Chapter 6 NBC10 Boston News, Aired February 7, 2006 #2
We grew up in a duplex in the McKees Rocks neighborhood.
When I came home for family dinners, I’d catch him fiddling around in his room with his unplugged, secondhand Mitchell, looking out the window onto the Ohio River.
I knew he had dreams of making it out of our industrial little backwater someday.
So I took him along with me to concerts whenever I could.
He was with me when I shot the Dust and Roses show that Ryan opened. Country wasn’t quite his style—he very much identified with Bruce Springsteen back then—but he wasn’t about to turn down a free ticket to the New Hazlett.
I, too, remember being intrigued by the number of young girls I saw up front. All decked out in silver accessories to match Ryan’s style. There was a tiny girl on her dad’s shoulders right near the front, wearing an equally tiny cowgirl hat.
What stuck with me, more than anything, was how Ryan genuinely acknowledged this group—how she seemed to meet every eye in the room when she strode onstage, already breaking into “Shoes on the Dash.” She couldn’t have, it’s silly to think so—but I swear she winked at me before she got to the mic.
My brother must have thought the same.
I’ve heard about how connected Ryan is to her fans.
Throughout the course of her entire career, she never seemed to get aloof like other major stars or to take her audience for granted.
Maybe she knew, back then, that it was their collective power that could launch her into stardom, and she was going to do all she could to earn their attention.
Or maybe she was just having fun.
Either way, when she stretched her arm out to touch the reaching hand of the little girl in the cowgirl hat during “Highway 71,” I captured it.
Two young bluegrass fans looking for all the world like the fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette bought my photo to use in a write-up about bluegrass’s revival in young female audiences. Entertainment Weekly asked permission to use it a week later.
And as Ryan’s career grew, so did mine.
Jasmine
I don’t know what kind of magic Ryan managed to work on the Dust and Roses tour, but by the time she got back to Austin, Skip had booked her a tour of her own.
San Antonio, Phoenix, San Diego, LA, Vegas, and San Francisco.
He joked that it was the “Southwest Sans,” which personally reminded me of a Taco Bell order, or maybe a font, but someone thought he said Southwest Sands, and I guess it caught on.
That photo from the Pittsburgh show, the one with the little girl in the silver cowgirl hat, did wonders—even my auntie called and told me how cute it was, and was that the young bluegrass lady I was working for?
Yes, Gomo, that’s Ryan. That’s Ryan to a T.
I think she knew exactly what she was doing with that photo.
Skip
Kshhhhhhh. Glide, baby.
Gavin Armstrong, lead singer of Montana Line
Ryan Holding’s crew brought us on as openers for the Southwest Sands tour.
That was back when Ryan was still country.
I don’t mean no disrespect—people change, and I guess their music can too.
I don’t want to say she sold out. I guess I just mean .
. . we had her first, you know? I know some folks in my genre find it easy to think she sold out on all of us.
It’s a real tight-knit group, and that’s only gotten more true in, well .
. . in our current political climate, should I say.
There’s a mindset in the industry that country’s gotta stick together.
And some would say Ryan gave it up down the road.
But I remember that tour. She was just a half-bit of a girl, she was, but what a spitfire.
Me and the guys were young, too, barely in our twenties, so it felt a little weird to be opening for someone who could’ve been your kid sister.
I mean, we were happy for the opportunity—don’t get me wrong for a second.
No one knew us from Adam in those days. But Ryan really had her own way of doing things, and for a bunch of guys who were already trying to do everything we could to be “cool,” well—it was different.
Different, but . . . great.
Part of it was that she was so normal. Our first rehearsal, she comes in wearing Hollister sweatpants and a hoodie, and you’re like Wait, is this her?
Is that Ryan? She was always professional in demeanor, but you could tell she was still learning to handle fame, this being her very first brush with it.
Still not quite big enough to be recognized on the street—and neither were we, not by a long shot—but big enough to find on any country station or Best Buy CD rack.
It hadn’t made her self-conscious yet, if that makes any sense.
Kylie Cameron, model and singer
One thing that Ryan would do at her early shows was pick audience members by random, and on their ticket, they’d get a little june-bug icon—you know, like the song. That meant they had VIP access.
