SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, May 28, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — Hollywood royalty is coming to the Beehive State next month as third-generation torchbearers of the Nelson family legacy Matthew and Gunnar Nelson take the stage at Layton’s Kenley Amphitheater.
The twins are part of a lineup of mostly national and a handful of local acts that are part of the 2024 Summer Nights with the Stars season. They will kick off the season on Saturday, June 15, with An Evening with Matthew and Gunnar Nelson. The season concludes on Thursday, Sept. 12, with Petty Theft: San Francisco Tribute to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. Also appearing during the summer are boldface names including Martina McBride, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, Ben Folds, and Phillip Phillips.
For more information about the show, click here.
Famous for their soaring harmonies, musicianship and, of course, great hair, multi-platinum recording artists Matthew and Gunnar Nelson are the sons of legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Ricky Nelson and grandsons of TV icons Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. As one of TV’s first teen idols, Ricky Nelson starred with his parents in the TV series “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” from 1952 to 1966. In 1957, he debuted as a singer on the sitcom and went on to put 53 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 list. He died in a plane crash in 1985.
The Nelson family landed in “The Guinness Book of World Records” as the only family in history with three successive generations of No. 1 hit makers when Nelson climbed to the top with their 1990 hit “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection.” The twins have written and performed one No. 1 and five Top 10 singles, garnered four No. 1 MTV videos, and sold over 5 million records.
These days, the brothers stay active as in-demand songwriters and performers. To celebrate the release of their phenomenally successful debut album, “After The Rain,” the former mainstays of MTV’s golden era of music videos are preparing to kick off their 25th Anniversary Tour, live and unplugged; just two voices, two guitars, and a night full of great songs. The special concert event features a combination of hits and current tracks that demonstrate their ever-evolving harmony blend and acoustic base. They also perform under the name of Ricky Nelson Remembered, as a tribute to their father, and also recently re-formed their band Nelson to play some dates.
Matthew Nelson chatted with Gephardt Daily by phone from his home in Franklin, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and their 9-year-old son Ozzie. In a wide-ranging interview, Nelson talked about his music, his family, and how he and his brother found their unique look (clue: it was in London!)
He told us more about making his home in Franklin, near his twin. “It’s about 20 minutes south of Nashville, been living here for many years. Gunnar has been living here twice as long as I have,” he said. “I lived in New York and moved to beautiful Middle Tennessee to get away from the nonsense and the state tax. Where I live, I’m in a neighborhood, but five minutes away is a horse property and wide open spaces.”
We asked Nelson, because he comes from a family that followed various artistic paths, whether he always knew music was going to be his destiny. He said that if he hadn’t gone into music, he would have most likely been a race car driver.
“I love racing,” he said. “Big motorsports fan. If I was not playing music… I was asked to stand in in a four-man GT2 team for Porsche; the Daytona 24, and I had to make a decision basically whether to go into racing full time, because I was winning some races, but leave my brother behind. So that wasn’t gonna happen. So I had to make a real decision to stick with family and stick with the music, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get in the car anytime I can.”
He added that music was always his primary passion.
“Well, the music always came first, that’s what I can say. Music was always just around all the time. My earliest memories were being a toddler and our dad rehearsing his band in our nursery, that type of thing. Also, we grew up in the Hollywood Hills in the late ’60s, early ’70s. So everybody seemed to be musical and a hippie; we were mostly naked kids running around listening to music all the time. That’s basically how it was. So I was joking, we’ve got the homeless guy in the living room all the time — it turned out to be [Bob] Dylan. And our babysitter, we loved her, she was so sweet, this jolly woman, was ‘Mama’ Cass Elliot. That was our normal. And there was always a paintbrush or a pen in my hand, or I was listening to music or trying to play it. That started when we were about 6. So we were young, we weren’t Mozart young, but we were young enough. And we started playing clubs in LA at about 12; we were very young for that.”
As teens, the twins were part of the cutthroat Los Angeles punk and new wave club scene, playing in the punk-pop trio Strange Agents.
“You see all these people that are in sport, and they start super young as well,” Nelson added. “My son, I’ve got a little boy named Ozzie, and he’s musical. Plays a bunch of different instruments and he sings, and I know that’s what he’s going to do, I can tell. But, I took him karting here because there’s an indoor kart track and he set the Nashville record, like pretty much solid for a year. If he wanted to race, he could. And I just want him to be happy and do what he wants to do. As far as the other stuff, I did a little bit of art, wasn’t trained because my mother [Kristin, who was an artist] wasn’t trained. She was, I guess, American primitive. So it’s kind of like perspective; there was no perspective. And so I grew up with linseed oil and turpentine and oil paints and canvases all over the place. So that was her thing. She actually has a really brilliant book. She did a book of all of her paintings, and with things from her life and love letters from our dad and her whole journey through that marriage and divorce and all that stuff. The book is called ‘Out of my Mind.’ We lost her a few years ago.”
Nelson also told us more about his mom’s side of the family.
