GEORGE JONES
She Thinks I Still Care:
The Complete United Artists Recordings, 1962-1964
(Bear Family, 5-CD box)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- George Jones' brief stint at United Artists is sometimes cited as a kind of personal golden age for the singer, and it's easy to see why. He recorded some of his signature hits for the label -- "The Race Is On", "She Thinks I Still Care" -- and it was at United Artists, too, that Jones began to be mentioned as one of the genre's finest-ever balladeers, a singer the equal of Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.

Listen to "Just A Girl I Used To Know", a #3 hit for Jones in late 1962. Written by Jack Clement, the song expresses a typical country irony and a Jones specialty: The girl he's singing about is not "just" an old acquaintance. She's his world -- that's why her photo is in his wallet -- and she's gone. It's a swell conceit for a song, but Jones' choices as a singer pack Clements' lyric with so much more than what was on the page: the way his intensity and volume build to the choruses where he almost loses it, only to quiet down again as he gets it together for the next verse; the way he stretches out "just" so far that it's bound to snap back in his face; the way his voice trembles with, of all the crazy things, tenderness for this woman who's broken his heart.

She Thinks I Still Care, a new five-disc set, includes the 151 sides Jones cut at U.A., and (hyperbole be damned!) all 151 of them are in their different ways just as amazing. That means not only classic hits such as Jones and Melba Montgomery's emotionally complex ode to second chances "We Must Have Been Out Of Our Minds", but also Jones' many tribute albums from these years (to Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and his friend Jimmy Dickens), as well as more obscure but still essential sides such the exquisitely tender ("tender" is the most unheralded element in the Jones catalogue) "Book Of Memories" and the terrifying murder ballad "In The Shadow Of A Lie".

That's quite a range of emotion expressed in those last two tracks, but it is country music's range. She Thinks I Still Care argues, once again, that no one managed the many spots on that divide better than George Jones.

-- DAVID CANTWELL
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or David Cantwell

COMMANDER CODY & HIS LOST PLANET AIRMEN
The Early Years 1967-1970
Live From Armadillo World Headquarters 1973 And The Capitol Theater 1975
(Blue Label)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- In no way does it denigrate Gram Parsons' role in helping define country rock to note that others forged similar trails. Forget the utterly pompous Eagles. The Dillards, New Riders, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Nesmith and Poco all played major roles, as did the shamefully overlooked Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen. Emerging from the Ann Arbor, Michigan, bar scene at roughly the same time as the MC5 and the Stooges, Cody and company forged rockabilly, honky-tonk (Bakersfield and Nashville), trucker tunes, R&B and western swing into an early '70s Americana melange. Playing the music honestly, the band (later based in Berkeley, California) could turn any venue into a deep south juke joint without the posturing endemic among later rockabilly-country revivalists.

With George "Cody" Frayne on keyboards and proto-rap vocals, singers Billy C. Farlow and John Tichy, Telecaster wizard Bill Kirchen, west coast pedal steel virtuoso Bobby Black, and fiddler-saxman Andy Stein as the nucleus, the band enjoyed four well-received LPs for Paramount, a 1972 hit rendition of "Hot Rod Lincoln", and intense popularity around Austin, Texas.

Sustained success, however, proved elusive. Their new label, Warner Bros., aggravated matters by pushing them to record an album embracing the pretentious Los Angeles country-rock they loathed, sessions painfully chronicled in the book Star-Making Machinery. By 1976, the band imploded and scattered.

Assembled from Farlow's tape stash and enhanced by his warm reminiscences, The Early Years begins with sloppy, stoned acoustic rehearsals. Over time, the focus sharpens as they augment their assimilation of Buddy Holly, Webb Pierce, Hank Williams, etc. with quirky, funky originals. As disc two ends, their 1971 Paramount debut is imminent, and Black is about to replace their original, inept steel guitarist.

The collection of live 1973 and 1975 concerts begins with a disc of often-reissued outtakes from 1973 Austin shows recorded for the Paramount album Live From Deep In The Heart Of Texas. But it's the second disc, a never-released 1975 show, that serves as summary and valedictory as they rip through 25 songs comprising the heart of their repertoire, minus the flaccid crap Warners forced on them.

