The Outback Club

“It was a magical time for me,” Lee Kernaghan tells Apple Music of writing his 1992 album. “I was 27 years old. It was the first time that I got to write songs and make records with Garth Porter, who assembled an incredible band for this album.” The Australian country music icon hit the ground running with The Outback Club—singles like “Boys From the Bush” and “High Country” helped bring unprecedented attention to country music, with its sunburnt outback stories and Aussie details, locations, and slang terms. Kernaghan attributes a great deal of its success to his band: “Guys like Mark Meyer on drums, James Gillard on the bass, Mark Punch and Colin Watson on electric guitar—those players really defined my sound for well over a decade,” he says. “I played the keys. A guy called Wayne Goodwin was on fiddle and mandolin. Rod McCormack, who's been a huge part of my musical life for the entire journey, played the guitars, acoustic guitars and banjo and mandolin, and Col Joye sang backing vocals, and went on to become the godfather of my firstborn son. That really was the Lee Kernaghan sound for years to come,” he says. “We knew we had some catchy songs, but we had no idea it could go on to be a hit and would still be loved more than 20 years later.” Below, Kernaghan talks through each track on The Outback Club.
Boys From the Bush “I was on the bones of my ass living in the back bedroom at my mum and dad's house because I couldn't afford to pay rent anymore. I got a phone call from Garth Porter, saying we should get together and write some songs. The first song we wrote together was ‘Boys From the Bush’—I wrote the music for it on an old piano that I'd been playing since I was nine years old. When we were recording it, we had minimal budget, and when I was putting down the final vocals, we didn't have the bridge written. I only had 20 minutes left to sing and then I had a cab waiting to take me to the airport and back to Albury. We didn’t have the money for a flexible flight back then. There was just no alternative. So Garth scratched some words down on a piece of paper: ‘We work the land through fire and flood. It's in our hearts. It runs in the blood.’ And that was the transforming factor. It turned it from just what could have been a party song into an anthem.”
High Country “I was born in Corryong, in the high country; that's where I grew up. The song talks about the Maddison family leading the cattle through to the high country in 1882. George Maddison was the first person from up that way to find a way to get cattle up Staircase Spur to those great grazing lands up on top. That was a tradition that continued for many, many years. The song came from advice that Garth gave me. When he heard my first lot of demos, they weren't culturally connected to Australia. He said, ‘Look, Lee, you are a boy from the bush. I want you to leave Sydney. Go back home, mate. I want you to write songs about you, your mates, your way of life.’”
She Waits by the Sliprails (The Bush Girl) “Another bit of advice that I received from Garth was to read as much Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson as I could. The way that Lawson could evoke emotion in a poem was second to none. So after reading through so much of his collective works, I found one called ‘The Bush Girl,’ and I decided to set it to music. When you look really at the early traditions of Australian country, our unique form of country music, which is different to any other nation, it really stems back to Lawson and Paterson. The early pioneers of country music followed in that tradition with the bush ballad—Slim Dusty set the gold standard and modernized it. I think people like James Blundell and myself and a whole bunch of others have been lucky enough to follow in that wake.”
Walkin' Out West “This song really just shows off the band. Lawrie Minson is playing the dobro; he played a lot of slide guitar on the album as well, and harmonica. He was really an essential part of the sound we were doing. It all came about because he made an album a couple of years before and he asked me to go up to Tamworth and hang out at his place for a few days and play some piano on his album. I did it for him and I did it for free, and then he returned the favor on The Outback Club.”
Country Girls “In the early ’90s, the man who was creating pandemonium around Australia was James Blundell. You'd be heading down the highway and he'd be on the Hanes ads, the underwear ads, and all that stuff. He was on 60 Minutes. He had number one songs on the pop charts and all of that. He came to Albury to do a concert, it was just packed to the rafters, the atmosphere was electric. He played this song called ‘Country Girls,’ and I thought, ‘What a great song.’ It was just awesome. But he never recorded it, or he hadn’t at that time. There was a couple of people I called when I was trying to get some songs together—one was Keith Urban—and James said he’d let me record ‘Country Girls.’”
