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Before country singer Dierks Bentley made his mom and dad proud, he made them crazy. With worry.Bentley - a Grammy nominee, singer of a current No. 1 hit, “Free and Easy,” and nominee for country album of the year - will perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Bismarck Civic Center. He said his social activities in his teen years resulted in his parents taking a drastic measure.”I had good leadership skills, but I used them the wrong way,”he said in a recent interview.He said the kids he hung out with growing up in Arizona were the ones who “wanted to do everything first, take it to the extreme.”There was some underage drinking, and being out until 2 or 3 a.m., and “being in places I shouldn’t have been in,”he said.His parents eventually would decide the solution was to send the 17-year-old away, far away from his crowd, to Lawrenceville, an elite private school in Princeton, N.J.”It was traumatic,”he said. “I wanted to run away … a friend’s parent offered to let me stay with them.”But his parents won that one. He ended up in Lawrenceville.”I was very lonely, a long ways from home,”he said. “It was sobering, my childhood was over.”But there would be a moment in his Lawrenceville dorm room that would change his life - when a friend told him he had to “check out this guy,” and played for him a Hank Williams Jr. song.”Everything in me lined up,”Bentley said. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”It was to become a country musician - and from that point on, tinkering with other music genres ended.Bentley, son of a banker and homemaker in Arizona, had grown up in a house with an unused piano.”The only thing it did was hold pictures,”he said.But he said he loved listening to music, all kinds. At 13, he became enamored with a friend’s electric guitar, realizing that he could be more than a music fan.”I could actually make (music),”he said.The teen taught himself the guitar, played rock music, and then in Lawrenceville, away from all of his Arizona friends, “music became my best friend.”"I always had a guitar and amp in my room, spent a lot of hours playing,”he said. “I was just trying to figure out my path, but I hadn’t found any (music)at that point to hit me perfectly.”He experimented with the blues, heavy metal, rock, but it wasn’t until he heard Williams’ song that he knew for sure what to do.After graduating from Lawrenceville, he wanted to be in Nashville, Tenn., but knew he couldn’t get a recording deal right away and needed to “buy some time.”So he enrolled in Vanderbilt University there, majoring in English, and while the English teachers talked, he was in the back of the classroom writing. They might have thought he was taking notes, but he was actually writing country songs.By 19, he had about 10 songs.He also had become a student of country music history and performances through a job he got at the Nashville Network. Bentley said he was a researcher, assigned to find such things as footage of, say, an old George Jones performance. That meant he got to watch historic performances from the 1940s to 1980s, and he filled binders with hand-written notes about the songs and performances.In the late 1990s, he got his first gig at Springwater Supper Club & Lounge, Nashville’s oldest bar, and got paid in beer.His take-home pay and life has changed a bit since then.When Bentley returned to the Springwater earlier this year for a photo shoot, the bar was still the same.Craig Smith, 32, manager, said Tuesday that things haven’t changed much there in the bar that was recently named for the seventh year in a row as Nashville’s best dive bar. The bar has been the Springwater since the 1970s, but the building has operated as a tavern since 1900, was a speakeasy during Prohibition, and was a bar that, in the 1960s, union boss Jimmy Hoffa would spend time in.The bar that paid Bentley in beer still serves only beer, no liquor.”If we served liquor, this bar would be a smoking hole within two weeks,”Smith said.Meaning:Adding liquor to the mix of the bar’s already rowdy crowd would be like throwing a lighted match where a lighted match shouldn’t be.So the bar’s the same; Bentley’s life isn’t.Bentley has moved up from beer pay.”He’s a nice guy, but it was kind of funny to see,”Smith said.Smith said at the photo shoot there were about 15 people with Bentley doing such duties as “fussing with his hair.”Bentley and his hair, and his songs, described as contemporary but leaning-toward-traditional country music, has hit the tour trail.His Bud Light-sponsored 30-city “Throttle Wide Open” tour began on Oct. 4 in Georgia.Also touring with Bentley is multi-platinum singer and songwriter Jack Ingram, whose hits included “Wherever You Are” and “Measure of a Man.”Doors open at the Bismarck Civic Center at 6:30 p.m. Thursday for the 7:30 p.m. concert.Tickets are $36.50 and $29.50 and are available at the Bismarck Civic Center Box Office and all Ticketmaster outlets.For more information, call 222-2121.(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)