Today Cody, Farlow, Kirchen (using the same Tele he used with the Airmen) and Stein continue making their marks in their respective incarnations. These two collections underscore what was always true: Parsons wasn't the only longhaired guy introducing his peers to the joys of hard-edged, no-frills country long before it became fashionable.

-- RICH KIENZLE

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle

WHISKEYTOWN
Strangers Almanac (Deluxe Edition)
(Geffen/Outpost/Mood Food)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- In 1997, the most surprising thing about Whiskeytown's major-label debut was how quiet it was. The big-league polish, that much was expected -- but not its overall subdued tone. If Whiskeytown's mythically chaotic live shows back then evoked a liquor-driven bender, Strangers Almanac was the soundtrack to the early-morning hours after the peak but before the hangover. It was and is music suffused with exquisite, gin-soaked pain, all the more vivid for being self-inflicted. Excuse me if I break my own heart tonight, indeed.

In 2008, the most surprising thing about Strangers is that it didn't make more noise commercially. Because if any album from the mid-'90s alternative-country generation was going to break big, this was it. Eleven years later, the music still sounds phenomenal, but it's impossible to shake this album's lingering vibes of unrequited expectations. This expanded two-disc reissue (which broadens the album's context with the original thirteen tracks plus twice that many bonus tracks) only makes that feeling more acute.

As well as it holds up, Strangers remains very much of its time. The album emerged at a moment of great all-around optimism, near the apex of the go-go '90s. Whiskeytown had literally grown up with this magazine, which ran a feature on the band in the 1995 debut issue and put them on its first (and only) No Depression concert tour in the spring of 1997.

That vote of confidence seemed well-placed. 1997 was at the tail end of a void created by the implosion of Nirvana and '90s grunge, after which the music industry was searching for that elusive "next Seattle." For a brief season, it looked like Whiskeytown's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, might be it -- and that Strangers could be the Nevermind of alternative country. This did not seem far-fetched at the time (indeed, it's what ND co-editor Grant Alden wrote in Rolling Stone). Between the Wallflowers and Lilith Fair, a slot for Whiskeytown at radio shouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility.

The original Strangers tracking takes up most of this set's first disc, and it remains a masterpiece of mood and pacing that builds up to several peaks. "Inn Town" opens the album, a downbeat evocation of coming back to the old hometown to "hang around with the people I used to be" (even then, frontman Ryan Adams was dreaming about fleeing). "Inn Town" is almost six minutes long and drowsily paced, a nervy way to kick off one's major-label debut. But it's a warm-up for one of Whiskeytown's great on-record moments.

"Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight" is an astonishingly great song, one of Adams' best-ever straight-country weepers. For all the melodramatic pathos of the lyrics, "Excuse Me" is so perfectly rendered that it finds triumph in its stubborn self-determination. When Alejandro Escovedo's voice unexpectedly sails in with an out-of-nowhere cameo verse toward the end, it's the arrow splitting the arrow in the bullseye.

Several Strangers songs echo Fleetwood Mac (a debt made explicit in the second disc's bonus-track cover of the Mac's "Dreams"). Among them is "Yesterday's News", which namechecks the Comet Lounge, the Raleigh watering hole where Adams used to hang around dashing off songs on bar napkins. That's an ideal setup for "16 Days", which should have been this album's breakthrough hit. The opening guitar and fiddle riffs resolve into an irresistible hook, followed by one of the best ensemble-vocal performances Whiskeytown ever pulled off.

A bit of the band's well-earned reputation for sloppiness creeps into "Everything I Do", a slow-burn soul ballad with some messy guitar tones from lead guitarist Phil Wandscher. But that mirrors the song's ramshackle emotions, making it sound like that hangover you've been trying to stave off finally kicking in.

"Houses On The Hill" restores order, a beautiful ballad suitable for playing at military funerals, tastefully embellished by Caitlin Cary's fiddle and harmony vocals. "Turn Around" takes another spin through the Fleetwood Mac palette, followed by "Dancing With The Women At The Bar", a barfly's anthem that is Whiskeytown at its most spectral and mysterious.

