The track list for this mix CD began to coalesce way back in 2016, when, partly inspired by the extraordinary God Less America compilation LP, I started throwing together a mix of my favourite country songs with lyrics concerning death, murder, crime, suicide, substance abuse, imprisonment (or, in the case of Chuck Wells’ remarkable ‘Down & Out’, all of the above compressed into three minutes between choruses).

The plan changed somewhat however when – much to my delight - my brother asked whether I could compile a mix of “cowboy music” for him (emphasis on the pedal steel). So, I began widening the scope to cram in some classics from country’s ‘big names’, and various cuts that I felt neatly demonstrate the pleasure of the genre’s trademark sounds.

I’ll admit, the polyglot mix that eventually resulted doesn’t really serve as an effective ‘starter kit’ for exploring country music (where’s Dolly / Patsy / Tammy / Buck / Willie / George / Waylon for chrissakes?), and neither does it work very well as a collection of eccentric/bizarre narrative country songs. You will also no doubt note the presence of a number of artists whose inclusion within even the widest definition of the genre is extremely questionable.

But, nonetheless, I believe that this compilation succeeds beautifully in encapsulating the things I love about country music.

High on the list of those things, I think, is verses. Far more-so than choruses, I’ve always loved a f-ing good verse or two, and (for English speakers at least) country gives better verse value than any other popular music genre I’m aware of, excepting possibly hip-hop.

So, if you feel similarly, and if you’re unfamiliar with these songs, all I can say is - please take the opportunity to give them a listen, because every single one is a marvel.



Track list:

00:00 Hank Williams – Ramblin’ Man
03:00 The International Submarine Band – Folsom Prison Blues / It’s Alright Mama
07:22 Jonathan Richman – Since She Started To Ride
09:53 Loretta Lynn – Bargain Basement Dress
11:32 Boxcar Willie – Truck Driving Man
14:21 Dave Dudley – Operation X
16:40 Jimmie Rodgers – Frankie & Johnny
19:27 Merle Haggard – The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde
21:30 Chuck Wells – Down and Out
24:35 Harry Johnson – It’s Nothing To Me
26:58 Gram Parsons – The Streets of Baltimore
29:49 Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra – Jackson
32:36 Arkey Blue – Too Many Pills
36:09 Bobby Gentry – Fancy
40:22 Lee Hazlewood – Pray Them Bars Away
42:57 Merle Haggard – Sing Me Back Home
45:44 Laura Cantrell – Lee Harvey Was A Friend of Mine
49:41 Tom T. Hall – It Rained In Every Town Except Paducah
52:32 Townes Van Zandt – Pancho & Lefty
56:12 Emmylou Harris – Wayfaring Stranger
59:38 The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
63:08 Dave Van Ronk – Hang Me, Oh Hang Me
66:18 Johnny Cash – San Quentin (live at San Quentin)
70:11 The Flying Burrito Brothers – Sin City
74:21 The Mekons – Lost Highway


Download links for mp3 version: one / two.

Labels: country, mixcloud, mixtapes

Lee Hazlewood’s first LP under his own name, ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ in a sense functions as a chronologically incompatible bridge between the (ineffably wonderful) International Submarine Band sessions he oversaw a few years later and the far more louche / urban MGM albums that established his recording persona for good towards the end of the decade.

Lee’s eccentricities were already getting the better of him here though, and, for reasons best known to himself, he decided to corral his songs together into a sort of proto-concept album, with each track preceded by a ramblin’ spoken word introduction concerning the simple-minded populace of an isolated town named ‘Trouble’ (allegedly based on Hazlewood's own birthplace in Mannford, Oklahoma).

