Jack Ingram

Somebody, please kick Jack Ingram‘s ass. Not because he deserves it; the Texas native seems like a pretty nice guy. And not because his music sucks. It doesn’t. His twangy, roadhouse rhythms and plaintive ballads touch on all the good stuff: getting ruined on drink, driving a pickup truck, having your woman leave you. It’s just that he looks too damned clean-cut for a fast-rising, shit-kicking country star. From his shiny, grown-up-newsboy mug, you’d never think that his precocious debut, 1997’s Livin’ or Dyin’, was produced by a bona fide ex-junkie and jailbird genius like Steve Earle. You’d never know that his heart had been shredded like D-grade beef jerky (as suggested in the defiantly bitter tune “I Won’t Go With Her”). You’d never assume that he could whip a Dallas barroom into a boozy frenzy, as his album Live at Billy Bob’s makes frighteningly clear. No, sir. Not from the looks of him. In all likelihood, there’s an oil portrait wasting away in an attic somewhere that depicts a stinking-drunk vagrant lying miserably in a pool of his own sick under a honky-tonk pool table as a $3 hooker taunts him with a chuckle. Back here in reality, though, Ingram’s grinning like the young Robert Redford because your cover charge is funding his rise on CMT. So, somebody, please kick his ass. Reverently.