Scott Lester performs on the electric guitar.
With a brand-new, double-LP, vinyl album – and accompanying digital download – called 25 Years of the Great Divide, a groundbreaking Oklahoma band has officially kicked off the celebration of its silver anniversary.
And while there was some separation and even dormancy along the way, the Great Divide has persevered and built upon the reputation it started earning in the ’90s, when it became the first of the Stillwater-based Red Dirt acts to sign a major-label deal.
Not bad for a band that wasn’t even supposed to be a band – at least, not in the beginning.
As drummer JJ Lester recalls it, all he and vocalist-guitarist Mike McClure originally wanted to do was sell their songs to other people.
By the time Lester was approached by a cousin in Perry about playing a Labor Day gig in 1993, Scotte, on guitar, and Green, on bass, had joined the loose-knit group.
Then came their first gig.
Guitarist Kelley Green rocks out.
Perhaps it had something to do with the way they began, but as those four men coalesced into the Great Divide, they never went the accepted route of getting country dancehall jobs by playing covers of popular songs. From the beginning, they did mostly their own music.
“We got the privilege of playing the Wormy Dog, that little upstairs bar in Stillwater,” McClure says. “It was very small, so we drew enough people to pack it out. We just had a crowd, and that first crowd started following us. That was way before radio started working for us. But you know, they [bar owners] don’t care what’s going on as long as they’ve got people there buying their beer.
“Sometimes we would do like three originals, and if I sensed the crowd was wandering, we’d maybe do a little something they knew. And on more than one occasion, I’d say, ‘Here’s a new George Strait song’ – and play one of our own,” he adds with a laugh.
As everything shook out, McClure emerged as the primary songwriter, lead singer and frontman for the Great Divide. And while you can hear his songwriting evolve on 25 Years of the Great Divide, it’s clear that he excelled at it from the beginning.
The songwriter himself, however, doesn’t exactly agree.
It’s likely his evaluation of his earlier writing is colored by an encounter he had with one of America’s all-time great singer-songwriters. As McClure remembers, it came after a gig the Great Divide played in Fort Worth.
“Larry Joe Taylor was playing up the street, and we took a break and walked up there – and Guy Clark was in the crowd,” he says. “I was a huge, huge Guy Clark fan. So I went up and introduced myself and got an autograph.
McClure remembers going back behind the band’s hotel near the Fort Worth Stockyards to a little airstrip.
In August, however, the band returned to Stillwater to play a 25th anniversary street party. Lester admits he was “somewhat surprised” by the massive turnout, held outside the iconic Eskimo Joe’s.
“I’m always surprised,” says Lester, chuckling. “I’m surprised that anyone’s ever bought a ticket to see us play, to be honest with you. It’s certainly something I never take for granted. I’m thankful for just even getting to do it in the beginning. The odds of the four of us coming together and it working out the way it did is nothing short of a miracle in my mind.
25 Years of the Great Divide is available from the band’s website, tgdmusic.com.