Multiplatinum-selling musicians Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, who’ve gone country since their ’90s hair-band days, don’t just pay tribute to their father Ricky Nelson on tour.
The 50-year-old identical twins also perform — sort of — with America’s first teen idol on stage.
“We’re to the point technologically we can actually sing with our father during ‘Garden Party,'” Gunnar Nelson said by phone recently from the Nashville home he shares with his wife and three daughters. “That presented itself recently when a person in an autograph line, who worked on a project my father was working on the month he died, had the original films and original audiotapes which are unbelievably hard to find and gave them to us.”
The technologically paired performance of “Garden Party,” the 1972 gold single written by Ricky Nelson, is a highlight of “Ricky Nelson Remembered” arriving March 30 at Joliet’s Rialto Square Theatre.
Described by Gunnar Nelson as “a high-energy rock concert meets an A&E biography episode,” the recurring tour has evolved in recent years with the addition of footage culled from more than 14 years and 430 episodes of “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet,” the longest live-action sitcom in television history. It aired from 1952 to 1966, during which time Ricky Nelson had 30 Top 40 hits, a tally behind only Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.
“The Nelson family was the right family at the right time to help Ricky Nelson smuggle rock and roll into mainstream American living rooms at a critical time. There was no other show on TV at the time that did anything like that,” Gunnar Nelson said. “When our father started singing on the show at age 16 in 1957 it was like an Elvis or Beatles on Ed Sullivan moment. From that point on, millions of Americans used to tune in every week to see if Ricky was going to sing. The family really sculpted the culture.”
“Ricky Nelson Remembered” takes audiences back to when television was brand new and limited to three channels and when rock ‘n’ roll was still considered racy and censored. The concert tour also explores Ricky Nelson’s career, including his post-idol years, and the man himself.
“We pick video clips to punctuate certain moments and want to give people a glimpse of who our father was as a person. He had a great sense of humor,” he said. “We tell stories no one else has access to about what was going on in the family when the cameras and lights were turned off.”
The concert goes beyond the TV years to when Flower Power and Beatlemania took over and Nelson was considered passe.
“My father redefined himself,” he said, “and was one of the founders of country rock with the Stone Canyon Band and the autobiographical song ‘Garden Party’ at a time when everybody considered him over.”
For him, an important moment in the show is a performance of “Easy to Be Free,” a song his father wrote in 1969.
“We feel our father really didn’t get the credit he was due when he was alive. A lot of critics overlooked him,” he said, noting his father was compared to made-for-TV icons who came after him such as Fabian and
Frankie Avalon
. “Our father wasn’t that. He wasn’t just a pretty face. He was the real deal and unfairly got lumped into that because he was so pretty.”
While Ricky Nelson didn’t write his early hits, such as “Hello Mary Lou” or “Travelin’ Man,” he did encourage his sons to compose their own material.
“As a result of that, my brother and I grew up writing and we’re in the Guinness Book as the only family in history with three successive generations of number-one hitmakers,” he said. “Matthew and I are the only generation who actually wrote our own number ones and that’s all because of our father.”
Surrounded by musicians and actors their entire childhood, Gunnar and Matthew Nelson started playing professionally at age 12 amid the Los Angeles club scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s and were embraced by the likes of Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, the Knack and the Bangles.
“We played a little bit of pop and a little bit of punk and were friends with all of those people who took us under their wing,” he said. “The only reason they let us in the club was, because unlike everybody else trying to cut their teeth, we actually were writing songs from the beginning. We never got invited to play school dances because we weren’t playing cover songs.”
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After their father’s death in a plane crash New Year’s Eve 1985, as 20-somethings with long flowing blond hair and ripped jeans, the twins formed the rock band Nelson and in 1990 scored the No. 1 hit “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection.” The album “After the Rain” spawned other Top 40 hits, including the title track, “More Than Ever” and “Only Time Will Tell.”
“We sold 10 million records to kids who had no idea who Ricky Nelson was,” said Gunnar Nelson, who started as a drummer, taught himself guitar at age 18 and played every instrument on Nelson’s final album “Peace Out” (2015).
But just as their father’s rockabilly ways were tested with Beatlemania, the Nelson twins battled alternative rock and grunge. They’ve since gone country, with plans to release an album and tour likely this fall as the Nelson Brothers.
“We’re the modern Everly Brothers with those co-lead vocals and really cool songs we’ve spent 25 years writing.”
This summer Gunnar Nelson also plans to go solo for the first time ever, starting “at the bottom of the ladder again” with a southern-rock bent and doing so under an assumed name.
“No one’s going to know it’s me. I want to do my own stuff and go out there, pay my dues, be humble and get honest feedback from people,” he said. “I want to do what we’ve always done … move my own gear, book my own shows, drive the seven-eight hours between shows and meet everybody after … and prove to myself as an identical twin that I can express myself by myself as well and be brave enough to stand on my own.
“It’s a little scary being my age and going ‘I don’t know what it’s like being up on stage without that guy to my left,'” he said. “I want to try that once and see if I have the stones to do that without the advantage of my twin watching my back all the time. I’ll never stop making music with my brother, but that stuff I’m writing for me is slightly different than what I’d do with Matt. I’ve always had more of an edge.”
No matter the genre, original material remains their forte, thanks to their pops.
“Our father was our best friend and our biggest cheerleader,” he said. “The ‘Ricky Nelson Remembered’ show has really been a passport to being able to be creative and do my own originals.”
Their original song “Just Once More,” an open love letter to their father, closes “Ricky Nelson Remembered” for an emotional full-circle experience, he said.
“Grandma Harriet always said ‘the Nelson family has never been in the entertainment business, we’ve been in the connection business.’ That’s what this show does,” he said. “It really connects many generations of Americans with a time in their lives when they felt 10 feet tall and bulletproof and nothing but possibility in front of them.”
That connection to the past may truly be felt in a space as historic as the Rialto Square Theatre.
“Theaters and churches kept everybody together and got everybody out of their houses mingling and connecting. Grandpa and Grandma met when Grandpa had a big band and hired Harriet as a singer. All the venues like the Rialto have been around long enough that all three generations of my family have performed those places,” he said.
“Being in theaters is really the best venue for this particular show because you can feel the history there, performing with the ghosts of everybody who’s taken that stage before you. You walk into a venue like that and you can really feel that.”
Vickie Snow Jurkowski is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
‘Ricky Nelson Remembered’ Starring Matthew and Gunnar Nelson
When: 8 p.m. March 30
Where: Rialto Square Theatre, 102 N. Chicago Street in Joliet
Tickets: $23.50 to $38.50
Information: 815-726-6600, http://www.rialtosquare.com or http://www.ticketmaster.com