Unfortunately, these introductions – sometimes almost as long as the flawlessly concise songs they’re introducing – are fairly tedious, containing little of the dry wit and off-hand pessimism evidenced in the compositions themselves, and instead hewing toward a kind of cloying Lake-Wobegon-Days coziness. They’re good for one listen at best, and if subsequently scanning through them to get to the good bits on my mp3 player proves a bit of a pain, getting up every two and a half minutes to jog the needle on the original LP must have been absolutely infuriating - one good reason perhaps why ‘Trouble..’ faded into obscurity and Lee exited his deal with Mercury post-haste.

This, needless to say, is a shame, because when you do get to the songs on ‘Trouble..’, they are almost all excellent – disarmingly simple, two minute / three chord country songs that sound so instantly catchy and familiar, you’re amazed no one had written them before. Performed with tight, minimal backing and just enough off-kilter strangeness to keep you on your toes, the breeziness of the tunes and the cartoonish simplicity of the lyrics as ever plays trojan horse to the weird darkness beneath.

As an opener, ‘Long Black Train’verily owns the concept of writing a song entitled ‘Long Black Train’, Hazlewood’s voice crawling snake-like across the title just as beautifully as you might hope as the rhythm section walks the dog behind him; “ninety-nine years, is what he’ll get / I bet it feels like a hundred to Jim”. Yes, one track in on his debut album and I’m already far-gone in thrall to Hazlewoodism.

‘Son of a Gun’, ‘Run, Boy, Run’ and ‘Six Feet of Chain’ are all just as good – happy, laidback sketches of death and sex, imprisonment and criminality that see no reason to break the rhyme scheme or outstay their welcome. Hopefully I’m not just saying this due to the synchronicitous song title, but it’s easy to imagine The Vaselines playing this one a lot as they threw together the off-hand magic of tunes like ‘Ride Me Rory’; a similarly timeless, unhurried feel is very much in evidence.

I suppose it stands to reason that Johnny Cash was a big influence on the kind of style Hazlewood was gunning for here, and, given the Man in Black’s penchant for scooping up catchy, novelty country songs by the dozen during the ‘60s, it’s surprising that his people weren’t on the phone to Hazlewood’s publishers PDQ after this album’s release. (Hell, this stuff’s even in the right key, ferchrissake.) In a different world, I’d bet Cash could have ridden any of these numbers to the top of the charts, perhaps sending Lee’s career off on a rather different path in the process. As it is though, maybe JC, like most everyone else, just couldn’t be bothered to get through the spoken word bits. He was a busy man, after all. Pills to take, prisons to visit and all that.

Well, c’est la vie. Maybe in that world we’d never have gotten ‘Cowboy in Sweden’, or Nancy &  Lee, or ‘Requiem for an Almost Lady’. By plotting his own course straight to the land of the strange, Lee remained his own man, and… that’s the only it could be, I’m sure he’d agree, even if his bank balance didn’t.


I hear that at some point this year, there’s a sorta ‘cover album’ emerging on which various tedious indie-rock types re-record ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ – a good idea actually I think, as these songs have tons of mileage left in ‘em (frankly, every band in the world could benefit from covering one). Details yonder.

Meanwhile, a resissue of the original with a ton of bonus tracks can currently be gotten from Light In The Attic.

Labels: album reviews, country, Lee Hazlewood

God Less America # 1

In honour of 4th July, I thought it might be a good moment to instigate an occasional (weekly? monthly? whatever..) series, highlighting tracks from God Less America, an out of print compilation of morbidly unhinged novelty country records put together by Tim Warren of Crypt Records.

There have been dozens of similar collections over the years of course, and the sheer volume of warped novelty blather that’s been doing the rounds in the internet era has pretty much reached saturation point, but, as is the case with Crypt’s immortal ‘Back From The Grave’ series, no one has ever scraped quite the same barrels nor assembled their troubling findings with quite the same care as Mr. Warren, leaving us with a brief but extraordinary playlist that takes us to some very dark and curious places indeed, exhibiting a far, far higher potential for fascination and longevity than might usually be encountered with this sort of shtick.

