Country – Page 9 – Rock Salted

Johnny Cash – The Baron

Johnny Cash – The Baron Columbia FC 37179 (1981)

For The Baron, Cash teamed up with producer Billy Sherrill, the man most responsible for the popular “countrypolitan” style used with Charlie Rich, George Jones, and others to great success over the previous decades. The Tennessee Three were not on the album. It was a more ornate studio band instead. The results are pleasant if plain, as the countrypolitan style was definitely getting a little dusty by the early 1980s. Cash also admitted in his second autobiography that he and Sherrill didn’t exactly put in a tremendous effort. The best thing here is the opening title track, which seems pretty clearly an attempt to mimic the success of Kenny Rogers‘ The Gambler but based on the story a pool shark instead of a card shark. A version of Tom T. Hall‘s “Ceiling, Four Walls, and a Floor” is decent too. “Chattanooga City Limit Sign” is one offering more in the rollicking novelty-song style of “One Piece at a Time.” The worst thing here is without a doubt “The Greatest Love Affair,” the most cloyingly patriotic song cash probably ever recorded (and he recorded a lot of that garbage, so this is saying a lot). Not an essential Cash album, but also not the worst he’s done.

Historian Jefferson Cowie has written about the sorts of socioeconomic changes that took place in the 1970s, as evidenced through music and film (Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class [2010]). In an article, “That ’70s Feelin’,” he described the way a dominant expression of working class sentiment in popular media became the individual “psychological release” of the character Howard Beale in the film Network (1976), when he exclaimed, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” without offering that exclamation in service of building any sort of program of positive action (after all, Beale was manipulated and later killed in the film for standing in the way of the network’s new “The Mao Tse-Tung Hour” program). There was fragmentation and parochial infighting. Much of Cowie’s music and film examples draw from the influence of Richard Sennett & Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (1973), which described the conditions that sort of gave rise to the re-birth of individualism and Tom Wolfe‘s “me generation”.

Cash made a series of albums in the late 1970s and early 80s that are fairly interesting when viewed through the lens of Cowie’s thesis. The Rambler, The Last Gunfighter Ballad, The Baron, Johnny 99 — all of these albums, in whole (like The Rambler) or in key songs, are structured around a lone individual. If there is a dominant narrative of the lone individual failing or having a bittersweet ending trying to break away from the claustrophobic confines of social structures, like in the films Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977) that Cowie highlights, Cash’s albums paint the loner as someone worn out by clinging to something of the past or looking to reclaim it. On The Baron, this characteristic is all over the title track, and even “The Hard Way” and “Ceiling, Four Walls, and a Floor“. The title track on The Last Gunfighter Ballad is about a shameless, fame-seeking gunfighter run over by a car as an old man, dismissed by latter-day society as part of the lunatic fringe. The entire album The Rambler involves Cash playing a wise old man archetype, teaching and helping those he encounters on his journeys. Even on Johnny 99 the Springsteen song “Highway Patrolman” concludes with the lines, “man turns his back on his family / he ain’t no good.” While the circumstances of these sorts of songs deal with lone individuals, they offer a different treatment than what Cowie talks about by sympathizing with a need for community and lamenting anomie. In this way, Cash was going against the grain amid the rise of the Carter-Thatcher-Reagan era. This might be one partial explanation for his diminishing commercial success in the era.

Cowie’s thesis also parallels and draws from Christopher Lasch‘s in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), which explained how, by the 1970s, individualist narcissism had displaced traditional symbolic authority, as a byproduct of corporate bureaucracy. (Lasch’s thesis is probably best viewed as a supplement to Jacques Lacan’s thesis that “discourse of the university” had displaced “discourse of the master” during the 20th Century, with Lasch espousing quasi-populist socially conservative leftism informed by psychoanalysis and Lacan). Here, Cash’s invocation of the aristocratic title “the baron” is a direct reference to a relic of symbolic authority from the past, and the namesake in the song encounters a young individual (his son) representing the new individualist narcissism, who was denied the opportunity to receive the “wisdom” of the paternal figure — thereby breaking from (patriarchal) tradition and its symbolic structures.

