Jewel unearthed at low-budget breakfast concert

By Jerry Fink

Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Groggy with sleep, vision not quite focused, anticipating the sunrise — it’s the perfect time to roll out of bed and attend a Jewel concert at Boulder Station.

For most concerts, fans have been up all day waiting for the sun to go down so they can attend a performance where they can guzzle beer or toss back shots while getting into the music.

But this is a breakfast concert sponsored by Station Casinos and country music station KWNR 95.5-FM. The concert, which airs live on the radio station’s “The Morning Show,” is free. The only catch is you have to get up with the chickens to take advantage of it.

The fun begins at 5 a.m., about the time some of us are just getting home from the previous night’s outing.

“We get people lining up at 4 a.m.,” says Joe Santiago, vice president of entertainment for Station Casinos.

The concerts, which have been going on for three years, are held monthly — usually the third or fourth Friday. The location alternates between the Railhead lounge at Boulder Station and the Chrome lounge at Santa Fe Station.

Artists vary from month to month. Performers have included Pat Green and Josh Gracin. Last Friday it was Jewel, a popular 33-year-old vocalist known for her pop, rock and folk music. It was Jewel with a side of bacon and eggs, orange juice (no vodka) and coffee (no Irish whiskey).

“Glad to be here,” she said from center stage as she settled onto the stool with her guitar and prepared for the first of two acoustic sets, each lasting about 30 minutes. “I always wake up, ahem, this early.”

Laughter rippled through the crowd of more than 300 fans, most of them probably stone-cold sober or sobering up.

For $1.95 you can walk through the breakfast buffet set up at the back of the lounge. If it’s your birthday during the month of the show you get a gift package that includes concert tickets, CDs and other goodies. That’s why KWNR calls it the Birthday Breakfast concert.

“Jewel is probably the biggest artist we’ve had,” said Natalie Lefler, producer of “The Morning Show,” which is hosted by Mark Stevens.

Jewel recently released her first country single, “Stronger Woman.” It’s a cut off her first country album, “Perfectly Clear,” which is set to be released in June.

The guest performer sang some of the songs she recorded before going country, including “Hands,” which she wrote in 1998 and which received a lot of airtime in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11. And she sang a couple of songs from her debut country album.

In between singing and yodeling (which she learned at age 6) she chatted with the audience and answered questions posed by Stevens.

We learned that Jewel probably should have been a country singer all along.

“My whole career they said I was a little bit too country,” she said.

Her life reads like a country song — raised on a cattle ranch in the wilds of open-range Alaska, where she and her father would ride herd on cattle for two days taking them to summer pasture. At night they would sit around the campfire singing and writing songs. When not tending cattle they lived in a log cabin without electricity or indoor plumbing.

She told fans about the hard times, about working for a man in Los Angeles who propositioned her when she was 18. When she declined, he refused to give her her paycheck, which led to her living in a van for several months and doing a little shoplifting, which inspired her to write “Hands” and to change her ways.

“I realized I was cheating myself,” Jewel said. “No matter how you work with your hands your own dignity is up to you.”

The hard times are long gone. She hit it big with her 1995 debut album, “Pieces of You,” which included the Top 10 cuts “You Were Meant for Me,” “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Foolish Games.” The album sold more than 12 million copies in the United States.

Last year she struck up a friendship with John Rich of the red-hot team Big and Rich (“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy”) while they were performing on “Nashville Star,” a reality TV program. He produced “Perfectly Clear.”

She also struck up a friendship with the breakfast crowd at Boulder Station.

At the end of the first set the fans rushed to the back of the room and lined up from the lounge, out the door and down a long row of slot machines and poker tables to get an autograph and have a picture taken with Jewel, whose memory for some will be closely associated with the aromas of breakfast.