After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"The Living Bubba" by Drive-By Truckers
Folks who grow up in Nashville can develop a curious relationship with country music. As kids, we tend to like it. The stars of the industry are readily accessible—especially to youngsters—and the songs we hear all over the radio are often catchy and cute. But as teenagers, we start to resent country. Rock and rap are much cooler, and besides, we get sick of going on vacation and hearing strangers say, "You're from Nashville? You must love country music!" Then as we get older, we start to reconcile with our hometown, and to take a certain amount of civic pride in Music City's most famous export. And for some, eventually, that pride can curdle into snobbery.
My own attempts to give country music a chance started with building a tolerance to southern rock. When I was 10, I was a fan of The Charlie Daniels Band, who hosted the annual half-rock/half-country Volunteer Jam near where I lived. I wore down my copy of Million Mile Reflections (the one with "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" on it), and for my 10th birthday I got to see the CDB play a concert with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. ("A night with Charlie Daniels and a hundred fiddles," the radio promotions blared.) I'd also always really liked Lynyrd Skynyrd, so when I started reading up on rock as a teenager and found out that the major critics of the '70s were pro-Skynyrd, they became my go-to southern rockers. And by the late '80s, both album-rock and college-rock radio were awash in the new-breed southern rockers: Jason & The Scorchers, The Georgia Satellites, Drivin 'N' Cryin', and so on.
The advent of alt-country in the '90s was, at first, pretty wonderful. In college I'd been getting into Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, along with the new northern country-rockers like The Silos and Cowboy Junkies. So I was in the right headspace when I heard Uncle Tupelo's No Depression for the first time, and I enjoyed the emergence of The Jayhawks, The Bottle Rockets, and all those New York bohos on the Diesel Only label. But a certain point, my pro-Nashville biases started to affect my willingness to hear yet another set of college dropouts in nudie suits and bolo ties, singing songs about mining disasters in affected accents, while giving interviews about how country music had strayed from its roots. I'm no great fan of "pop country" either, but it struck me as pretty presumptuous for these outsiders to complain about what the Nashville industry should be producing, just because they once found a couple of Flatt & Scruggs records at a thrift store.
I was already getting fed up with the carpetbaggers when I had a few reading/listening experiences that helped clarify my position:
First off, my friend and former editor Bill Friskics-Warren collaborated with David Cantwell on a book about the 500 greatest singles in country music history, titled Heartaches By The Number. Bill and David spread their interest between the critically respected "outlaw country" and the more charts-focused Nashville mill, and they helped me understand that "outsider" does not automatically equal "superior." On their book tour, Bill and David appeared on a radio show that shall remain nameless, and the hosts of that show seemed genuinely confused that Heartaches By The Number included songs by the likes of Garth Brooks and Faith Hill, but almost nothing from alt-country acts like Neko Case. Bill and David handled the hosts' misunderstanding of what their book was about with aplomb, but listening at home, I was seething. How could these radio dudes claim to be country music fans, when they clearly didn't have a tenth of the knowledge, analytical skills, or pure love that their guests did?
Around that same time, I read Chuck Klosterman's essay in Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs about how he has more respect for "Wal-Mart country" like Trisha Yearwood than for critic-approved alt-country like Lucinda Williams, because the former is more honest. Or to put it a different way: the kind of people who Lucinda Williams sings about are more likely to listen to Trisha Yearwood than to Lucinda Williams. I was thinking about that again a year or two later, when Will Oldham re-recorded a bunch of his old Palace songs in a throwback "countrypolitan" style for the lovely album Sings Palace Greatest Hits. Some writers—especially the ones who contribute to a site that rhymes with "bitchcork"—were convinced that the album had to be a joke, because why would someone who usually records in a stark, croaky, "authentic" style suddenly go all slick? But I interviewed Mark Nevers, the producer of Sings Palace Greatest Hits, while the project was in process, and he told me that Oldham wanted to make a record that sounded like the country music he originally fell in love with. Which raises a question: What's so "inauthentic" about the smooth country music style that's dominated the radio since the '60s?
