Chris Janson graduated high school, packed his green Monte Carlo and made the four-hour drive to Nashville. He was 18 in the summer of 2004, and the Perryville, Mo., native had never been to a big city. People in his hometown didn’t go to college – they went to work. Janson decided music was his job.
When he arrived, Janson pulled his car into the alley between the Ryman Auditorium and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. He intended to park there, figure out his next move and maybe sleep for the night. He was immediately kicked out.
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Janson moved his car, “bunked up” for the night behind what is now Honky Tonk Central and planned to pound the pavement the next day looking for gigs. When he woke up the next morning, he had a boot on his wheel.
Janson, the voice behind No. 1 hits including “Buy Me a Boat” and “Fix a Drink,” spent the next decade finding his voice as a songwriter and artist. Along the way, he also found his soulmate – Kelly. Monday night the now-married 31-year-old father will headline a sold-out Ryman Auditorium for the first time. But without that alley – the one with clear sight lines from the back of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge to the back door of Ryman Auditorium – to provide musicians and inspiration, he might not have made it.
The singer spent his first full day in Music City walking up and down Lower Broadway asking the honky tonks for a chance to perform. He was rejected at every stop. For hours, Janson kept trying. It was approaching 1 a.m. when he tried Tootsie’s again. This time, the door man let him on stage. He asked the band if they knew Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
“You should have seen the look on their faces,” Janson recalled.
The band started the country classic slowly, in the tempo that Cash recorded it. Janson hated it, stopped the song and asked the musicians to play it faster.
“It was off the rails and the place went crazy,” he said.
Tootsie’s asked Janson to finish the rest of the night. After that, he played the bar every day for almost a year. The next day, his acoustic set started at 10 a.m. When the 2 p.m. singer didn’t show up, Janson got that spot. The 6 p.m. talent was a no show as well, and Janson got that gig, too. But there was a catch. He had to have a band. He lied and said he did, then rushed out the back door to the alley — the same one he was kicked out of days before. He quickly threw together a band from a group musicians who’d just got off their mid-day shifts at other bars and were milling about. The group was back on stage within 15 minutes.
Three weeks later, Janson was able to move out of his car. He was happy with his tips, but wanted more. He skipped lunch one day and used the money to buy a harmonica from the Cracker Barrel where he frequented the kids menu. His tips tripled. But every night he stared across the alley at the artists going in the backdoor of Ryman Auditorium.
“It’s an aching thing in your stomach if you’re a guy like me because I wanted (to play there) and I thought I was good enough to (play there),” Janson recalled. “It turns out that it just takes some people longer than others to get there.”
Unbeknownst to him, Janson was building a following from Music Row. Within six months, publishers and songwriters were flocking to watch his show.
Trey Bruce, VP of A&R and Creative at Chrysalis Music, was among them.
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“He was wild and irreverent, but he was playing Hank Sr. songs,” Bruce said. “Some of the descriptions I remember reading were, ‘punk country, like early Cash, Jerry Lee and Jagger crossed with Black Flag.’ Just really hard core country, but really, really aggressive.”
Bruce said it was frightening, but that fans and music executives were packing Tootsie’s nightly. He signed Janson in 2006, was there when the singer’s first label deal fell through and helped him get a manager and a spot on tour with Hank Williams Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Janson’s connection to Chrysalis Music lead him to co-write with Guns N’ Roses. He was sitting in a Nashville bar with the band’s bass player, Duff McKagan, when a pretty blonde walked in and caught his attention. He looked over at McKagan and said, “I’m going to marry her.”
“Yep, probably not,” McKagan scoffed.
Over the next couple of years, Janson wrote songs and toured around the Southeast. He was in the midst of his first ill-fated record deal when he started to frequently cross paths with the woman from the bar.
He found out she worked at a Nashville record label, and he booked a meeting with her to go pitch his songs.
“I thought he was the best thing I’d ever seen,” recalled Kelly Janson, then Kelly Lynn Roland.
He invited her to his cabin under the guise of co-writing, and they sat on his porch swing and fell in love.
Their love lasted longer than the record deal, which ended with only one radio single.
The couple was married in 2010, and Kelly encouraged Janson to be more structured. They sold the cabin for extra money and in 2012 – eight years after Janson moved to Nashville – Tim McGraw gave Janson his first big cut as a songwriter with “Truck Yeah.” That song led to cuts with Justin Moore, LOCASH and others. All the while, Janson was praying the hits would keep coming – in addition to his wife’s two children, the Jansons already had two of their own.
He and his wife were running a small-scale business by then – him touring on the minor radio hit he had and the strength of songs he’d written for others. He was about to go on tour in 2015 when Kelly suggested he self-record a song and put it on iTunes. The night before he released it, Janson emailed it to a small handful of friends.
When country radio personality Bobby Bones opened the email the next morning, he listened to “Buy Me a Boat” and told his producer he wanted to play it if they had a spare minute.
“The song was super catchy and it’s full of metaphors about life that everybody can relate to,” Bones said. “It was the modern day perfect country song.”
Bones played about one minute of “Buy Me a Boat,” and his phone lines lit up. He played it again and started watching it climb the iTunes chart. He spun “Buy Me a Boat” several more times during his broadcast, and by the time he signed off “Buy Me a Boat” was No. 1 on iTunes.
Warner Music Nashville’s Lisa Ray heard “Buy Me a Boat” and called the label’s SVP of A&R Cris Lacy. Lacy, who is responsible for helping to sign artists, was familiar with Janson but hadn’t heard his new music.
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“He sounded like an artist who had finally found himself,” Lacy said. “He was trying to figure it out but he didn’t sell out.”
“Buy Me a Boat” changed Janson’s life. He got multiple offers, but signed with Warner Music Nashville. He released two albums in three years, bought back his cabin, charted a second No. 1 song with “Fix a Drink” and his current single “Drunk Girl,” has already sparked rumblings of song of the year.
Janson will play both of those songs when he headlines Ryman Auditorium Monday night. When he steps on the stage, it will be a dream realized – one that was born from staring across that alley.
“It’s the greatest, humbling honor,” Janson said. “People have asked me a lot, ‘Hey, what’s one venue you’ve always wanted to play?’ I don’t have an answer for that other than the Ryman. That’s the biggest deal. It’s also home, which is my favorite place to be.”
Reach Cindy Watts at 615-664-2227, [email protected] or on Twitter @CindyNWatts.
Meet Chris Janson:
Name: Christopher Pierre Janson
Born: April 2, 1986
Hometown: Perryville, Mo.
Wife: Kelly Lynn (Roland) Janson
Children: Georgia, 6 and Jesse, 3, and two older kids – Graham and Chel – from his wife’s previous marriage
Favorite drink: Mountain Dew
Favorite candy: Sour Patch Kids
No. 1 hits as an artist: “Buy Me a Boat” and “Fix a Drink”
Hits as a songwriter: Janson has written hits for artists including Tim McGraw, Frankie Ballard, LOCASH, Hank Williams, Jr., Justin Moore and Randy Houser
Current single: “Drunk Girl”
Source: https://t-tees.com
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