"Waiting To Derail" is the most rocked-out song on Strangers, and in another setting it would probably make more of an impression than it does here. That's because it precedes "Avenues", one of Adams' signature songs and a foreshadowing of some of his post-Whiskeytown solo acoustic directions. Adams gets in touch with his inner Paul Westerberg on "Avenues", uncorking a devotional song of great beauty and depth.

The closing stretch of "Losering", "Somebody Remembers The Rose" and "Not Home Anymore" sandwiches another "Houses On The Hill"-style ballad with two rockers, fading out on just the right note. The last word on Strangers is "gone," followed by a ringing alarm clock. Time to wake up.

As No Depression co-editor Peter Blackstock's liner notes recount, Strangers involved a difficult birthing process in the studio. You'd never know it from the results, because the album feels organic and well-structured from first note to last. Producer Jim Scott deserves a great deal of credit for getting such a mature record out of the band -- and it was a good thing he did, given subsequent events.

Just a few months after Strangers Almanac came out in July 1997, an onstage blowup in Kansas City chased everyone out of the lineup except for Adams and Cary, who finished the final dates of the tour as an acoustic duo. They carried on with new members and made a solid though less cohesive follow-up album, Pneumonia; the 1999 Universal/Polygram merger put the album into limbo after Whiskeytown's label Outpost was dissolved. By the time Pneumonia finally came out in 2001, Whiskeytown was gone, and Adams and Cary were both well into solo careers.

Both Adams and Cary have had plenty of high points on their own, some of them even higher than anything on Strangers Almanac; and Wandscher hasn't done half-bad with Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter. Still, this remains: None of them have ever made a better record.

-- DAVID MENCONI
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or David Menconi.

ROSS JOHNSON
Make It Stop! The Most Of Ross Johnson
(Goner)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Ross Johnson's 1993 single, "It Never Happened" b/w "Nudist Camp", addresses Memphis music history and the scarring effect an early encounter with sexually precocious twins can have on a self-declared "southern sissy" with woman problems. A Little Rock native who moved to Memphis in 1965, Johnson has been a drummer (most notably with Tav Falco's Panther Burns), rock critic, librarian, and, as this disc demonstrates, first-class humorist.

Veering from spoken word to mutant rockabilly, the compilation presents a raconteur deranged by pop culture -- Brother Dave Gardner crawling down Beale Street with a head full of booze and trouble, maybe. On "It Never Happened", he declares, "None of that shit ever happened here in Memphis," while "Nudist Camp" immortalizes "sin twisters" Donna and Dora and their 12-year-old "pimp kinda kid" brother Richard, who allow the pre-pubescent Johnson a peek at a future terrifying to contemplate.

-- EDD HURT
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Edd Hurt

JERRY WALLACE
The Best Of
(Varese Sarabande)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Jerry Wallace had his first significant hits on the pop charts. The Nashville-sounding "Primrose Lane" (co-written with Wayne Shanklin) went top-10 in 1959, and five years later, his considerably more charming "In The Misty Moonlight", a Cindy Walker-penned ballad that Wallace sang in a Johnny Tillotson mode, cracked the top-20.

By the '70s, though, Wallace had gone country. And, just like Conway Twitty and so many other rock-and-pop acts of Wallace's generation, he negotiated the transition without having to alter his music much at all. Wallace sang with a vibrato croon, something like Ray Price but with the compromised lung power of a Whisperin' Bill Anderson, and his country hits were tricked out with string and backing choirs courtesy of arranger Bill Justis.

A lot of these cuts sounded ukulele-in-a-rowboat old-fashioned even when new. But Wallace's best numbers -- "If You Leave Me Tonight I'll Cry", which topped the country charts in 1972, and its #2 country follow-up, "Do You Know What It's Like To Be Lonely", both in a moody, low-key style clearly influenced by countrypolitan-era Charlie Rich -- are criminally forgotten these days and not to be missed.

Wallace died May 10, 2008. He was 79.

