Country – Page 8 – Rock Salted

Johnny Cash – The Last Gunfighter Ballad

Johnny Cash – The Last Gunfighter Ballad Columbia KC 34314 (1976)

As the 1970s wore on, Johnny Cash had more and more difficulty finding enough suitable songs to fill an album. The song selection on The Last Gunfighter Ballad ranges from the decent (Guy Clark‘s “The Last Gunfighter Ballad”) to the tedious (Terry Smith’s “Far Side Banks of Jordan”). Three songs he had previously recorded. He also was more and more likely to give a half-hearted effort singing. But unlike most of the lesser stuff of Cash’s lean forgotten years, the bad stuff is not just boring but truly awful. The opener “I Will Dance With You” is perhaps the very worst Cash performance on record…and some moron decided to put it first on the album! Same goes for “You’re So Close to Me,” which opens side two. Lots of other stuff actually feels almost like leftovers from the One Piece at a Time sessions, or at least attempts to do more of the same (“City Jail”). Yet, it’s a shame and a waste that “Give It Away,” with a nice gospel-style vocal chorus, is a fine performance of a corny song. And “Cindy, I Love You” has a guitar part derivative of “You’ve Got a New Light Shining In Your Eyes” but still ends up being a terrific song. There definitely are some gems here. This is probably the most uneven album Cash made in the 1970s. He makes it hard to love or hate this in its entirety, and it will take a died-in-the-wool Cash fan to appreciate this motley beast as a whole. But, yes, it still boasts one hell of an album cover photo.

Zac Brown Band – The Foundation

Zac Brown Band – The Foundation Atlantic 516931-2 (2008)

The Foundation draws heavily on easygoing beachside pop-rock by Jimmy Buffett and latter-day followers like Jack Johnson, and even Dave Matthews Band-like easygoing folk jams, but combined with typical mainstream country twang. Parts of the album have some decent fiddle playing that leans more toward traditional country (the best thing the album has going for it), plus songs like “It’s Not OK” and “Sic ’em on a Chicken” that are more in the outlaw country-rock or Charlie Daniels Band mode. Zac Brown, who has a rather nice natural voice, sings with contemporary country music’s usual heavily affected half-yodel with overdubbed harmony. There are some good performances, as on the hit song “Chicken Fried.” However, music like this should not be trusted. It is divisive, and that is its purpose. The opener “Toes” has the lyrics “I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand / Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand / Life is good today, life is good today.” This song sets the tone for the entire album. Basically, this is militant ruralism, if it can be called that. The opening lines signal that this is music that will be considered “crude” by wealthy urban elites. This is music meant to distinguish its audience from those groups. In a way it is meant to smugly belittle those other groups, as if they don’t “get” the characteristics of its more rural, working class intended audience (and maybe they don’t). Elsewhere the album expresses a degree of frustration, not angrily or in an exasperated way, but to adopt implicit bewilderment by the world and a desire to just detach from it and just go off and have some fun. It is kind of a lazy, cowardly — if not overtly mean-spirited — response to a recognition that the world is a messed up place (“It’s Not OK”), but the songs simply express a desire to get away from that, do nothing about it, and take whatever pleasures are available on hand. The sentiments driving this album are offensively egotistical in many ways. Some listeners rejoice that Zac Brown mentions reggae music and looks to other genres outside country, but it is worth taking a closer look to see why and how he does those things, which most often is to bolster a brand of reactionary populism that is dangerously apathetic to external corruption and reliant on discriminatory demagoguery.

Willie Nelson – You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker

Willie Nelson – You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker Lost Highway B0006079-02 (2006)

A nice tribute to the songs of Texan Cindy Walker, who passed away just over a week after this album was released. Willie plays this material with a sophisticated air, with a lively fiddle laced throughout that nods to the leading figure of western swing Bob Wills (who co-wrote a number of these songs with Walker). In his autumn years Willie has so often seemed to be locked into a daze, churning out recordings with regularity but rarely straying from a kind of detached and — let’s face it — formulaic delivery. But You Don’t Know Me ups the ante a bit. Nelson seems to connect with these tunes and his whole band brings more energy to them than usual, even though this has a light, easy listening touch. Count this among Nelson’s more successful late-career outings.

