama, with all his attributes, it’s kind of hard to get over that he’s a freshman senator. It’s a clear cut decision for me and for a lot of young Americans regardless of what you read in the media. There are millions of young people who are going to vote for McCain.

What do you think about Obama?
I think he’s one of the most charismatic men in the world, without a doubt. But, I don’t think charisma gives you everything you need to run the United States of American, especially the way the world is now and I think you can watch the decisions he’s making back and forth and changing his mind and it makes sense because he doesn’t have much experience, he’s just a freshman senator and I think it’s just the wrong time for him to be president.

Now that you’re part of Team McCain media, what do you think about McCain’s ad with Britney and Paris?
I think it was accurate. To me Barak Obama comes off more into the hype of everything than into the substance of it and I think it took a shocking image like that to really make people start talking about that fact. They could have picked other celebrities if they wanted but they’re not exactly a bunch of dummies over in the McCain headquarter. These are some smart people so they wanted to make a statement and they wanted to shock people a little bit and get their attention. I think when you speak to over 200,000 Germans overseas like you’re already the president of the United States I think that’s a pretty presumptuous attitude and I think there’s a pretty good argument that it’s pretty arrogant as well and I think that commercial highlighted all that and I don’t disagree with it at all.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson crashed weddings, this weekend I crashed a Sweet 16. Really. But, it wasn’t just any Sweet 16, it was for The Suite Life of Zack and Cody stars Dylan and Cole Sprouse. While I sipped a Diet Dr. Pepper and picked at a piece of red velvet birthday cake I watched one of the Spouse twins bat it out with his friends on Nintendo Wii’s new Mario Super Slugger game and a bunch of the other kids battle it out on the dance floor. I was clearly impressed by the moves these kids came up with on the dancefloor and honestly may even steal one or two myself my next time out, but the clear star was an adorable kid I soon learned was Jaden Smith, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s son who starred with Will in the Pursuit of Happiness. It was fun to watch him and Madison Pettis, the girl from that movie with The Rock, battle it out and at times she gave him a run for his money. Then one of the other few adults at the party told me that Madison and Jaden were dating! Toooo cute, but these kids looked pretty little. I had to ask Madison and Madison told me, “I’m not dating Jaden, I’m not dating anyone, I’m 10! Well, there you have it.

 

I also saw Selena Gomez. She's dating one of the Jonas Brothers who were playing clear across the country at the Ross School in the Hamptons. But she's 16. She told me she had fun at the party.

So much to say and so little room to say it in the magazine. Good I have this blog to share my stories – or rant as one person recently pointed out that I do, or did in an instance. I’d take offence, but as the definition of rant is (according to the ever-so-accurate Wikipedia) ‘A monologue that does not present a well-researched and calm argument,’ I must confess to being a sometime ranter, most often here. I prefer to think I’m just passionate about what I say, and therefore on occasion speak, or write, before thoroughly thinking, or I’d even prefer the term babble, it sounds a bit cuter, But hey, I think I’m ranting, so I’ll move on.

Prior to moving West I used to yearn to go hang out with the cool kids on the beach in Malibu on summer Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One Sunday last summer I made it to Malibu and spent a day playing beach volleyball at the then Polaroid House and ultimately getting my hair done and my forehead burnt my David Hasselhoff (see photo).
The rest of the summer, although I enjoyed the tradition of Saturdays at Bridgehamptom polo that I adhered to for several consecutive summers, I fantasized about being on the beaches of Malibu.

This summer I actually live in LA and looked forward to a summer full of Saturdays and Sundays spent at a Malibu beach house. Ironically, this weekend was my first on the West Coast all summer – and the last weekend of the Malibu summerhouses. Never driving anywhere I shocked my friends when I offered to take the convertible to Malibu – and even gave in to taking the freeway, a foreign place to me I haven’t visited in nearly seven years. I lived, so did my friend, even though halfway we realized I didn’t have brake lights! At least I had brakes.

The house was fun. I stayed sober so the sobering experience was a bit different than I’m accustomed to, but nonetheless I enjoyed watching Pete Wentz DJ for the Boost Mobile BBQ and his six-month pregnant wife Ashlee Simpson, clad in black under the blazing sun, talk about the child she’s due to have in about three more months. She kept referring to the unborn child as ‘he’ but I have better sources saying it’s a ‘she.’ We’ll see.

Ian Ziering, gosh I can’t believe I’m mentioning his name, but he strutted around like on audition to be the next Mario Lopez. Guess they are both ‘I-was-famous-in-the-90s-but-still-have-great-pecs-and-a-cheesy-smile to use for a comeback kind of guys, so…

David Spade was there and I still have an odd fascination with him. I finally did my, ‘What is it About David Spade’ Q&A with him a few weeks ago and although somewhat gratifying it wasn’t altogether satisfying. I still want to know more about how he lands women like Heather Locklear and Lara Flynn Boyle. I need to dig deeper. Well, not too deep.

The next day I was going to go back to the same house for the Young, Fabulous and Broke party to people watch again, (and missed sightings of Luke Wilson and Matthew Perry by missing out) but I decided to have a more mellow and cultured Sunday and joined a few girlfriends, back to Malibu, to see actor-turned-photographer Scott Caan’s photo exhibit ‘Thirty-two’ at Canvas in the Malibu Country Mart. I narrowly missed Sienna Miller, or as Perez aptly refers to her, Sluttyienna, and Balthazar Getty get mobbed by paparazzi leaving lunch but caught a very low-key and casual Natalie Portman viewing the photos and hanging with girlfriends. Despite my loose vow of sobriety I had my arm twisted and tried a Rose’s Mango Mojito. It’s a friends client, what’s a girl to do? Would have been rude not to. I liked it.

Ok, I’m ranting, and babbling, so I’ll stop now.