Rick Alan Carpenter

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In an age when country music is dominated by contest winners, fresh-scrubbed adolescents, and prepackaged pop (read “new”) country pretenders, Rick Alan Carpenter is the genuine article. “I’ve been dead drunk, dead broke, divorced and damn near dead more than a few times” he intones, “I’ve successfully avoided success for 20 years, my life is a country song!” Carpenter has played as a sideman in numerous country and rock bands in Los Angeles as well as Nashville, where he currently resides. He has opened for everyone from “Boy Howdy to Van Halen, playing huge auditoriums, closet sized bars, and every type of roadhouse and honkytonk in between.”
Born “in the east” and raised “out west”, Carpenter started playing the guitar at thirteen. “My mother played the piano and always entertained when people came over, so I caught the bug early on.” He started playing bass as well and found out he could get more work as a bass player, because “everyone wanted to play the guitar.”
After a few years playing bass in several rock bands (including a stint with legendary LA guitarist Terry Kilgore), Rick Alan rediscovered the country music he heard as a kid. “I had a friend who had thousands of records, Buck and Merle, Wynn Stewart, Tommy Collins, Joe Maphis, all the great Bakersfield stuff, I felt reborn.”
The cowpunk scene in LA had spawned Dwight Yoakam, The Blasters and Lone Justice, and the neo-traditional country sound appealed to Carpenter. “I played the Palomino not long before it closed, but was getting tired of LA, and headed for Nashville with my guitars and a suitcase full of sad songs in ‘93.