“Our grandfather, Tom Harmon, was a gridiron star,” he said. “So he won something called the Heisman Trophy, which is the top college football award that they give every year. It’s a big deal. So he was quite a force. He was a tough guy, and he was very competitive. And he raised three children and encouraged them to be competitive between themselves. My mother was the oldest and she kind of she just came in a hurricane, came in a firecracker, and our aunt Kelly became a fashion model and married, young, to very important automotive guy named John DeLorean, and she was just kind of on television and in magazines growing up. And our uncle, he was a football star himself in college, not as much as our grandfather, but he did very well and decided to go into acting, following after our other grandfather. He’s done very well. Mark Harmon. So that was kind of like what we learned on both sides of the family, was all that was possible, just by looking at their example.”
He described that his family stayed down-to-earth despite being Hollywood royalty.
“We never really saw them have celebrity moments,” he said. “You know that crap that you see with Kardashians and stuff? That just didn’t happen. Like my dad was the kindest man I’ve ever met. And we had to pull him out of an autograph line; everyone in America felt that they grew up with him, and he was impossibly beautiful. He just was the sweetest person ever. I still have people coming up with stories, it makes me happy. For instance, I had a woman come up in an autograph line last year. She was well into her 60s. She said: ‘when I was a kid, it was my first concert and I went with my mom and my dad, who were smitten by your father, and he was playing a fair with his band in the early ’70s.’
“She said: ‘I was quite little, you know, didn’t know who he was, but everybody was going completely nuts. We got there early, so we were up at the front and your dad came on stage and the audience started crushing.’ And she was getting crushed. She said: ‘Your father saw what was going on, and he got on the mic and stopped the entire crowd and shamed them and said, stand back, there are people getting hurt.’ She got lifted out of the audience by him. He asked her if she was OK, and he gave her a hug and put her on a chair right next to him for the entire show and kept bringing her glasses of water — just making sure she was all right. He was so affected by possibly hurting somebody. And she said: ‘He was so nice to me, and I’ve never forgotten that he gave me hugs and signed some stuff, and said you’re always welcome at my shows.’ And just those kinds of things that you don’t hear a whole lot of today from people in entertainment.”
He also spoke about Paul McCartney and how nice he was when the Nelsons met him.
“Paul was always my Beatle, even though George Harrison lived next door to us, had breakfast with us as toddlers for a few years,” Nelson said. “And George is Gunnar’s deal, but Paul was always mine. I was a bass player and I sang, was always a fan of Wings growing up and he inspired me — he and Sting were my guys. And when we got a chance to meet him it was a last-minute call, and we found ourselves backstage backstage, you know the kind of inner sanctum, and it was us standing next to Reba McEntire, Brooks and Dunn, Rascal Flatts and Simon Kirke from Bad Company, and it’s like, we have a totally normal life, right? Reba was funny. She turned to Gunnar and said: ‘Hi, I’m Dolly Parton.’ You know, it’s like one of those things, collectively, hundreds of millions of records sold.
“So he (Paul) came out of his little room. And he looked at everybody, waved, and he looked at me and walked straight up to me and grabbed my face and said, ‘Don’t you look like your Daddy?’ He was so sweet, and apparently he is a huge Ricky Nelson fan. The last song our father ever recorded three days before he died was ‘One After 909.’ It was Lennon and McCartney, one of their last songs. And I told him about that, because he was set to produce a Ricky Nelson album and never got a chance to do it. And I told him that was the last song he ever recorded. And Paul, his eyes got huge and he said, ‘Did you?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and I gave him a CD of the song. He literally clutched it to his chest and started jumping up and down and gave me a hug. It’s just nice that those people, it seems, are the most unaffected, pure people.”
We also asked him how he personally stays so down-to-earth.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Nelson said. “My definition of success and especially of wealth has nothing to do with money. For me, it’s a matter of appreciating people and things that you have. I said this to my 9-year-old yesterday, not to get all esoteric or whatever. But I said, ‘I just saw a video of these kids in the Sudan and they had a tennis ball. Somebody had given them a tennis ball. And these children were jumping up and down with joy and rolling it on a rooftop and bouncing it against the wall. This was their treasure. One tennis ball.’ And I said, ‘Ozzie, can you see these kids and see how they appreciate this one thing so much?’ That’s why I’m kind of, you know, I’m way over-indulgent. You know, I said, ‘This is why we’re so fortunate. Because this is a treasure to them. And you would never look at this twice here.’ It’s all about what you appreciate. I’ve had money and I’ve had no money numerous times. And I realize that when I die, I’m not going to be saying, ‘Man, I really should have gotten that Porsche.’ No, I’m gonna say, ‘I hope that everybody’s gonna be OK. And I hope I made a difference. You know, I hope that my love mattered.’ That’s what you’re gonna be thinking about. I don’t think about that other crap. The way I look at it, we’re all kind of custodians for this stuff. We never really own anything. We just throw it away or pass it on to somebody else.