Willie Nelson – Heroes

Willie Nelson – Heroes Legacy 88691960482 (2012)

After a few albums of more old-fashioned, nostalgic country, Heroes has Willie Nelson back making music with a more contemporary feel. His son Lukas is prominently featured. Lukas plays guitar with a smooth sound, inflected with classic rock sensibilities. There are a lot of guest vocalists. This one is pleasant if unremarkable, though it might have been more than that without all the guest vocalists. Also, Lukas Nelson may be a decent guitarist, but a little more of Willie and Trigger would have been nice. In all, Willie is making more of an effort to seem relevant, though he also seems to be deferring a bit too much to his label (back on Columbia). This is nondescript contemporary country, and, as such, is only marginally interesting and too unambitious to make it stand out. Its best quality is that clearly a lot of effort went into recording, so this is polished up to a degree few albums can afford to do.

Willie Nelson – Across the Borderline

Willie Nelson – Across the Borderline Columbia CK 52752 (1993)

It’s hard to mention Willie Nelson’s name without two things immediately coming to mind: marijuana and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). It’s the latter that provides the backdrop for this album. Due to reliance on investment advice that turned out to be fraudulent, Willie accumulated a tax debt to which the government added numerous penalties so that it ballooned to many millions of dollars. As it turns out, Willie didn’t manage his money well and his star (and record sales) had faded, leaving him without the funds to pay the bill. So began a period of years when friends and fans purchased his old assets and sold them back to him–often for pennies on the dollar. He even released an album direct-marketed over TV, The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?, to help pay the IRS. Eventually Willie won a lawsuit over the accounting firm that gave him the investment advise originally, and he settled the IRS debt and returned his full attention to the music business. The first album after the IRS days drew to a close was Across the Borderline.

This album shows more promise than anything Willie had done since the mid/late 1970s. Paul Simon‘s “American Tune” is a fantastic opener, and there is more great stuff in store like John Hiatt‘s “(The) Most Unoriginal Sin.” But, the album doesn’t quite hold to that high standard throughout. It feels like Willie is trying to follow the same path as Bob Dylan by recruiting a rock producer, Don Was (plus Paul Simon and Roy Halee). Hell, Willie even teams up with Dylan for “Heartland” and covers another Dylan tune later on the album. After a full decade of lazy irrelevance, Across the Borderline showed Willie still had good music in him. But it would be in the late 1990s that he delivered his best recordings since the 70s, in Spirit and Teatro.

Willie Nelson – Yesterday’s Wine

Willie Nelson – Yesterday’s Wine RCA Victor LSP-4568 (1971)

Willie Nelson had a recording session scheduled in May 1971. He had grown lazy as a songwriter over the years, and he didn’t really have material lined up for the album. The night before recording began (!), he wrote much of the material — at least seven of the songs — that ended up on Yesterday’s Wine. The result is a major departure from his “typical Nashville” albums of the previous ten years. This subdued concept album about coming to terms with religion in adulthood strips the music back to spare, intimate settings. Often there is little more than Nelson’s voice, acoustic guitar and bass, with piano or steel guitar appearing only briefly, even just momentarily. Although mellower and more laid-back (the Willie Way!), it’s a format a bit like Bob Dylan‘s albums Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding (not all that surprising, given that session man Charlie McCoy appears on both Dylan’s and Nelson’s albums). The singer-songwriter movement sweeping the music industry seems to have had some effect on Nelson. Recorded with a mix of Nelson’s touring band and a few session men, the album’s experiments don’t fully succeed. There is a stiffness in the performances, with the backing band often just plodding along — it’s hard to blame them for lack of practice, though, when the songs were written the night before! Nelson seems tentative in his vocals too. He’s in new, unfamiliar territory, and he hasn’t entirely sorted out where he’s headed. His vocals shed much of the crooning style that he relied on so much the previous decade. The album’s greatest strength remains the excellent songwriting. Chief among the new songs is the classic road rambling tale “Me and Paul,” written in honor of Nelson’s touring drummer and former pimp/hoodlum Paul English.

Willie Nelson – Spirit

Willie Nelson – Spirit Island 314-524 242-2 (1996)

Not as well-known as Willie’s great albums of the 1970s, Spirit is one of his few later-career efforts that belongs in that same category of his very best. 1976’s The Sound In Your Mind was his peak as a vocalist, but Spirit is his peak as a guitarist. His iconic nylon stringed guitar Trigger never sounded better.

Rosanne Cash – The River & The Thread

Rosanne Cash – The River & The Thread Blue Note B001951102 (2014)

There are artists who paint within the lines, and those who don’t. Rosanne Cash has always been one to stay within the lines. Everything she does has precedents, though not always in the realm of country music where she is best known. But she paints within the lines in a way that is convincing and rich, wanting for nothing outside those bounds. The River & The Thread is among the finest work of her career. She just keeps getting better and better with age. Songs like “The Sunken Lands” and “50,000 Watts” are taut and lively, while staying within arm’s reach of the mellow vibe Cash is known for. Good stuff.