Much, much later, when Cash triumphantly made a “comeback” with his American Recordings album in the 1990s, circumstances had changed. The usual story is that producer Rick Rubin came in and revived Cash’s career. But, aside from Rubin’s indeed excellent work as a producer, this marketing ploy falls apart on close examination. A lot of the renewed success came from timing. Cash was hardly singing differently on American Recordings than he was on The Mystery of Life, which was the commercial nadir of his long career. But on American Recordings, the songs he was singing showed very different choices than what he had offered on flops like Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town. By the mid-1990s, the cracks were showing in the neoliberal political order that went hand-in-hand with the socioeconomic conditions Cowie was writing about. Audiences were maybe believing a bit less in the narrative preached by the loner raging against the system. Rocky V (1990) was a bomb. But Cash, still around, and still in his own way questioning the very notion of the individual triumphing against the social order, was back to singing about the downtrodden, lost individual in need of others for support — “Bird on a Wire,” “Drive On,” … Is this not just what Cash was singing about in the late 1970s too?

It might be possible to argue that the particular style of austere acoustic guitar playing on American Recordings is better or more attractive to audiences, but we should also consider the point of reference of the audiences that made the entire American Recordings series of albums more successful than the past efforts. Johnny Cash now had an element of danger. He may have had the image of the “man in black”, who did prison concerts and was beloved by the mean, dangerous convicts locked away there, but he also was a guy who cultivated that image to supposedly help the poor and deprived (he even wrote a song about why he is the “man in black”!). He wasn’t using the outlaw image just to bolster his own situation (though, obviously, he was doing that too; he was trying to sell his recordings after all) but to call attention to a lack of solidarity. Those efforts were still shot through with contradictions. The closer “The Greatest Love Affair” on The Baron is patriotic garbage, the sort of nationalistic chauvinism that is squarely at odds with the egalitarian impulses elsewhere in Cash’s music — does equality for all really stop at arbitrary borders on a political map? Though the kind of bastardized patriotism of a song like that was one of the only ways the working class had left to express solidarity in a world of bullshit jobs and self-interested hedonism. And let’s look further at the man’s American Recordings comeback, to the second installment, Unchained. Songs like “Rusty Cage” and even “Rowboat” revive the theme of the loner raging against the system. And even “I’ve Been Everywhere” vaguely fits that mold as well. Those tunes lack the appeals to solidarity and revival of old systems of community and family found elsewhere in Cash’s work. But is it telling that many consider Unchained a lesser album in the American Recordings series?

No doubt, The Baron is a weaker Johnny Cash album. But given a close examination, there is is something to be admired in Cash’s intransigent support of his old New Deal style social optimism against the great weight of the Carter-Thatcher-Reagan era’s neoliberal onslaught against it. Cash wasn’t overtly political in his music, but his politics were intimately a part of what he did, apparent as much in what he didn’t do as anything else. So, in a way, a meaningful appreciation of Johnny Cash at the peak of his powers and popularity should create some obligation to look at Cash when his outlook on life and what he represented was under attack, when it would have taken superhuman efforts to swim against the current from his position. Does “The Baron” even take on something of an autobiographical tone? In a way, too, Cash and Sherrill making a countrypolitan album in 1981 is something like Harry Nilsson singing on “You’re Breaking My Heart” (Son of Schmilsson): “You’re breakin’ my heart / You’re tearing it apart / So fuck you.” It was maybe a populist cop out, in failing to reconnect with new audiences. But if what listeners wanted was hedonism, Johnny Cash was just raising his middle finger to them, like in the iconic photo of him by Jim Marshall from San Quentin Prison, who said, “John, let’s do a shot for the warden.”

Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited

Various Artists – Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited Sony Masterworks 88843 06067 2 (2014)

Johnny Cash was a guy whose greatest achievements took substantial influence from his religious beliefs and upbringing. When he spoke or performed in a way directly dealing with religion, it usually came across as overly literal, in the most absurd sort of way (The Gospel Road). “Hey Jesus, turn this water into wine real quick!” Where (christian) religion served Cash the best was in standing for the proposition of being a better person, and taking the burden for doing so upon yourself. Not, as is increasingly the case with the many sorts of egotistical flavors of religion popular today, by convincing yourself that you are a better person than others no matter what you do or by claiming to help others by helping yourself. Cash was no saint. His personal history is littered with sordid details and grave mistakes. Instead, this proposition is about acknowledging flaws and striving to make the world a better place, through acts of generosity and humility. It is the idea that no matter who you are, what you are, you can be (and do) better, measured in terms of what your own efforts accomplish for others. In this regard, Cash’s secular music that still took moral authority from religion, and gave expression to his political views that leaned toward egalitarianism, stands out. Few professional efforts in his career embody this more directly than his 1964 concept album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The other most apparent example was his support for prisoners, represented most visibly by his series of live albums recorded in prisons (At Folsom Prison, etc.). But before he became a leading advocate for compassionate treatment of prisoners, he made an album about the shameful treatment of Native Americans. Bitter Tears was his first use of his fame as a musician in the context of social issues.