“But I’ve met more people and had more love in my life, and I hope I’ve got a lot more ahead of me. And that’s the coolest thing about music, and maybe that was the determining factor in not going into motorsports for me full time. Especially being born with a twin brother that I make music with. I show up with the guitar, we show up with our songs and a couple of voices, and we can move the world. And we’ve done that, whether we played in foreign countries where they don’t even speak English as a first language and people have phonetically learned the songs that we’ve written and are having a great time. It’s like we’re the same religion, and we’re realizing this is more powerful than people think. And I kind of you know, I love people. That helps me think that motorsports was a very necessary thing for me to have especially as a twin, to have my own thing, just you and the machine, period. There’s a spirituality in that as well that only race car drivers understand. And you know, I think a great quote is, ‘Racing is life, all the rest is just waiting.’ And I’ve had so many close calls in my life, and I realize I’m really on borrowed time here anyways. Too many things that have happened to me that I just kind of say I must have some angels that want me to do something.”
This summer, the twins are touring with three separate shows: the 25th Anniversary Tour, Ricky Nelson Remembered, to relive the music and memories of their father, and finally, with their re-formed rock band Nelson.
“We re-formed Nelson, because we’re old enough now that we’re nostalgic,” he said. “Last year, we got asked to take the place of a band that had 18 shows booked with hard rock bands all over America. And they said, ‘Well, you have two-and-a-half weeks, can you put together the real band, the real show? Get your merchandise together, get your scenery together, hire your crew. And the first show is in Ohio in two-and-a half weeks.’ And we said, ‘Well, yes, we can.’ And we did. It was nice to have that kind of challenge. We love challenges, and it went better than we expected. I’m happy to say that we’re out playing Nelson shows. We actually teamed up with some friends of ours in a band called FireHouse that kind of had that kind of pop-metal success from back in the day. We were a little different than them musically, but it works because there’s a similar fan base and we’re teaming up to do a double-headlining tour.”
I mentioned to him that I had just watched the “Love and Affection” music video, and that he and his brother had great hair and great guitars. I asked him if anyone in the band still has long hair or if it’s short hair all the way now.
“We’re all at varying lengths; Gunnar and I grew our hair out just little bit because it just doesn’t stay short,” he said. “We’ve had short hair off and on, but my hair’s down below my shoulders. I don’t look like a hot Swedish chick any more.”
He added: “The reason why we grew our hair that long and the reason why we had a very colorful visual image and we had clothes made for us instead of off-the-rack things like Prince did was because we were in the U.K. writing songs for the first album with, I think, Adrian Gurvitz or Russ Ballard or something. We were over there and we basically lived in Hertfordshire for about a month. And we hung out in London with, oh gosh, George Michael’s bass player [Deon Estus] was a friend of ours. So there was a party, an industry party. Gunnar and I showed up and this just beautiful Black woman was there who was styled out to the max, just looked so put together. Just beautiful. She walked up to us and she was kind of like, ‘Hello.’ And she said, ‘What are you going for? Is this American rock bland? What are you doing?’ I didn’t even know what to say. We told her who we were and what we were doing. We were writing, about to release our first debut album after years of trying, and she said, ‘Listen, are you going to to try to do something in Europe?’ So I said, ‘Of course, we want this to be for everybody.’ She said, ‘OK, I’m gonna give you a hint. You can’t do it looking this way. You have to make a statement. You guys are twins. You have to do something that’s gonna make people pay attention. Because frankly, everybody gives a shit for about five seconds. Yeah, if you don’t sound a certain way or look a certain way, they’re going to change the channel,’ and she was completely correct.
“And Gunnar and I talked about it, and we realized that regardless of what our reality was, Gunnar and I honestly played music for a lot of years. Our mom was a talent and she also liked to drink, so music for us was an escape. It’s kind of us keeping our heads together. Our parents had a world-class Hollywood divorce and all that stuff. But nobody cares as far as we’re concerned. And nobody would believe that we were just regular guys or that we were just, you know, street preachers that did black and white warehouse videos in leather. So we thought about what we were writing, and we came up with a style that reflected that. It was actually a counter-statement to all of the, quote-unquote hair bands of the day. It was much more like a heavy version of The Hollies or The Byrds, and we wrote songs like ‘After the Rain,’ basically about getting through tough times. When the video in America hit, there was a major backlash, actually. People paid attention, but people were like, ‘What is this?’ kind of thing. And that’s exactly what we wanted to do, because of that one woman at a party. It’s exactly what we wanted to do.”
We also asked him if his wife and son will be out on the road with him this summer.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Nelson said. “We’ve chosen to home-school him. So my wife has picked up the mantle as a teacher that she never expected to be. She worked really hard at it. But what we love about it is we can both be hands-on with him as far as experiences. I think that’s the best part of it. He can touch things and see them. We’ve been talking about doing more traveling now because things have kind of loosened up, at least until the election happens.”
For more information and tickets to the Kenley Amphitheater show, click here. For more information about Nelson, click here.