-- DAVID CANTWELL
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or David Cantwell

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Nashville Stars On Tour
(Bear Family, 5-disc set)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Blame it on the Cold War. With America's extensive European military presence, Armed Forces Radio playing country discs, and country acts touring those bases, it was inevitable European civilians would embrace the music. RCA Victor's expert promotion machine in Europe stood ready to exploit that new audience in April 1964. With Beatlemania seemingly ruling the world, RCA sponsored "Nashville Stars On Tour", two weeks of shows for military and civilian fans. The headliner was Jim Reeves, already wildly popular there, his band the Blue Boys, Chet Atkins, Bobby Bare, and the Anita Kerr Singers.

Among those attending: Bear Family's Richard Weize, which explains this lovingly assembled four-CD, one-DVD package of live recordings from Hamburg and Berlin, the troupe's Oslo, Norway concert on video and a disc of later German language recordings by Bare and other RCA Nashville acts.

The performing schedule frazzled everyone, yet the performances captured here reflect none of that. While the Blue Boys prove a capable backup unit, the Kerrs, so effective when Atkins used them as session accompanists, come off bland and soulless during their onstage solo spots. Bare radiated fire and youth as he sang "Shame On Me" and his signature hits "Detroit City" and "500 Miles Away From Home". Atkins's shyness didn't detract from his stunning instrumental virtuosity on crowd-pleasing "Yankee Doodle/Dixie", "Windy And Warm", Jerry Reed's complex instrumental "Yes Ma'am", a rousing, intense "Tiger Rag" and the jazz instrumental "Gravy Waltz".

Reeves's performances are powerful whether he reprised pre-Nashville Sound hits "Mexican Joe" and "Yonder Comes A Sucker" or his greatest moments: "He'll Have To Go" and "Four Walls", "Danny Boy" and "Adios Amigo", undiluted even by the Kerr harmonies. There's nothing soft or mellow about anything he does, reiterated by his prickly onstage temperament (a truth still hotly denied by some Reeves idolators). Three other live Reeves albums exist from earlier periods, yet these performances carry special poignancy since in slightly over three months, Reeves and Blue Boys pianist Dean Manuel would be dead.

As with all Bear Family collections, this one includes a photo-laden book. A hardcover affair, its text is mostly in German, some in English. Certainly, the photos, clips and memorabilia all convey the excitement these shows generated. For most, however, hearing (and seeing) Atkins at his best, marveling at Reeves and Bare performing in the classic, austere Nashville Sound style that began in the late '50s will be the true reward.

-- RICH KIENZLE
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Stax Does The Beatles
(Stax/Concord)

(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Of course it makes sense. The Beatles, and most of their fellow British Invaders, swiped liberally from American blues and R&B figures, some of whom remain better known today in the U.K. than ever they were here in the States.

And, of course, there was a long tradition of covering popular songs.

The problem is that the early Beatles source material swung, and if the Beatles themselves didn't always manage to swing, they made up for it with a kind of feral intensity. When they became songwriters, they became pop songwriters (and then psychedelic songwriters, and then Wings), and most of those songs don't swing at all unless one beats them into shape.

Despite its simple and clever cover art, Stax Does The Beatles does not revive an old and clever cover album; it is a modern repackaging of stray tracks, and does listeners few favors. Unless you own a skating rink.

If everything here were as muscular as Otis Redding's alternate take of "Day Tripper," this would be a spectacular assemblage. But it's not. Most of this is instrumental music from Booker T & The MGs, or the Mar-Kays, or Isaac Hayes ("Something"), and mostly it serves to remind how banal the Beatles could be. Steve Cropper's "With A Little Help From My Friends" is, at least, vigorous enough to sound like the backing track for a singer who didn't make the session.

But with all due respect to the venerated Booker T and friends, their instrumentals sound far too much like an exercise in demonstrating how many easy songs could be recorded in a three-hour session to fill out an album. Too many.

The vocals tracks are scarcely better. Young Carla Thomas' "Yesterday" (taken from Live At The Bohemian Caverns, a sketchy 1967 live in LA album reissued last year) serves principally to remind us how much a singer must bring to a simple pop song to make it sing. And how vapid that particular piece of the canon is, a precursor to Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again." (Ray Price, at least, managed to wring something out of the song, but he was in his 70s when he cut it.) That "Yesterday" is repeated as a Bar-Kays' instrumental only amplifies the insult.

