Gary Bennett   -  Biography

Gary Bennett was born Oct. 9, 1964, in Las Vegas to country music-loving parents. After living in Conroe, Texas, for the first five years of his life and a year more in Southern California, the family settled in the small logging town of Cougar, Wash. Nestled at the foot of Mt. St. Helens, Cougar had only about a hundred people there at the time.

By age 16, Bennett was playing bass for a gospel band from a nearby town and began to get a taste of the musician's life on the road. After high school and a series of logging jobs, he began performing as a solo act in his hometown bars every weekend, playing the traditional country songs he had learned as a boy from his parents' record collection, along with a growing repertoire of original songs.

In 1993, he loaded his pickup truck and headed for Nashville. Unfortunately, he arrived at a time when "real country music" had been all but forgotten. After attending many fruitless songwriter nights, he began hanging out in the honky-tonks in the historic Lower Broadway area of downtown Nashville. Within a month, he took a solo gig at a bar there. Eventually, he fronted a band at Roberts' Western World, a boot store by day, honky-tonk by night.

It was about this time that he met Chuck Mead, a singer-songwriter from Lawrence, Kan. The two formed a band and, after various personnel changes, it became BR549. Less than six months after arriving in Nashville, they were on their way to becoming the darlings of Music City. BR549 graced the cover of Billboard before they even had a record deal. The industry magazine hailed them as having single-handedly revived the soul of country music in Nashville. Shortly thereafter, the group was hounded by every major record label in town, eventually signing with Arista Records.

The band recorded five albums (four with Arista and one with Sony), received three Grammy nominations and was voted best country group in 1996 by Rolling Stone. During Bennett's tenure, the band sold more than 500,000 albums and toured the world, headlining shows as well as opening for such artists as Bob Dylan, George Jones, Merle Haggard, the Black Crowes and Brian Setzer.

Eventually, Bennett felt as though the musical freedom BR549 once enjoyed had become stagnant due to the "retro" pin tagged to them. Wanting to make original and more progressive music, he stepped away from the group in 2002 to let his head clear.

In 2006, Bennett will release his solo album, Human Condition, on Landslide Records. The project features 12 new songs, most of which were written by Bennett, including one co-written with Todd Snider ("Better Than This"). His studio band features Kenny Vaughan on guitar, Jimmy Lester (Webb Wilder, Los Straitjackets) on drums and Mark Winchester (Emmylou Harris, Setzer) on bass. Special guests include Marty Stuart, who plays mandolin on several tracks as well as rhythm guitar, famed pedal steel guitar player Lloyd Green and producer R.S. Field on several instruments.