The idea of descendants of white European settlers in the New World taking a sympathetic, moral view of the Native Americans certainly began long prior to Johnny Cash’s lifetime. Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes in 1881. The very title of the book alone conveyed that the European settlers treated Native Americans with without honor. As she wrote, the “lesser” right” of occupancy of native lands given to the Native Americans by the European powers was “bound” to give way to the “right of discovery” (or “discovery doctrine”) which included the ability to grant, sell, and convey title to the land. Exploitation was inevitable. Johnson v. M’Intosh was an early and significant U.S. Supreme Court decision along those lines — shamefully still the law in the United States — establishing that it would be inconvenient to allow Native Americans to sell land to European-American settlers, thereby creating conditions that allowed appropriation of land by the Federal Government much easier. There is a still very far to go to see equality and fair treatment of Native Americans in the United States. As late as 2009, a class-action lawsuit settlement of $3.4 Billion was paid out by the U.S. Government for malfeasance in dealings with Native people and tribes, including damning admissions of failure to maintain even minimally adequate accounting records for moneys supposedly held in fiduciary trust on their behalf.

In 1964, the year Bitter Tears was released, questions of social justice were all around, if in a slightly different context. This was the year that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the Johnson Administration. The “freedom movement” (also called the “civil rights movement”) tended to be framed as a question of rights for Afro-Americans subjected to discriminatory Jim Crow segregation laws. Attention to Native Americans was something that went beyond a narrow conception of the era being about a merely binary black/white racial divide.

The early/mid-1960s was also the time of the urban folk movement, when the likes of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and others made “protest songs” popular. It is possible to see Johnny Cash’s album about Native Americans, coupled with appearances at events like the Newport Folk Festival, as purely commercial concerns seeking to expand his audience (and therefore his record label’s customer base). Urban folk and protest music tended to appeal to middle-class, college educated types. Those were important record-buying demographics. Some of his earlier recordings, like Blood, Sweat and Tears (1963) already headed in that direction. He did not come from the same sort of upbringing as most of the protest folk artists. Yet they were listening to him. But for Cash, as someone who emerged from Memphis, Tennessee, and was seen mostly as a country music artist, this broader career move must at a minimum also be seen as something that broke from expectations — though he did release a number of “old west” themed albums that did fit somewhat within the Nashville fold (Ride This Train, Sings the Ballads of the True West). Accounts indicate that Cash had to fight his record label to record the music for Bitter Tears, and he ran an ad decrying how the music establishment won’t give it airplay later on.

Cash rather uniquely bridged a divide between rural and urban audiences. Much of the time that involved finding values that worked for both types of listeners, and working them into song. Joe Bageant wrote Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (2010), which used his own personal history to portray how rural populations were displaced during the 20th Century, increasingly thrust into urban jobs, without desire to see their old way of life die off. In that way Bageant offered an account of the origins of rural populism, of a kind created by the purposeful machinations of certain political forces. Seeing beyond those forces and working against them, down a path other than the frenzied and directionless reactive anger of populism, were people like Johnny Cash. He grew up on a New Deal farm in Dyess, Arkansas, and called it, approvingly, a “socialistic setup”. In a way, Cash was kind of like country music’s Eleanore Roosevelt. He embodied the legacy of the New Deal coalition’s more compassionate, democratically empowering impulses, seeing the possibility of uniting the needs of the rural poor with the compassion of educated urban elites to promote the well-being of everyone — rather than to pit urban and rural groups against each other for narrow personal gain in a kind of “divide and conquer” strategy. Empathy and community show up as positive ideals, things to actively foster. So it should have surprised no one that when Cash had a network TV show five years later, he was reaching across racial and class divides to feature musical performances from a wider spectrum than just about anything in mainstream media. There was no hesitation in thinking audiences could find a common ground, and appreciate the inherent worth of other points of view. It was awkward sometimes on the TV show, but that very awkwardness was in a way proof that this was a foray into new and unfamiliar territory that made use of untested formulas.

