Ricky Nelson’s twin sons pay musical tribute to Dad

It can’t be easy to hold up your end of a family legacy. Just ask Matthew Nelson.

Matthew and his identical twin brother, Gunnar, are the sons of million-selling teen idol Rick (nee Ricky) Nelson, who grew up on television as the pop-singing son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. For decades, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952-66) held the record as America’s longest-running sitcom. His biggest his included “Poor Little Fool,” “Travelin’ Man” and “Lonesome Town.”

The twins’ mother, Kristin Harmon, played Ricky’s girlfriend on the show, and married him in real life (their first child, Matthew and Gunnar’s sister, is Father Dowling Mysteries actress Tracy Nelson). Kristin’s father was football legend Tom Harmon; her brother is NCIS actor Mark Harmon.

Still, Matthew Nelson said, “Music was always the through line in this family. It wasn’t television.”

Before he brought his family to radio, and then TV, Ozzie Nelson was a musician and dance band leader. Harriet had been the vocalist in his group. “He thought television was a fad. His true love was music, doing that with his wife.”

Grown-up Rick Nelson famously hated his “teen heartthrob” image, and created progressive country/rock music until his 1985 death in a plane crash. “If memories are all I sing,” he wrote in 1972’s “Garden Party,” his last hit, “I’d rather drive a truck.”

The Nelson brothers appear Friday (April 11) at the Central Park Performing Arts Center in Largo, with a multi-media show called “Ricky Nelson Remembered.”

They’ll also play the hits they had, under the name Nelson, in the early 1990s, to continue the family through line.

Nelson, 1990. Image: Geffen Records.

They were ubiquitous in those days, each with exceptionally long, Breck-beautiful blond hair. They looked like models from the cover of some twin-hunk romance novel. About as far from the crew-cut Nelsons of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet as they could get.

“Gunnar and I grew up in Southern California,” Matthew said. “The punk and new wave thing is what we started doing in clubs. Way before all that hair band shit. And we learned how to write songs.”

The first time anybody got a look at them was when they guest-hosted a week’s worth of MTV’s countdown show Dial MTV. “There we were, two long-haired white guys who looked like hot Swedish chicks.”

“(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” and “After the Rain” were major hits in 1990; the After the Rain album went double platinum. “We sold millions of records to people who had no idea who Ricky Nelson, or Ozzie & Harriet, were.”

The music was pop-metal; playing guitars and fronting a similarly-tressed backing band, they toured the world and received Ricky-style airport welcomes wherever they went. “Gunnar and I knew what it was like to be Taylor Swift,” Nelson recalled. “And then it was like overnight, we became pariahs. I don’t know why, that’s just how it happened. It’s how the world was.”

MTV, at that moment, dumped every “hair band” video and focused on the emergent grunge music out of Seattle. And, in the bat of an eyelash, hip hop culture.

“We understood that everybody considered us sons-of, and ‘everything must have been easy for those guys,’ and ‘it’s a hobby, they’ve got millions of dollars in the bank.’”

Not so. “By the time the record company finally pushed the go button on us, we were down to sixteen dollars in our joint account. Our dad had been dead for a few years, and we were kinda almost, to be honest, living in our cars and crashing on couches.

“But we had a dream and we had each other. I think the reason it worked was, we understood what it was to be guilty until proven innocent our whole lives, especially with music.”

The dream endures, even through the long hair is long gone. The brothers, whose familial harmony singing can be chill-inducing, still record and tour as Nelson, or the Nelson Brothers.

And sometimes it’s “Ricky Nelson Remembered.”

In countless biographies and TV documentaries, the image of the Nelsons as the all-American family they played on TV for so long, has faded.

Truth was, there was some serious dysfunction going on. Ozzie Nelson was a stern taskmaster who drove his sons hard, even telling them they couldn’t attend college because they owed their allegiance to him, and to the show. Bitterness hung in the air.

Wait, there’s more.

“Here’s the reality of it: Our mom was a pretty heavy drinker, our parents had a pretty heavy divorce,” Nelson explained. “Our dad was gone, paying for everything and being Peter Pan. So Gunnar and I had each other. And we had our music.”

As youngsters, he said, “There was music all around us. We were hippie kids. We’ve got pictures of us banging around on our dad’s drummer’s drum set in our nursery. I joke in our show that the homeless guy that didn’t leave turned out to be Bob Dylan. It was just around us. Nobody knows what famous is when they’re little.”

The twins were 3 years old when they were taken to their first concert and realized it was their dad onstage, smiling and singing, and making the audience happy. “That connection was instant,” he said, “and it was just electric. It was like, it doesn’t get better than this. Everybody’s happy.”

That, he said, is what drove them then, and what drives them today. As for everything that happened in the middle: “I still love music. I hate the business. I think anybody that’s sane would say the same thing.”

Usually, they perform together, with acoustic guitars and without a band. “We went out with Styx and Peter Frampton doing this,” Nelson said. “The biggest show we ever played was 60,000 people. We could bring a drummer and make it the same thing. We make a huge noise with the two guys.”

“Ricky Nelson Remembered” is an upbeat reminder of why teenagers, all around the world, loved their dad in his day. Matthew and his brother have been doing this particular show for a number of years, and it’s always an audience favorite.

“I think he would have been happy that we did our own thing for a while, but (his) songs are so good …,” Nelson said. “Our show is a multi-media thing, we’ve got interview footage from him, and people like Kris Kristofferson, Paul McCartney and John Fogerty. And we’ve kind of put it together to where it’s songs, it’s videos, it’s stories … because we have some great stories about our pop.

“We really don’t try to ‘be’ him. We’re not counterfeit Rickys. We play the songs, and play them with respect, and you can feel that connection between father and son. We play a couple of our own songs, where it makes sense.

“And not to give away the whole show, but we sing with our dad at the end.”

Click on this link for tickets to Friday’s concert.