Key to this I think is that, with a few exceptions, the tunes (well I say tunes, quite a few of them are just weird spoken word kinda things) on ‘God Less America’ are compelling and well-executed listens rather than one-play ‘snigger and move on’ kinda spins, and a few are just flat-out brilliant.

Beginning with one of the latter, here’s ‘Down & Out’, performed by Chuck Wells.

Taking the received wisdom that a good country song hinges on death and tragedy to its natural conclusion, ‘Down & Out’ is a masterpiece of narrative efficiency, working from the blueprint of a generic Johnny Cash-style ‘story song’ and cranking things up to a truly fevered degree, somehow managing to cram real estate fraud, gun-running, incarceration, true love, marriage, murder, despair, vengeance, more murder, drug addiction and more despair into three minutes and five seconds, still leaving room for choruses, instrumental breaks and a healthy dose of doom-stricken, Satan-based philosophising.

Songwriters: listen, learn and cry tears of awe. That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.

BEST BIT:

After repeated listens, I’m very keen on the neat way the final verse is turned, but for sheer immediacy the “KILL KILL KILL” moment is hard to beat.

HISTORY:

My five whole minutes of research suggests that info regarding Mr. Wells is pretty scarce. Not to be confused with the Carolina soul singer of the same name, it seems likely that this Chuck Wells was the native of Jaspar, Alabama who recorded numerous sides between 1952 and 1954, sixteen of which (not including ‘Down & Out’) are collected on a CD entitled ‘The Complete Hillbilly Collection’, released in 2006 by UK label Cattle records. Though it would be a hair-raising number in any era, I couldn’t help thinking ‘Down and Out’ sounded a bit too modern for the early ‘50s, and indeed, this handy discography reveals that it was actually the B side of a one-off comeback single issued on the Rice label in 1965; the A-side is the promisingly titled ‘Good Morning Fool’.

Labels: Chuck Wells, country, God Less America

Arthur Russell – Love Is Overtaking Me
(Audika, 2008)

Arthur Russell’s music, as experienced via the slow but steady series of reissues produced by Audika, Rough Trade and Souljazz, has come to mean a lot to me, and countless other music fans, in the past few years. I even own an Arthur Russell t-shirt, courtesy of the latter label’s ‘Sounds Of The Universe’ shop. As such, people are sometimes inclined to ask me, so, who is this Arthur Russell guy anyway? And whilst I would dearly love to immediately fill them in on the whole sphere of Arthur Russell-ness, the sheer breadth of the man’s work and the variety of the cultural spheres in which he moved makes that a very difficult question to answer without sitting the questioner down for a brief lecture, accompanied by slides and musical extracts. For, as I’m sure other fans will acknowledge, “oh, he was just this genius cello-playing gay Buddhist avant garde disco producer experimental pop song writing echo-obsessed home recording pioneer musical genius guy” fails to really get the point across.

Thankfully, I can now point questioners in the direction of ‘Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell’, which I went to see at the ICA a couple of weeks ago, and found to be one of the most moving and thoughtfully assembled music documentaries I’ve had the pleasure of watching in recent years;



But anyway, back to the subject in hand, the DVD release of the above film has been scheduled to coincide with Audika’s latest archival release, ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’, a long-awaited collection of Russell’s more unadorned pop, country and folk material. And for those of us who have heard the simpler instrument & voice recordings – near unbearably beautiful fragments of pure expression – that have turned up on previous collections, this one could well carry expectations of being a veritable motherlode of Arthur’s songwriting prowess.

Going in with such expectations, I’m afraid the initial feeling here is, inevitably, disappointment. The majority of the tracks here take the form of straight-up countrified pop, often verging worryingly close to the realms of soporific post-James Taylor ‘70s MOR. Presumably drawn in part from the sessions Arthur recorded with Springsteen/Dylan producer John Hammond, these songs help add yet another odd detour to the narrative of Russell’s career-path, suggesting an interlude in which he might have been actively courting success as a cowboy hat-sporting FM balladeer.

