Country star ready for fun

While it's tempting to turn Pat Green's hike up a hillside into some sort of metaphor, it's probably better just to call it a noble attempt at multitasking and leave it at that.

Nonetheless, Green's willingness to combine a phone interview with a wind-sucking hike in Vail seems to say at least something about the Texas-born singer/songwriter's energy, easy sense of humor and total lack of pretense.

Green -- who has had 15 singles on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, including the No. 3-charting "Wave on Wave" from the gold album of the same name -- comes to Las Vegas Saturday for a show at the Rocks Lounge at Red Rock Resort.

It won't be Green's first visit. "We've done a lot of shows at the House of Blues and Mandalay Bay," he says, and he has opened here for headliners such as Kenny Chesney.

And he's happy to be coming back. "Las Vegas audiences are great," Green says, largely because fans here arrive at shows determined to have some fun.

"I mean, our job is to get people out of their skins and make them a little more comfortable doing things you wouldn't do in front of your kids," Green says. "That's kind of how I feel when I go see (Bruce) Springsteen or Willie Nelson."

That Green would cite a noncountry artist such as Springsteen confirms that he is simply, as he puts it, a fan of "good music," be it from the Rolling Stones, Merle Haggard, Jerry Jeff Walker or the Beatles.

"I guess it's more than anything about just listening to songs that had something to say, as opposed to just kind of tap-your-toe, fly-by-night, sing-along kinds of songs," Green says.

Green was born in San Antonio and grew up in Waco, and his own dreams as a kid were of playing baseball.

"Then I broke my arm in 17 pieces my freshman year (of college) and learned how to play the guitar," he says. "Not only was it less stressful on the arm, but it was probably more creatively productive than I could ever have been in the sports world."

Green began performing part time while holding down a day job with his stepfather's gasoline wholesale business. And when his stepfather saw how well Green was doing as a performer, he fired him.

"I was making like 20 grand in one weekend, and I'd never seen that much money," Green says. "I was just 25 years old and I just got out of school, and one week he said, 'If you can do that in one week, you can do that every other week. Chase your dream.' "

Along the way, Green became a songwriter as well as a singer.

"When you write a great song and you turn around and look at it, it's like what I'm doing right now, looking down the hill I just walked up and (saying), like, 'It's so pretty,' '' he says. "And, then, you don't really get to understand how good it is until the fans latch on to it and sing it back at you. That's such an amazing feeling.''

Also amazing is the scenery on that Vail hillside. Green lives in Fort Worth and jokes that having friends who have homes in places like Vail is "one of the true great perks of being a musician: I don't have to buy a vacation home."

At the end of both the hike and the interview, Green figures he's about 1,500 feet higher than where he began. And, except for the time or two when he apologized for catching his breath, nobody would ever have known.

"In a radio interview, this doesn't work very well," he explains with a laugh. "But it's print, so I said, 'OK, I could do this.' ''

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.