It wasn’t like my shows, or, I mean, any shows, where you had to pay extra to get the VIP ticket. No—it was totally democratic, totally random.
And that kind of pissed me off, you know? Because this girl was starting to be a big deal, even though I didn’t know what the hell bluegrass was. But she had this bomb-ass dress in that Entertainment Weekly photo, and I wanted a dress like that. Silver was having a huge comeback because of her.
And I wanted to meet her. I wanted to know what was going on in those VIP meet and greets.
I was just modeling back then; I didn’t have any music industry cred, so I didn’t have any connections who could get me backstage like I do now.
In fact, I got into music because of Ryan.
She’s really been so influential to so many people.
But the only way I could get to that backstage was if I bought someone else’s little june-bug ticket, and those were quite hard to come by.
Ryan did a really good job of building this .
. . intrigue. A young girl breaking into the bluegrass scene, becoming mainstream with a genre that no one on the Billboard Hot 100 had thought about in—I don’t know, decades?
But her singles started showing up there on her Southwest Sands tour.
What was her deal? Where were all these little bluegrass fans coming from?
And, listen. People can be . . . well, just mean. Look at Olivia Rodrigo. Look at Charli XCX. Anytime you start to see someone totally unknown—especially a young woman—skyrocket upward, people are all like, What’s the catch? Why does she deserve it? Tale as old as fucking time.
I’ll admit I hung out with a lot of those people.
I’ll admit that I was one of those people.
You don’t know catty and petty until you’ve clawed your way up in the modeling industry, and I had to earn my stripes somehow.
The word around our circle was that Ryan’s whole wide-eyed, girl-next-door thing was nothing more than a schtick.
You don’t grow that fast without stepping on some necks, and this all-American persona of Who, me?
I’m just a girl! I’m so excited to be onstage, and I love baking cookies and watching movies with my best friend! drove some of my friends batshit.
Maybe it felt like an insult. We’d learned early on that we had to be tough in our industry, we had to take a lot of abuse. And here she was acting like it was all cupcakes and butterflies and . . . she was having fun. Or seemingly so.
I told myself that I was hate-reading the magazine articles about her, hate-listening to her songs, hate-buying a ticket to her show and getting there early to see if anyone would exchange a june-bug ticket with me.
I went alone except for my own security guard.
None of my other friends were interested back then.
But there was something else when I finally got to my seat, VIP ticket in hand from some eleven-year-old who’d been gullible enough to trade it for a hundred dollars.
I felt my pulse jump when she came onstage playing all those crazy jangling notes and whooping it up, getting the crowd to clap faster and faster and stomp their feet until I could hardly see her fingers flying over her strings.
I remember having this image of my grandma, but, like, my grandma at my age, listening to something like this or even playing it herself and feeling . . . alive.
It was fun. Plain and simple. I was enjoying myself.
I still expected something exclusive when I headed to the VIP lounge after the show; I don’t know what.
Carved ice, sushi, champagne—even though she had just turned sixteen and I would only be nineteen the next month.
So when I had my ticket scanned by this massive dude in all black, I was, well . . . surprised by what I saw.
There was no huge line to see her. There was no security or roped-off area. Ryan was right there and had changed into a flannel T-shirt, and she was playing Guitar Hero on a projector screen with a couple of fans competing with her and the rest cheering her on. I just stood there and stared.
It was like no other VIP lounge I’d ever been to.
There was a big archway decorated with fake bluebonnets and a wooden sign where you could take pictures, yes, but there were also craft-services tables full of pizza rolls, nachos, brownies, sodas.
It wasn’t until I grabbed a plate that I realized how hungry I was, and I was there stuffing pizza rolls in my mouth when Ryan came over to grab a 7UP.
“Hi!” I said with my mouth full. “Such a great show! I’m Kylie Cameron.”
She smiled. “Hey, thanks so much for coming, Kylie! I’m so glad you liked it, that means a lot.”
I could tell she didn’t recognize my name. I mean, that’s fine, I wasn’t major major back then, but it did take me down a peg. I mean, I was in a lot of magazines. And I had a second where I felt all that judgment swell up again at her fake-looking smile.