This tribute album project was inspired by Antonino D’Amrosio‘s book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (2009). The album was released to coincide with the fifty year anniversary of Bitter Tears. There has been a continued interest in Cash’s music since his death in 2003, with a hit 2004 biopic (Walk the Line), a 2004 book on the making of At Folsom Prison (Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece), an unsuccessful Broadway musical (2006) and soundtrack (2008), a 2007 satire movie vaguely based on Cash’s life and Walk the Line (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), and boxed set re-releases of all of his Sun (2005) and Columbia (2012) albums. Certainly, some of this is driven by efforts from the Cash estate or other rights owners to posthumously bleed every penny they can from the man’s legacy, just as has happened with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc. But aside from whatever crass motivations record labels and heirs may have, it says something about Cash’s continued relevance to audiences that these things are successful enough to keep being released.

Peter La Farge wrote five of the songs from the original album, and Cash the rest (the closer co-written with Johnny Horton). They vary tremendously in tone. “Custer” is a rollicking song that mocks General Custer, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn by allied native tribes. The single and best-known song from the album is “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” about a Pima native who fought in WWII for the United States in the Battle of Iwo Jima (in the Volcano Islands). Hayes was one of five U.S. marines and one U.S. navy corpsman pictured in an iconic, award-winning photograph by Joe Rosenthal called “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima,” which was taken on Mount Suribachi during a battle against the Japanese Empire and was widely distributed by a press wire service almost immediately after being taken. Hayes is seen furthest left in the photo. Hayes’ personal history following the publication of the photo, and the war, is a tale that might well have inspired a hundred stories about neglected veterans, the sort made much more common through the Vietnam War.

Some of the songs on Bitter Tears were given a serene, atmospheric treatment that Cash had previously applied to religious songs. “Talking Leaves,” and to some extent “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,” borrows from Cash’s 1962 B-side “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” recorded with The Carter Family. This is telling about Cash’s approach to Bitter Tears. He saw the treatment of Native Americans as a topic for which the use of religious music was appropriate. Whatever the nearly chant-like wails of a backing singer (either June Carter or Anita Carter) added to religious music, they could add to protest music too. This was the application of moral appeals drawn from religion to social issues. The gambit is that audiences will have the same favorable reaction in both contexts. However, this also had the effect of belittling possible sources of government power. Cash invoking religious song arrangements tends to place (religious) morality above the actions of governments, and suggests that government actions must be submitted to the standards of a higher moral authority. Laws are not a supreme power. They are laws of men, and can be wrong. Crucial in this moralizing is that Cash is not appealing to “the market” or some sort of (non- ethical) economic justification for the treatment of Native Americans. There is no balancing of interests to produce a maximum tradeoff, or efficient equilibrium. Instead he frames the issues in terms of inherent, basic, absolute ideals that are equally applicable to all people. He is singing about human dignity and its loss. He is singing about honesty and perfidy. He is singing about survival and murder. Whatever the context, the government falls on the side of moral wrong, often from a point of view of providing selfish benefits to some groups at the expense of others, and the predominantly racial divides between those exercising power and those subject to it are made clear.

On this tribute project, much of the edge in Cash’s original treatment is gone. The performers seem more interested in paying tribute to Cash the man than the cause he originally championed on Bitter Tears. Certainly, the new performers claim compassion. That is made clear in the liner notes. But remaking recordings from fifty years ago in the sedate, ordinary fashion in which they are done on Look Again to the Wind will challenge no one’s belief’s about the treatment of Native Americans, now or in the past. This is a self-congratulatory shout-out to people who already know better. It is hard to see how this project does anything to advance the interests of Native peoples. That isn’t to say there isn’t good stuff here. One of the most successful re-interpretations is “White Girl” by The Milk Carton Kids. Cash’s original suffered under an ill-suited application of the typical Cash boom-chicka-boom rhythm, and nearly stammered vocals that made it exceedingly difficult to follow the song’s lyrical narrative. At least in this new version, the intent of the story told in the lyrics is clearer. Some of the other performances are a bit more sanctimonious, and the humor on Cash’s original is often missed.

