| Country
The Beatles flirted with it in the 60s, The Stones
lampooned it in the 70s, but country music in rock was a diversion
rather than a direction.
And then something strange happened at the turn
of the decade. After bringing a complexity of language and image
and musical electricity that had never been achieved in rock music
before, in 1969 Bob Dylan released Nashville Skyline featuring simplistic
repetitive songs like Lay Lady Lay; going from the profound to the
prosaic. In 1970 The Grateful Dead sacrificed their stratospheric
free-form psychedelic improvisational explorations for the off-key
country harmonies of Workingman’s Dead. After a string of
innovative 12 string raga space-rock inter-galactic singles and
albums, The Byrds delivered the country hokum of Sweetheart Of the
Radio, offending both audiences. In 1970 after the extended electric
guitar-driven epics of his second album Neil Young also countrified
himself on the After The Gold Rush album. Everybody seemed to be
suddenly looking backwards rather than forward, yesterday rather
than tomorrow, the traditional rather than the revolutionary.
After all weren’t those country-music-lovin’
goons who shot us off our choppers at the end of Easy Rider? A bunch
of nigger-hating, fag-bashing, wife-abusing, war-supporting, flag-loving,
god-fearing, self-pitying good old boys who loved “kicking
hippies’ asses and drinking beer?” (Merle Haggard’s
“Okie From Muskogee”) We were their target and peace
and love was just another notch on the barrel of their weapons in
the gun rack in the back of their pick-up trucks.
In the country rock bubble that followed, at least
Steve Earle hung out with The Pogues, Dwight Yoakam looked like
a cool cartoon, but often the country/rock cross-over was the worst
bits of both musics misconnected into the mediocre. The cocaine
country of The Eagles and their high-flying ilk became the sound
of FM commercial radio devoid of its rural roots.
The short-lived outlaw country movement of the
60s and 70s incorporating Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson,
Jerry Jeff Walker and David Allen Coe amongst other renegades changed
the political and social agenda but remained true to the music tradition.
Today in America country music is the new MOR,
the soundtrack of the Republican Party and the only music Fox News
airs, with a succession of big-hatted country caricatures gung ho
for the Iraqi war and going all the way with Bush coming in to plug
their record or tour. The Dixie Chicks dared to break ranks, step
forward and be outspoken and were castigated by the conservative
media and boycotted by their stars and stripes sucking country music
lovin’ fans.
And let’s not even consider the Stetson-wearing
Australian country twangers who sing in a southern American drawl
or those who simper about how their man done them wrong in an adenoidal
whine.
Even today, country music represents the fewest records of any genre
in my collection. Willie Nelson, the greatest American song stylist
since Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Emmy Lou Harris and Neil
Young’s frequent country with conscience excursions, are about
it. I have discovered the joy of the pedal steel guitar’s
quicksilver flow and the gothic melodrama of country’s greatest
lyrics, but the majority seems like cornball poor-white-trash psycho-drama
and formulaic session-slick picking.
Most of the so-called Alt country acts these days
sound like Poco or The Souther Hillman Furay band or some other
second-rate and thankfully forgotten country rock cash-ins from
the 70s rehashed for people who were fooled the first time around
or who pine for some fantasy denim and Cuban-heeled youth gone by.
back
to top
|