The obscure John Gary Williams' take on "My Sweet Lord" is, at least, curious up until he skips the "hari kari" interlude for a sermon. It's almost something.

But mostly these Memphis legends treat the Beatles' music as so much white bread, and forget to place a heavy layer of barbeque atop it so it can soak up that greasy goodness.

-- GRANT ALDEN
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Grant Alden

NICK LOWE
Jesus Of Cool: 30th Anniversary Edition
(Yep Roc)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- To paraphrase a vintage David Bowie promo campaign, in 1978 there was old wave, there was new wave, and there was Nick Lowe -- smack in the middle. Still a year shy of 30, Lowe had already been through the ringer; his pub rock outfit, Brinsley Schwartz, spent five years drumming up boffo press and slim sales. Yet when he tried to provoke his label to drop him with the 1975 glam parody "Bay City Rollers, We Love You", it backfired when the song became a smash...in Japan. Once freed, he co-founded Stiff Records, producing key releases for the Damned, Elvis Costello, and Wreckless Eric. But as a recording artist, he had yet to establish where, if at all, he fit in the landscape apres punk.

Rather than pick sides, Lowe courted both on his solo debut, Jesus Of Cool. (In America, that cheeky title didn't fly; the disc was issued, with an overhauled track listing, as Pure Pop For Now People.) Accompanied by Rockpile, Lowe served up originals that showed facility in various classic genres. "Little Hitler" framed gum-chewing girl-group swagger with Beatles-worthy backing vocals, while the rapturous "Tonight" could've sprung from the Goffin/King team. He toyed with loping ska rhythms ("No Reason"), and, in the ever-circling "So It Goes", offered a scruffy blueprint for what would be his biggest U.S. hit, "Cruel To Be Kind".

Yet Lowe also boasted a cynical streak to rival Johnny Rotten's. Several cuts attacked the music industry; some worked (the ragged "Shake And Pop"), others fell flat ("Music For Money"). One of the album's highlights, "I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass", with its jagged piano lines, seemed to poke fun at Bowie's somber Low (issued the same year), yet its author claimed the inspiration actually sprang from dressing-room shenanigans he'd witnessed while touring with Bad Company. Either way, it still sounds great.

This Yep Roc repackaging amends all Lowe's related cuts circa '77-'78, including a peppy remake of Sandy Posey's politically incorrect 1966 country hit "Born A Woman" (from Lowe's Bowi EP), cuts substituted on the U.S. edition, compilation tracks ("I Love My Label"), and the one-sided Rockpile single packaged with initial British pressings. The result is a comprehensive appraisal of the cornerstone -- cracks and all -- of Lowe's long, remarkable career. Even tarted up with so many accessories, Jesus Of Cool runs little risk of looking like the doggie's dinner.

-- KURT B. REIGHLEY

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Kurt B. Reighley

CHARLIE MONROE
I'm Old Kentucky Bound: 1938-1956
(Bear Family)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- While Bill Monroe stood as the Father of Bluegrass in the '60s (though often eclipsed during that time by Flatt & Scruggs), older brother Charlie -- half of the legendary pre-bluegrass duo the Monroe Brothers -- worked two jobs, one as a fry cook at a Howard Johnson's in Martinsville, Indiana.

It was a profound reversal of fortune. Eight years Bill's senior, Charlie originally had the edge. After the duo's strained 1938 split, Charlie recovered with a new band that did well on radio and records and planned to audition for the Opry in 1939. When Bill and his original Blue Grass Boys got there two weeks sooner, the die was cast. Charlie and his band, the Kentucky Pardners, worked in Bill's shadow thereafter, the brothers' relationship uneasy. In the '50s, semi-retired in comfort to his Kentucky farm, failed business deals and his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis left Charlie virtually destitute.

This definitive four-disc collection assembles all Charlie's primary material for the first time. His 1938-39 Bluebird sessions, 1946-1951 RCA material and 1950's Decca sessions cover three discs. A fourth showcases Monroe and the Pardners onstage at Maryland's legendary New River Ranch in the mid-'50s, recorded by folklorist Mike Seeger. High-quality remastering restores the vitality of the prewar material, and even the live disc sounds clear and crisp. The booklet features a fine anecdote-rich Dick Spottswood biographical essay including comments excerpted from Doug Green's 1972 interview with Charlie.