Did Cash ever follow-up on Native American activism after Bitter Tears? Well, not really. When the American Indian Movement (AIM) was most active in the 1970s, Cash had sort of moved on and shifted his focus to prison advocacy. He met with politicians and appeared in prisons, trying to make positive differences and call attention to the treatment of prisoners. He was no longer calling attention to the treatment of Native Americans in the present. While that was too bad, in some respects, it shouldn’t take away from what he did do to support the plight of Native Americans. Bitter Tears is still a compelling album fifty years later. Look Again to the Wind has none of those compelling qualities. It is actually a pretty boring album — as boring as any Hal Willner tribute project. But, at a minimum, it presents a chance to revisit Cash’s original effort and appreciate what an incongruous feat it was.

Johnny Cash – Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian

Johnny Cash – Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian Columbia CS 9048 (1964)

Behind a lot of Johnny Cash’s work lies a firm belief in egalitarianism, the idea that every person has inherent worth and should be treated fairly and equally. To the extent that he recorded a lot of “patriotic” music it might be said that it was partly because he viewed egalitarianism as part of a core national identity. There is no better example of Cash’s commitment to egalitarianism and social justice than Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.

The theme of the album is the treatment of native Americans (“American indians” would have been considered the most respectful term at the time). Songs cover topics like treaties (specifically, the Treaty of Canandaigua) between the government of European settlers and native nations in the context of recent breaches by President Kennedy (“As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”), the creation of a written language of the Cherokee by Sequoyah (“Talking Leaves”), the military service and tragic death of Ira Hayes (“The Ballad of Ira Hayes”), and a humorous jab at the crushing defeat of an invading U.S. government military force led by George Armstrong Custer by allied Native tribes at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 (“Custer”). It was highly unusual for celebrities to highlight native American issues in 1964, though the Freedom Movement or Civil Rights Movement focusing mostly on African-Americans was still underway.

Cash worked closely with Peter La Farge on the album, who wrote five of the eight songs but does not appear on the recordings. La Farge was a fixture of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s. He was a performer of very limited means, but Cash liked him personally.

The musical tone of the album is similar to Cash’s other early 60s albums, with rather minimal instrumentation in a folk-like setting. He tends toward a very respectful approach to the music, making the topics seem dignified and important. But the subject matter puts this more in a class with protest albums like Dylan‘s The Times They Are A-Changin‘ from the same year than anything coming out of Nashville at the time.

Bitter Tears is somewhat divisive among fans. For some, it represents the epitome of Cash’s integrity, a testament to his image as something of a crusader for noble causes. To others, this is a contrived, heavy-handed political statement lacking in purely musical merits. For me, it’s some of Cash’s most admirable work, maybe a little uneven, but with a passion and significance matched with the simple folk stylings that were effective and endearing.

Johnny Cash – Water From the Wells of Home

Johnny Cash – Water From the Wells of Home Mercury 834 778 (1988)

Cash made some real stinker albums through the 1980s. Often this was the result of lunging from one producer to the next, trying to pair him up with whatever style seemed like the most commercially viable fad that year. Water From the Wells of Home was a little different in that Cash actually spent an extended period of time working on the album, instead of his usual practice of pulling together songs, relying on the producer to find a “sound” for the album, and then showing up and doing the actual recording in a brisk fashion. The album also employs what would be a growing trend for aging stars: enlist guest performers to try to draw in new audiences. For all that effort, the album is still pretty mediocre. Cash is clearly putting in more work to his singing than he had in a while, and most of the guests give this a real go. The production style is clear and crisp, without a lot of obvious gimmickry, so it has aged a little better than some other 80s efforts. But the backing band provides only the most hackneyed, nondescript support, to the point that this often feels like a karaoke session. Then there is the title track, a duet with Cash’s son John, which is really dreadful. So this album isn’t particularly successful, though it showed the potential still locked in Cash’s rich baritone voice, now a little older and coarser. In many ways, this was the album that set the stage for Cash’s American Recordings comeback in a few years, by keying in to his voice in a more direct and unencumbered way, letting the man sing what he likes without being beholden to some trendy country subgenre that didn’t quite fit. What remained, though, was to strip away the unnecessary guest spots, and get rid of the horrible backing band. Rick Rubin would realize this shortly, and make it happen soon enough.