Rosanne Cash – The Essential Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash – The Essential Rosanne Cash Legacy 88697 82710 2 (2011)

Rosanne was always a country artist, but really her interests lay elsewhere much of the time. The template for much of her career is Willie Nelson‘s Stardust. Willie took traditional pop ballads and gave them an extremely light country treatment. Rosanne was much younger than Willie, so she instead looked to AM radio light rock of the early 1970s and popular rock of much of the 1960s to the 1980s to some extent too and gave those sources a light country/folk touch. She avoided entirely the kind of affected half-yodel country singing that was popular throughout her career. This particular collection tracks mostly her singles. It seems to omit certain fan favorite album tracks, perhaps because they are too edgy for commercial radio and weren’t selected as singles. This is all pleasant music, even if it is a little plain much of the time. It is marked with impeccable professionalism and fine craftsmanship throughout, full of rich and varied sonic palettes that would usually be incongruous with music this sombre and plaintive. Really, though, Rosanne got better with time, and her later albums like Black Cadillac had a bit more character than much of what came before, which makes this collection somewhat premature for an artist still recording stuff that is as good as she ever has since this was released.

Bobby Darin – You’re the Reason I’m Living

Bobby Darin – You’re the Reason I’m Living Capitol ST-1866 (1963)

You’re the Reason I’m Living has Bobby Darin crooning over pop country treatments, something experiencing a cross-over surge since the prior year thanks to Ray Charles — people from the traditional pop world like Dean Martin, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Darin were trying to capitalize on the fad. Darin had already released one country single (“Things”). Much of the time, a mid- to late-career country recording is a condescending effort to reach out to the rural slums when fickle tastes of urban elites start to pass by a once mighty star, or some equally lame reason (just a few later examples: Nashville Skyline, We Had It All, Almost Blue, Hanky Panky, Honeycomb, …). Of course, Darin sings nicely. He always did. But the music behind him, especially on side two, is no more than an extremely lazy amalgamation of cliches and stereotypes. The horn charts are all homophonic blasts of energy, without any sort of modulation, or for that matter any real purpose specific to these songs. The strings seem to offer only one texture, pointlessly tacked on to a number of songs in a way that smacks of pure happenstance. The vocal chorus backing (“You’re the Reason I’m Living,” “Release Me,” “Here I Am,” “Please Help Me, I’m Falling”) is also that over-used male/female mashup of Gregorian chants and barbershop quartets that soiled recordings a-plenty for many years after WWII. On the plus side, the Hank Williams song “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle” is not the bleak loner tune it usually is, but an original Icarus-like reading that portrays a dumbfounded big shot tumbling from great heights. “It Keeps Right A-Hurtin'” has a nice soulful country walk that lets Darin sing with as much longing as possible. There is some decent pedal steel guitar (“Now You’re Gone”), and honky tonk piano (“Be Honest With Me”) too. Elsewhere he’s stuck awkwardly between the terrain of a country-tinged, clean-cut heartthrob like Ricky Nelson and a Vegas-style approximation of “Country & Western” music that a showtune star like Debbie Reynolds might have tried. What really drags, though, is the way Darin starts to sing every song the same way. After almost every line, he finishes the last word with the same brooding, sly melisma, stretching and bending the last syllable of each line for heavy-handed emphasis. This is felt most strongly on “Who Can I Count on.” The effect seems like a profoundly calculated and circumscribed attempt to add hints of polite, socially acceptable swagger and palpable, seductive charisma. Unfortunately, though, it comes across at best as an overused affectation and at worst as a crippling limitation on his stylistic range. All that aside, the biggest problem with this album is that it never presents a convincing case for adding glitzy pop orchestration to country songs. It would seem that the producers thought that was what Darin fans expected, even when he was doing a country album, so they are added in without any further deliberation. That rationale, inasmuch as it was consciously or unconsciously used, is specious. Darin, himself, is sort of exactly what he sets out to be: someone who doesn’t respect rigid genre boundaries. That ends up being kind of cool and kind of creepy, actually. His near obsession with awkward, unexpected twists and stylistic combinations is creepy! Anyway, Darin was an interesting character, though much of what he did was sort of a journeyman version of Scott Walker‘s career.