Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen take 'Beer' tour to OKC

By Andrew W. Griffin
Pop Writer
Norman Transcript
Posted: June 29, 2007

OKLAHOMA CITY – First off, I give Texas music superstars Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen high marks for the name of their acoustic tour – the “Hold My Beer and Watch This” acoustic tour 2007. I love it because it reminds me of the old joke about rednecks that say that very phrase before doing something incredibly stupid.

But there was nothing stupid about Rogers and Bowen hitting the hallowed stage at Bricktown’s Wormy Dog Saloon in Oklahoma City and singing their best material in front of what appeared to be a sold-out crowd last week.

Rogers, with his trademark backwards baseball cap and Bowen with a strangely innocent expression on his face, stood side-by-side on the stage cradling their acoustic guitars, while beers and various adult beverages awaited them on a stand directly behind the duo.

After the whoops and hollers lessened after the two hit the stage, Rogers kicked things off with “Rollercoaster,” introducing it by simply saying, “This is a true story.”
Well, maybe. After Bowen got a chance to sing a song he co-wrote with Rogers, Rogers takes to the mic again and says: “Forty percent of the song lyrics are full of (expletive) and the rest are true. It’s up to you to decide which ones are true.”

They gave the crowd the songs they wanted to hear from their hits “Kiss Me In the Dark” (Rogers) and “God Bless This Town” (Bowen) to interesting covers like the Dave Loggins song “Please Come to Boston,” which Bowen tackled admirably.

And that’s what the crowd got this humid night. In fact, in the 75-year old, two-story building that houses the Wormy Dog, the original elevator, installed in the early 1930’s, had malfunctioned, according to Wormy Dog bouncer Johnny Five.
As a result the employees were having to haul in case after case of beer on their shoulders in order to slake the thirst of the crowd.
“Knowing that, three dollars a beer doesn’t seem too expensive, does it?” Johnny Five said.

All the while, Rogers and Bowen played their songs, kicked back, drank beer after beer and swapped stories. Rogers even played a new song titled “Long Enough to Leave,” which he’d co-written a few weeks earlier with Micky Braun of Micky & The Motorcars.

At one point, the two had a contest: who wrote the worst song, a song, they suggested, could be offered to macho country singer Trace “Honkytonk Badonkadonk” Adkins.
“We want you to vote for the worst song,” Rogers said. “And the loser has to buy the winner a … taquito.”
Rogers’ bad tune, a love song of sorts on the level of sub-standard seventh-grade poetry, was pretty poor. But it was Bowen who got the attention of the crowd with his song that elicited every country cliché, from trucks to working in the “West Texas sun,” and an absurd refrain, “She said, ‘Hell yeah, boy!’” Or was it ‘Hell yeah, Bowen.”? Who knows, the sound was so bad in the Dog that night it was hard to tell.

In any event, it was Rogers who owed Bowen a taquito.