Having said that though, this is still motherfucking *Arthur Russell* recording country-pop songs, so it goes without saying that they still carry a certain wordless emotional weight and unvanquished oddness, and that they also convey a genuine love for the comforting joy and fleeting profundity of an easy-going pop melody. But Arthur’s songwriting chops, whilst nice enough, remain underdeveloped here in view of what came later. Whilst these compositions still convey the essential purity of intent that marks out all of Russell’s music, and a couple of the better tunes (‘Close My Eyes’ and ‘Oh Fernanda Why’ are my picks) make it to within stumbling distance of the sublime, the effortless transcendence of his later work is lacking, dooming most of this collection to lurk closer to the realms of the ‘curious’ than the ‘mindblowing’ in yr music collection.

And curious is the word, as fragments of zen lyricism and sonic exploration can’t help but creep in, sabotaging any dreams of radioplay. ‘Goodbye Old Paint’, a fairly corny number about a dead horse no less, begins with an austere cello and tamboura intro, and things get full-on WEIRD on ‘What’s It Like’, a lengthy track which sees Arthur putting on a gruff hillbilly-tinged accent to recite a mystic spoken word narrative about a priest and his lover finding god amongst the Ohio cornfields, as an airport lounge-worthy backing track that keeps threatening to turn into ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton plays out in the background. It’s pretty far-out in it’s own sweet way, and although I’m aware that music-should-speak-for-itself blah blah blah, I can’t help but wish I had some sleevenotes and recording details to help me make sense of all this. I probably shouldn’t really be writing this review before I’ve got hold of a proper copy with sleevenotes actually – I'm sure it's full of factual errors and dodgy assumptions, but hey.

Altogether more to my liking on ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ are the scattered tracks taken from outside of the ‘country’ era. ‘Time Away’ is brilliant - a witty, upbeat Jonathan Richman via Talking Heads art-rock song, perhaps not sung by Arthur but definitely written by him, presumably originating with one the bands Arthur fronted in collaboration with Ernie Brooks of The Modern Lovers. I’d guess that 'Hey! How Does Everybody Know?' and 'Habit Of You', a pair of absolutely sweet, soft-touch new wave pop songs, share a similar lineage. 'Eli,' by contrast, is a brief and oddly harrowing voice & cello piece, it's harsh textures and drone-like construction sitting in stark contract to the gentle fare on the rest of this disc, perhaps highlighting the certain-elusive-something what’s missing from much of this material. And the set closes on a definite highlight with ‘Janine’, a beautiful radio-hit-that-never-was, sounding like the missing link between the earlier new wave songs and the private universe of avant-pop sartori Russell went on to craft on ‘Calling Out Of Context’ and ‘World Of Echo’.... that is, until it cuts out unexpectedly at 1:45, throwing us back down to earth like a rock slung from a motorway overpass, realising how warm and engrossing Arthur Russell’s music can be, how lucky we are to be able to spend time in its company, and how, for all the mysteries and inconsistencies of this particular collection, his songs never fail to make the world feel like a good home for a few minutes.

Mp3s>
Close My Eyes
Janine

Buy, etc: http://www.audikarecords.com/

Labels: album reviews, Arthur Russell, country, pop, reissues

Deathblog:

LEE HAZLEWOOD:
9 July 1929 – 4 August 2007

Well it was pretty inevitable Lee Hazlewood would die sometime this year, so the world has had a long time to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little sad, and undoubtedly an event worth marking.

If I were to go for a full recap of Hazlewood’s career and the various roles he’s played over the years, his influence upon pop culture etc., this would be a very long post indeed. Whether you’re familiar with the guy or not, do a Wikipedia or a Google, and have some fun getting (re)acquainted with a flawlessly idiosyncratic CV that pretty much defines the notion of a “cult musician”.