"Bluegrass," Spottswood rightly concludes, "remained foreign to Charlie's style." Indeed it did. While Bill emphasized dignity, complex vocal harmonies, fiery instrumental breaks and a propulsive backbeat, Charlie's vocals were warmer, his sound looser and more flexible. He was solidly traditional on his '30s material and early postwar fare such as 1946's "Bringing In The Georgia Mail". Since he tilted toward the mainstream by adding amplified lead and steel guitar, it's no shock hearing his 1950 session with Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys.

It would be Jimmy Martin, not Bill Monroe, who in 1972 brought Charlie back to the stage. Three years before, after Charlie's remarriage -- to a woman Bill had dated -- the brothers had a final, irrevocable split. Still living hand-to-mouth and despite suffering from leukemia, Charlie returned to performing in 1974 and died a year later. Given the quality of the music, it all seems unfair.

-- RICH KIENZLE
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle

JOHN ANDERSON
Just Came Home To Count The Memories
All The People Are Talkin'
Eye Of A Hurricane
Tokyo, Oklahoma
Countrified
(Collectors' Choice)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- First charting in 1977 and coming on strong by 1980, John Anderson was a harbinger of the New Traditionalist movement that hit Nashville in the mid-'80s, a young man with an old man's voice -- his unfettered, adenoidal baritone tore like Lefty and Haggard and swooped like Jones. These, his third and fifth through eighth Warner Bros. albums (the previously reissued Wild And Blue was his fourth), cover 1981 through 1987 and balance no-apologies honky-tonk with textbook country-boy rock that could only have seemed radical in those Urban Cowboy years.

Anderson sounds like nobody else, before or since; not only is he instantly recognizable, but when he rips into a lyric full-bore, he leaves most other singers sounding limp and inhibited. Yet he also has a mawkish streak that could let the air out of even his strongest albums, and he sometimes allowed strings and backup singers to undercut his best performances. He can also be distractingly self-conscious and erratic in selecting material; for all his career high points, he never cut a truly essential album.

I Just Came Home features the newly-arrived star bemoaning a country burnout on "Can You Catch A Falling Star" and flirting with bluegrass on "Stop In The Road" and Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's All Right", before closing with a version of the Delmore Brothers' "Trail Of Time" that sounds like Hank Williams cutting the follow-up to "Lost Highway". (Lionel Delmore, Alton's son, was Anderson's favorite writing partner.)

All The People, probably the best of these five reissues, is dominated by rocking songs with country themes, including "Black Sheep" (co-written by filmmaker Robert Altman) and "Let Somebody Else Drive", but "Look What Followed Me Home" is a ghostly weeper. Hurricane, Anderson's first album of all new material (by a variety of writers), was well received and yielded three hits, but sounds in retrospect like a bit of a time-marker, part apex and part beginning of the end. "She Sure Got Away With My Heart" (a dead ringer for Van Morrison, of all people) is the most engaging single, while the rambling-man album track "Lonely Is Another State" is an understated sleeper.

By Tokyo, Anderson's whole approach is beginning to seem formulaic, more rutted than rooted, despite the devastating "Down In Tennessee". Countrified smells like a contract-fulfilling throwaway that only a books-balancing major-label accountant could truly love. Anderson subsequently switched labels and went into a career swoon that lasted about five years before he temporarily righted himself with the likes of "Straight Tequila Night" and "Seminole Wind".

It's unfortunate that Wild And Blue couldn't be part of this batch, because it's his best effort. Anderson die-hards will greet these long-unavailable albums enthusiastically, but others are better served by the two volumes of Greatest Hits condensing this era. Regardless, you do need to hear Anderson, who's proof that worthy music can happen in Nashville even amidst its worst phases.

-- JOHN MORTHLAND

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or John Morthland

LYNYRD SKYNYRD
Street Survivors (Deluxe Edition)
(Geffen)

by GRANT ALDEN

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- But for the passionate arguments of Patterson Hood, Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably be remembered here only as the music blaring from the bondo camaros the rough smoking guys stood around with their high school girls, who probably did put out. Or as the flames LP, recalled and redesigned after the plane went down, a lower case butcher album on the collector market.