When it comes to alt-country or southern rock, I automatically get suspicious when things start getting a little too "down home." Just as too much of modern hip-hop reduces African-American life to crime, sex, consumerism and hip-hop itself, too much of southern rock has become about poverty, cheatin', drinkin' and Hank Williams. Even one of the best of the new southern rock bands, Drive-By Truckers, sometimes wallows too much in tales of incest and NASCAR—though at least they do it with a fair amount of wit and skill, and balance those songs with songs about, say, a musician friend succumbing to AIDS ("The Living Bubba"), or, coming to grips with the intertwined legacies of George Wallace, Bear Bryant and Ronnie Van Zandt ("The Three Great Alabama Icons").
Yet when I think about what southern rock can be, I think about Kings Of Leon, singing about reconciling their evangelical upbringing with their love of Joy Division and groupies; or Lucero, delving into the feeling of being young and restless in a nowhere town; or Glossary, delving into the feeling of being middle-aged and restless in a nowhere town; or American Princes, bringing a gritty urban feel to frayed guitars and Dixie angst; or Lambchop, applying literary techniques and elements of musique concrète to sprawling country-soul symphonies. These southerners live in the place I live, where churches, strip clubs, strip malls and universities are just a few blocks away from each other.
Maybe my southern rock problem isn't with southerners making music about their experiences Maybe it's with my fellow critics having too narrow a conception of what those experiences should be.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Destroyer
Years Of Operation 1995-present
Fits Between Syd Barrett and Lou Reed
Personal Correspondence My knee-jerk reaction to Dan Bejar's body of work would be to call his tight, driving contributions to The New Pornographers superior to the verging-on-formless art-pop he attempts with his own band, Destroyer. But that really isn't meant to be a knock on Destroyer. When Bejar stumbles on a catchy turn-of-phrase—like, "Was it the movie or the making-of Fitzcarraldo?" or "I was just another west-coast maximalist"—and marries it to his rippling piano and idle guitar-strumming, the lack of a hard structure makes the songs all the more exciting. (It's sort of like listening to an improvised monologue by a skilled raconteur.) Still, there's something to be said for the compactness of Bejar's New Pornos songs, because at their worst, Destroyer's more sprawling numbers can sound pointlessly self-indulgent—though to my ears, those low points are rare, and outweighed by the times when Destroyer makes the ethereal momentarily concrete.
Enduring presence? Bejar's in an awkward position when it comes to The New Pornographers, because I get the feeling that while he'd rather save his best songs for Destroyer, The New Pornos have a bigger audience, and have inarguably helped raise Destroyer-awareness. For me, his split attention mainly raises a sticky organization question: Should I file Bejar's New Pornographer's songs alongside Destroyer on my iPod playlist?
"European Oils" by Destroyer
The Detroit Cobras
Years Of Operation 1995-present
Fits Between Reigning Sound and The Crystals
Personal Correspondence The best part about the emergence of The White Stripes into the wider rock culture in the early '00s—aside from the enduring appeal of the Stripes themselves—is that it alerted a lot of exhausted indie-rock nerds like me that garage-rock was alive and thriving in local scenes across the country. I spent a happy year scouring All Music Guide and Amazon for tips as to which bands and scenes to pursue, and when I traveled back to Nashville, I'd ask the staff at my favorite record store, Grimey's, for recommendations. The happiest discovery to swim out of this flood of new music was The Detroit Cobras, a band of Motor City-based garagers who get around the whole "How do we write instant classics?" problem by performing rocked-up covers of obscure R&B singles. (Because hey, if you haven't heard it, it's new to you.) There's pretty much nothing I don't like about The Detroit Cobras, from their twangy guitars to their jumpy rhythms to the smoky croon of Rachel Nagy, whose former job as an exotic dancer only makes the band seem more appealingly seedy. Since hooking up with producer/guitarist Greg Cartwright—frontman for another garage band I love, Reigning Sound—the Cobras have gained more range and depth, but at the expense of some of the frenzied energy that made their early albums such crazy fun. So far the dip is only a slight one.
Enduring presence? Someday The Detroit Cobras will leave behind a best-of compilation so exciting that you'll only be able to handle it if you're encased in latex. For now I recommend that people buy the US edition of the 2005 LP Baby, which includes the killer 2004 EP Seven Easy Pieces. Then work backwards from there.
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