Personally, I’ve always found Hazlewood’s work to be a bit of a cipher… easy to enjoy, yet difficult to fully engage with. That he was a masterful songwriter and producer with a singular creative vision and, of course, an extraordinary voice is obvious from the word go, but to try to get a solid line on where exactly he was coming from – there lies the challenge that sets him apart. His songs, and his public persona, walk a line between emotional authenticity and self conscious showbiz sleaze so fine that when you find yourself caught on the hook of one of his beautifully constructed dead-love laments, it feels like just that; being caught on a hook. Is Lee sharing his emotions with us here, or just grinning behind the studio console as he fashions a better hook for next time?

And similarly, even his goofiest pop songs manage to convey a weird fascination, a sense of something deeper and more personal going on. Despite his deep love of simple, accessible pop and country music, it seems like, whether by accident or design, Lee Hazlewood was incapable of ever making a record which was, strictly speaking, “normal”. Who else, when presented with the lucrative chance to help turn Frank Sinatra’s daughter into a star, would take a chance and hit the world with something as shockingly kick-ass as “These Boots Are Made For Walking”, and follow it up with a record as astonishingly unique, baffling, beautiful and otherworldly as “Some Velvet Morning”? And who else, in the whole of history, could have taken that risk and had it pay off in the form of huge financial / chart success and a some of the most amazing, distinctive pop records of all time? And then disappear into the shadows just when his face is on the cover of a million-selling LP?

Maybe it was this kind of ambiguity that was responsible for it as much as his much-praised refusal to play by the industry’s rules, but either way, there is something impeccably fucking COOL about the way Lee Hazlewood never became a massive star, something that I think serves as an inspiration to all musicians who choose to follow their own ideas of creative success outside of the mainstream. At different points in his career, I’m sure Lee could easily have made it big in the pop mainstream, whether as an Andy Williams style swinging crooner, an iconic country star or even, at a push, a Leonard Cohen-esque moody singer-songwriter. The fact he was an extremely smart and talented operator with proven hit-making potential and personal connections to some of the biggest people in Hollywood would probably have helped his case too, but, for whatever reason…. he chose not to. And chose instead to make records like these:



If nothing else, the man certainly deserves the respect of all lovers of great album covers.

At the risk or over-simplification, it is almost as if at some point, he decided that being genuinely cool was more important than being rich n’ famous…. and just went with it.

And, I would venture to suggest, Lee Hazlewood managed to die in a manner just as cool as that in which he lived his life. Not that a slow death from cancer is very cool in itself of course, but to return to the music scene as a slightly weird elder statesman figure, play a few final shows, record a typically perplexing and funny / dignified "reflections on death" album (‘Cake Or Death’), do a few warm and wisdom-filled interviews with fans and smaller publications, sit back as the plaudits roll in from hipsters the world over, and pass away quietly somewhere just outside Las Vegas (a VERY appropriate location). If you're gonna die, that's the way to do it.

So I guess everyone is gonna be playing ‘Some Velvet Morning’, and rightly so, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a few of my other favourite Hazlewood tracks with you, beginning with his own rarely heard version of his best-known song.

I’ll admit I know nothing of the context of this recording, but I get a real kick out of imagining it was done shortly after Nancy dumped Lee as a lover(??) / co-star / producer….. SUCH amazingly expressed ‘fuck you’ bitterness here – I love it. Also note how Hazlewood manages to put across a great “buncha guys rockin’ in the studio” vibe, even though it’s clearly quite a lavish big band production job – his vocal adlibs are solid gold. Definitely my favourite version of this song.

Mp3 > Lee Hazlewood – These Boots Are Made For Walking

Seems like Lee always had a couple of good slouching, drunken self-pity songs lying around, and this next one is a killer.

Mp3 > Lee Hazlewood – After Six

And just in case you’re getting the impression this Hazlewood guy was some kind of lounge lizard chucklemiester:

Mp3 > Lee Hazlewood – Your Sweet Love

One more for the road:

Mp3 > Lee Hazlewood - I Am a Part

So long Lee.

Labels: country, deathblog, Lee Hazlewood, pop