Or, and this is the most inexact fate, for its principal single: "What's Your Name," a cavalier -- wonderful word, that, for both meanings fit: its archaic sense as a gentleman, and its present connotation of disrespect -- ode to the rock star life of the 1970s. It is the kind of song which would have kept me from listening to the band, much less the album, for that kind of hedonism has always seemed both below and beyond me.

And yet.

And yet it is a finely drawn, carefully rendered song, or so it plays today. (So it played then, but I couldn't hear it, too much a fan of Peter Green and Keith Emerson.) Effortless in its simplicity, and deceptive for all that. It's a nasty guitar riff, a nasty, predatory song. And it's not. In 1977 that opening line about a limo driver smelled of debauchery, but now it seems quite self-evident that musicians should not drive themselves around strange towns, particularly when they're achieved a certain iconic status. And "little girl"; man, that plays differently now than I think it was meant when written. "I've done made some plans" and "I've found a little queen/and I know I can treat her right" roots the singer's class, there's been a fight in the hotel bar, and yet the closing line for the one night stand is this: "shouldn't you stay/little girl/though there ain't no shame." Shame. In the end, of course, the singer offers cab fare home, same time next year. A gentleman, despite himself. In addition to himself.

The temptation, then, is to let that song frame Street Survivors as an album celebrating the wretched excess of '70s rockstardom, only this simple eight-song LP is far more complex than that. Remember that it was built during the era of rock operas and concept albums, and remember that albums were conceived of as comprehensive statements, as suites. That sequencing was important.

Except the second track is "That Smell," Ronnie Van Zant's voyage through the same territory Neil Young explored with "The Needle And The Damage Done," with more preaching and less fury, if that makes any sense. The juxtaposition here cannot have been accidental. And, in passing, I wonder if some of the street jargon -- "'ludes", in particular -- is as impenetrable to most of today's listeners as Billy Joe Shaver's dominecker hen was until I realized it was a specific kind of barnyard animal, and nothing less...nor more).

Point being, the balance of the album seems like a meditation on the singer's transition from roving hotel cavalier to family man ("One More Time," "I Never Dreamed," etc.). The second side, of course, opens with "You Got That Right," another one of those feral, fighting songs for which the band was justly famous. But it closes with "Ain't No Good Life," which almost certainly has to be a nod to Willie Nelson's "Night Life," doesn't it? Only it feels more like Haggard: "I want to know/Tell me why is it so?/Well, just 'cause I don't pray/Lord that don't mean I ain't forgiven/Just because I'm alive/that don't mean I'm making a living." (There's a song begging to be recast as southern gospel, should, say, Mike Farris happen by needing material.)

And on those terms, as a self-conceived work of art, not simply as an ode to the sybaritic excesses of the road, this is one hell of an album. And, of course, it rocks.

This deluxe edition reissue appends the original eight tracks with a second disc, which you will listen to once. It includes the first version of the album, produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, known (apparently) as the Criteria Studios Album. The same eight songs, only they sound as if they were played by a really competent cover band who had learned them note by note from careful tablature. Dowd has a great reputation, though I confess to not really knowing his work. This, too, is a fascinating reminder (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is another) that musicians aren't simply being petulant artists when they reject all that work because it comes off wrong. Somehow Dowd neutered a band, neutered these songs. It's bizarre to listen to, but no fun at all.

And then there are five live tracks from August, 1977, just before the crash. But the sound quality's not much, and I can't make it through them. So you're on your own there.

Some of us will always wonder what Jimi Hendrix might have become had he struck up a working relationship with Miles Davis. What Buddy Holly might have made of Sgt. Peppers and Phil Spector, or whether he'd have gotten their first, somehow. (But not, somehow, what Kurdt Cobain might have come up with; he wasn't going to pull through, not that burning ember, though I wasn't clever enough to see that.) I don't often put Ronnie Van Zant and Skynyrd in that same dream world, the one in which he steals Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets about 1998 and...oh, that's just silly.

And this is a serious album, conflicted, complex, and a whole lot of fun. And sad, for there was no next year.