Willie Nelson – Tougher Than Leather

Willie Nelson – Tougher Than Leather Columbia QC 38248 (1983)

Anthropologist F.G. Bailey wrote in his book Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (1988) that a leader has a need for an entourage, who make up a buffer and a sort of subordinate set of leaders to insulate the ultimate leader from the mundane. But, such a leader must control his entourage, usually through strategic use of uncertainty and discord among the ranks. If we take Bailey’s theories (right or wrong) and apply them to Willie Nelson, then maybe they provide an explanation of what went wrong in the 1980s. Nelson developed a Pollyanna-esque “positive thinking” approach to life and steadfastly refused to focus his energies or attention on anything negative. He did have an entourage, which between his backing band, drivers, bodyguards and assorted others, had grown quite large by the early 80s. But his laid-back approach to life didn’t allow him any room to control this entourage. So he was too often enveloped in a strange cocoon of celebrity. His recordings, increasingly pop- and easy listening-oriented, suffered because of it.

Near the peak of his popularity Willie collapsed a lung, and had to recuperate in the hospital for a time. While there, he planned his 1983 album Tougher Than Leather. It marked a return to the stripped-down old-time acoustic country sound of Red Headed Stranger. It ends up being Nelson’s finest album of the decade by a fair margin. He had a lot of range, but he was always known first and foremost as a country artist for a reason. He plays to his strengths here. There are some old tunes and even some traditional chestnuts like “Beer Barrel Polka” tossed together with another loose (and barely recognizable) concept. This time it has to do with reincarnation — a topic Nelson genuinely believed in. The time spent on thinking this through provides warm returns. This is the most consistent and convincing album Nelson would deliver for a while. The reason may well be that being less reliant on his band and having more time to himself in the hospital Nelson freed himself briefly from the confines of his entourage. This may not be his finest moment compared to the entirety of his career, but renditions of the likes of “My Love for the Rose,” “Changing Skies” and “Summer of Roses/December Day” (and more) are very good.

Willie Nelson & Family – Willie Nelson & Family

Willie Nelson & Family – Willie Nelson & Family RCA Victor LSP-4489 (1971)

Another middling offering from the time just before Willie really broke through. He veers into the territory of singer-songwriters, with a cover of James Taylor‘s hit “Fire and Rain.” The nagging problem is that Willie is making this music too grandiose, and is still clinging slightly to a crooner’s style in his vocals. That, and the glitzy, Vegas-style backing singers, horns and strings on “I’m a Memory,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “Kneel at the Fee of Jesus” seem too much for Willie’s style of guitar playing and singing. Rather than take simple, spare music and dress it up as he does here, his next album Yesterday’s Wine would instead strip things back to simple, spare performances with greater success. This plays well enough all the way through, and is better than some of Willie’s early Nashville albums, but it still pales in comparison to what was just around the corner from him.

Willie Nelson – A Horse Called Music

Willie Nelson – A Horse Called Music Columbia CK 45046 (1989)

More pop than country, A Horse Called Music finds Mr. Willie Nelson mastering the synthetic sounds of 1980s pop. That’s right. This one is much more of a pop record than a country one. There are strings and lush background vocals on much of it, returning to country briefly, such as for yet another rendition of his “Mr. Record Man” and the opener. This thing fairly reeks of the 1980s, yet, the songs are by and large much better choices than on so many of his other albums of the era. He’s also singing fairly well. “Is The Better Part Over” was written five years earlier about Nelson’s third marriage to Connie, the wife his band liked best. “Nothing I Can Do About It Now” was the hit, Nelson’s last really big one until a duet with Toby Keith more than a decade later, but it’s really one of the lesser cuts on the album. The best stuff here is actually the orchestrated traditional pop. It does bear mentioning that this has one of the most amazing album covers on any Willie Nelson album, and the title is quite funny too.

Willie Nelson – To All the Girls…

Willie Nelson – To All the Girls… Legacy 88765425862 (2013)