Country's Really Big These Days “Back then, country music wasn't particularly fashionable but I'd spent most of my life living and breathing it. This was my salute to country. It's very much about the traditions of country, where it came from, but I also had an eye on the US and what was happening over there with some of the big stars and the great music they were making. It just felt to me like it was the beginning of something big. It turned out to be true—country music turned into a tidal wave through the early ’90s and people like Garth Brooks made it into a worldwide phenomenon.”
You’re the Reason I Never Saw Hank Jnr Play “I was 13 years old when I really began to discover how good country could be. I was introduced to people like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, David Allan Coe, and Hank Williams, Jr. These guys were outlaws. They were country, but they rocked and they were like nothing Nashville had ever seen before. It was my lifelong dream to go to Nashville and see some of my favorite artists live. And when I was 22, I went to see Hank Williams, Jr. I took a slab of VB beer all the way from Australia to Nashville, because I thought, ‘What can I give Hank that he can't already get?’ And I knew some people I was writing with over there who got me a backstage pass and I was able to deliver the beer to Hank and his band. Hank wasn't there—I think his band ended up drinking it, to be honest—but I had the opportunity to come backstage and meet him later. It just so happened that I met this girl from Alabama who was sitting in the 42nd row, just in front of me, and we kind of hit it off. And I mean, we hit it off pretty damn good. So good that I didn't worry about going backstage again to see Hank. I ended up with her, and she was the reason I never saw Hank Jr. play.”
Rejected “That's another Lawson poem set to music. It resonated with me because, being as into country music as I was in high school, I was probably one of the most uncool kids at school. I was definitely the only one who wore R.M. Williams boots to school. I used to make up mixtapes of all my favorite music and give it to a few mates and try to convert them. In terms of my love life, I was rejected more times than I can remember. In fact, it wasn't until I was 17 that I got my first kiss. But I've certainly made up for it since then.”
Scots of the Riverina “Another bit of Lawson coming through there. It’s just a beautiful story of wartime and a young son who goes off to the war and never comes back, and his father disowns him for leaving the family farm. It had all the great elements. It had all the elements necessary to be a great country song, and it was an honor to turn it into music.”
You Don't Have to Go to Memphis “I didn't have enough songs to get through a whole album, and this one was sent to me from a publisher in the United States. I just liked it. It felt like the kind of music I wanted to play, so I put it on the album. It's the only American song. I guess it’s a tip of the hat to some of the great American songwriters that took me under their wing, who taught me about the craft of songwriting when I was 22, in Nashville.”
Searchin' for Another You “Before The Outback Club came out, I had a duo and a band that was just running around the pubs and clubs in the Riverina. I was towing a horse float, it was modified into a band trailer, and we had all of our equipment in the back. You couldn't get through a whole show playing country, so we had to play pop, rock, and blues, and my lead guitar player, a guy called Mark Featherstone, was just this huge fan of the legendary blues artists. He introduced me to Robert Johnson, Elmore James, The Robert Cray Band. It’s basically a song about recovering after getting dropped and trying to find someone to replace the girl you loved. It was the story of my life really through the ’80s and ’90s.”
Tallarook “Growing up in the bush, you ride motorbikes, you ride horses, help with sheep and cattle, and the other thing we used to do was shoot. Me and my mates would go out shooting at the Tallarook Ranges down in Victoria. We were on this shooting trip and it was pissing down rain, it was freezing cold, winter was coming on, and it was a real miserable experience. We were camped and I remember we took some steak and sausages with us but they were all completely frozen when we got to the camp and it was just horrible. There was nothing to shoot. We didn't shoot a single living thing, and I'm glad we didn't, because I don't like shooting anymore except targets and stuff. Anyway, we didn't shoot anything, but things were crook in Tallarook, and that's where that song came from.”