MERLE HAGGARD
The Studio Recordings 1969-1976
BONNIE OWENS
Queen Of The Coast
(Bear Family)

by BARRY MAZOR

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- By 1969, as this second completist six-disc box of his Capitol recordings begins, Merle Haggard was well-established as a smooth purveyor of working man's blues, from "Mama Tried" to "Sing Me Back Home". During the span of this extraordinary collection, Merle steps into history, digging and observing and reporting back in a singular conversation that has not stopped since. He would also test himself against his own heroes -- Lefty and Jimmie and Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan -- even as he saluted them by reviving their material.

The Strangers were now a great, tight bar and studio band, capable, as these tracks remind us, of following Haggard across musical boundaries. Yet he'd still augment the sound with horns -- which had for some time been near-anathema in much of roots music, and country in particular. Many of the tracks on the vast Hag collection exploit the brassy, jazzy sounds that made Merle the first Country Hall of Famer on the cover of Downbeat.

(Album-long salutes to Rodgers and Wills, and the Strangers instrumental albums of this same period, will appear on a separate concept albums box; Haggard's unissued studio explorations of the music of Georgia minstrel Emmett Miller and the Love Affair With Trains material are here.)

This was also the time when Haggard stepped into controversy, with the culturally pointed, right-veering "Okie From Muskogee" and "Fightin' Side Of Me" singles. Extensive interviews with Deke Dickerson in the excellent book that comes with this set clear up the matter of Merle's intentions in those songs for good; he meant every belligerent, received, semi-thought-through line at the time. They were no joke -- and he considers them ridiculously naive and wrong-headed today, which is why he's lampooned them since. It will surprise some that by 1976 his campaign-year topical songs include a reference to "the Brothers Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson...and Martin Luther King" in his definition of freedom fighters.

For all of the exploration, Merle had as many hits and self-penned classics in this period as at any time of his career -- from "If We Make It Through December" to "It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)" to "It's All In The Movies" to "Tulare Dust" to "Living With The Shades Pulled Down".

Merle's muse for all those love songs in this period was mainly Bonnie Owens, his longtime singing partner and, for quite a while there, his wife. Her recorded works have been notably under-represented until the appearance of this second four-disc retrospective set, Queen Of The Coast. It covers all of Owens' output from small west coast indies through Capitol Records, from 1953 to 1971 -- including (and this is going to be the key attraction for many listeners) all of the often gorgeous duets with Merle. These two are probably the least-revisited of the great male-female duos of the '60s; this is your chance, and you should take it. Like Dolly and Porter, the sheer vocal perfection is as key to their power as the chemistry.

Bonnie tended to put her own career to the side during their married years, and there weren't, consequentially, an unending string of great new songs coming her way during that time. As a vocalist, she tended toward the lighter, thinner Kitty Wells approach -- and the songs often match that tone with docile, long-suffering lily sorts of lyrics. And then Bonnie surprises you with the in-your-face lies of "Number One Heel", and you see the power she often brought to country classics in during these years, and even more so, arguably, in the years beyond.

Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Barry Mazor.
Illustration by Shocko Grafix

PETER HOLSAPPLE & CHRIS STAMEY
Mavericks
(Collectors' Choice)

(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- When dB's founders Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple reunited to record again eight years after Stamey had left the band, fans got excited to hear the cult outfit's jangly, jagged college rock again. Their 1991-released record, however, delivered something slightly different: acoustic-based, harmony-heavy folk-pop, more Everly Brothers than Big Star.

But what initially seemed overly subdued now sounds quite exquisite. Both Holsapple and Stamey, then in their mid-30s, convey a sense of worldly experience in these songs, which predominantly deal with love. Holsapple contributes some of his most starkly heartfelt songs (notably "Taken" and "She Was The One"), while Stamey takes a more sardonic look at relationships on "Lovers' Rock" and "I Want To Break Your Heart".

This crisply remastered reissue boosts several bonus tracks (including the previously unreleased "Hollywood Waltz"), but most importantly it functions as a reminder of Holsapple and Stamey's sublime songwriting skills -- perhaps serving, too, as a harbinger for the duo's long-rumored follow-up disc.

-- MICHAEL BERICK
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Michael Berick