Willie Nelson has kept touring and recording a hell of a lot longer than anyone ever would have guessed. Many of those later-career recordings are decent but not of much consequence. They feel tossed off and somewhat lazy. But returning to a major label he has recorded a few albums in recent years that sound much more elaborate and polished than what he was doing in the early 2000s. Another problematic feature of his recent work has been the gimmicks, from stupid genre exercises like the reggae album Countryman to faddish, star-studded guest performer albums like The Great Divide. He’s made some dubious choices when it comes to quality control. But he’s still a guy with a great voice, and when he pulls himself together and puts forth some effort he’s still capable of good things. Against the odds, To All the Girls… is an unlikely late-career success. The title reflects that each song features a different female guest performer. There is a certain stylistic diversity, allowing individaul songs to lean on the strengths of the guests — from a Bill Withers cover with Mavis Staples to western swing with Shelby Lynne. But much of this has an easy listening feel — appropriate given that Willie is now eighty years young — and he comes across as more engaged with that sort of a sound than just about any time in memory. Nothing here jumps out as particularly notable. But Willie has hardly made an album this consistently listenable from top to bottom in more than a decade. There is a gentle touch in the recordings that suit that approach quite well, with unobtrusive strings and other little embellishments that enrich the performances without taking away from the singing and guitar solos that rightly remain the focus. The guest performers for the most part all turn in nice performances (the biggest dud being the outing with his daughter Paula Nelson), and the song selections are appropriate ones for both Willie and the guests, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect in pulling off a project like this. If you can handle Willie’s more polished and lighter tendencies then you might well rank this as his best since 1998’s Teatro.

Neil Young – American Stars ‘n Bars

Neil Young – American Stars ‘n Bars Reprise MSK 2261 (1977)

After his “Gloom Trilogy” and the slightly overrated Zuma, the somewhat scattershot American Stars ‘n Bars seems like the perfect move for Neil Young. First of all, he sounds like he’s having fun making music for the first time in years–even if those intervening years produced amazing recordings. Side one is the real highlight. Carole Mayedo, Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson make great contributions. It’s country rock, but with a ragged rock ‘n roll heart that Neil wears so proudly on his sleeve. “Saddle Up the Palomino” has a little up and down runs played so slowly you can almost picture Young in the studio waving his arms wildly like a conductor, in a vague and comically half-hearted attempt to coax the musicians gathered for a late-night session that hadn’t been sober for hours, if it ever was to begin with. “Hey Babe” is Neil Young the sweetheart, at least, Young the sweetheart singing double entendres in a quaking, nasal falsetto. This less wholesome attitude comes back with a vengeance on the rockingest track on the first side, “Bite the Bullet.” Side one goes many places, most of them mapped out on the opener “The Old Country Waltz,” which simultaneously proves Young’s bona fides in the realms of country and rock. It’s a song with smooth three-part vocal harmonies, a slurred fiddle, pedal steel guitar and room for a rather steady strum of an acoustic guitar and heavy drum beats on a snare. No concern for precision stands in the way of matters to the heart of the song.

The second side is made up of leftovers from a couple of aborted album projects from the previous three years. The country leanings of side one are gone, in its place some harrowing, solitary folk (“Will to Love”) and a hazy, laid-back guitar anthem set against sustained, spaced-out keyboard chords (“Like a Hurricane”). It is somewhat fitting that after the completely wasted sound of side one Young has to mail in last week’s homework for side two–his own kind of Sunday morning coming down. The thing is, most artists would never make stuff as good as anything on side two, much less have it around to use as filler! Young makes that sort of complete indifference the noble, slacker heart of the album.

There are definitely different sides to Neil Young, but the side of him that favors a wild ride, replete with a few “fuck off and let me do my thing” laughs, and revels in bawdy inside jokes, was one that made only more tentative appearances in the coming years. That makes this a little special. Of course, all that is tempered with a sensitive side that suddenly drops all pretense and demonstrates inquisitiveness and vulnerability. He does all that, and owns the contradictions. This is Neil Young the perfect anti-hero rock star, one who comes across as simply too well-adjusted, by comparison, to be a “real” rock star. In other words, one for the rest of us. Dean Stockwell‘s album cover concept sums this one up.

Neil Young – Comes a Time

Neil Young – Comes a Time Reprise MSK 2266 (1978)

Lyrics have always been Neil Young’s weakness. Here–surprise!–he delivers his best all-around showing since After the Gold Rush (and this would remain his best songwriting across an entire album for at least a decade more). There are a number of very strong numbers here, like “Goin’ Back,” “Comes a Time,” and “Lotta Love” (backing singer Nicollette Larson would have a big hit with her own solo version of the latter). Still, the album has a few faults. Its country-rock style feels a little self-conscious at times, and some of the songs seem to coast by without a lot of ambition. The bleary weirdness of American Stars ‘n Bars. This nonetheless remains one of the stronger second-tier Neil Young albums.