Back and even bigger
After meltdown, Turnpike Troubadours turn their troubles around
The last four years have provided plenty of fodder for the next Turnpike Troubadours album. Fans can only hope that comes to pass sooner rather than later.
The Oklahoma sextet was the hottest thing going in country and roots music in early 2019 after opening several dates on Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town’s arena tour the previous year. A decade of constant touring had honed the band into a dance hall sellout and top-line festival draw — a lethal musical hydra with a keen eye for hard-luck observations and Sooner State lore.
But cracks were starting to show. Country-curious tabloid outlets latched onto the idea that Lambert and married Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker were an item. His kidney stones reportedly forced the band to drop off the last leg of the LBT tour, but afterward, he appeared erratic and inebriated at several shows the band did manage to play. Other shows were canceled.
Then the wheels really came off. On May 24, 2019, Turnpike announced an indefinite hiatus with a Facebook statement that said, in part, “we have been standing at the crossroads, optimistically in hopes of healing, but it was not to be.”
However, a funny thing happened in the intervening months and years: The band’s legend only grew. When Turnpike ended the hiatus last month with two shows at Tulsa landmark Cain’s Ballroom, the band was bigger than ever.
“Everybody in their circle, I think, (is) just now experiencing the same exact awakening: At the moment, the sky’s the limit for them,” said Josh Crutchmer, author of the 2020 book “Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in
At the moment, the sky’s the limit for them.” Josh Crutchmer, author of “Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, At Home Anywhere”
Texas, At Home Anywhere.”
“They could be the biggest thing that independent country music has ever seen,” added Crutchmer, who broke the comeback news for Rolling Stone last November and reviewed Turnpike’s first Cain’s show. “And at the worst, I think they’re going to be in that tier alongside ( Jason) Isbell and Brandi Carlisle and Tyler Childers as far as the really, really, really in-demand Americana artists. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this and I follow the Americana scene really closely, and have for 20 years.”
Crutchmer’s day job is print planning editor at the New York Times (he designs the front page), but musically, his heart never left eastern Oklahoma. Red Dirt music became a beacon to him while attending Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, and he befriended many of its leading lights: Cody Canada of Cross Canadian Ragweed and the Departed; Jason Boland of the Stragglers; and Mike Mcclure of scene progenitors the Great Divide.
Turnpike formed in 2005. Before Crutchmer could hardly blink, he recalled, “they were opening for Jason Boland and the Stragglers; and then Jason Boland and the Stragglers were opening for them.”
He described the years leading up to 2010’s “Diamonds & Gasoline,” the first album of four on the band’s Bossier City label, as “meteoric.”
The band Crutchmer saw at Cain’s was a much different Turnpike than before the hiatus, he said — much more engaged with the crowd and (it should go without saying) musically on fire.
Now sober and father of a baby girl, Felker was particularly sanguine and gregarious. On the professional side as well, Crutchmer believes the band has taken the necessary steps to ensure the comeback sticks.
“They have surrounded themselves with people that understand how to handle an in-demand, frenzied band,” he said. “What those people have clearly done for them is said, ‘We’re gonna to take all this pressure off of you, and you guys are just gonna go play.’ ”
Demand for Turnpike tickets is presently off the charts; a reported 70,000 people tried to get into the first Cain’s show. A show tonight at Floore’s Country Store is sold out, as are two dates in October at New Braunfels’ Whitewater Amphitheater.
Crutchmer said Turnpike will likely be more circumspect about touring going forward, but fans will eventually get their wish.
“I don’t think this frenzy dies down, certainly not this year or next,” he said. “It’s going to take a good long while if it ever does die down, and right now, we don’t have any evidence it’s going to.”