Hard Places

Waylon Jennings - Dreaming My Dreams (mp3)(buy)

Jamey Johnson - High Cost of Living (mp3)(buy)

George Jones - He Stopped Loving Her Today (mp3)(buy)

The only what from I know for Jamey Johnson (myspace) comes out that voice of his, that's how I'd like it kept.  Let him sing me who he's been and what he's done, damn Internet will squash the legend from life.  Don't need to fact check Johnson's police record, or have him take a loyalty oath to the way country music once was and still should be.  I don't even want his date of birth, because when he sings his grandfather's part through "In Color" he sounds like he's already earned his way to one hundred years old.  Deep, sad, and spirited, words pushed out with leather tongue.

If "High Cost of Living" has a verbal hook that feels ripped from a D.A.R.E. pamphlet, if the prison metaphor is too easy and the heartfelt-this! hush of "...and threw away" feels badly calculated, it only makes the song feel more like a legitimate twelve-step confessional.  The song's obvious choices - of course Johnson has a pickup truck, of course he meets a Hammond B-3 in a church parking lot - ground things like its crucifix-as-compass poetry.  The middle way's the goal.  Johnson's no hard-partyin' penthouse-to-outhouse celeb, this average guy's new-norm addiction was "just another old routine," one that swapped the finer things for shit.  "I had a job and a piece of land, my sweet wife was my best friend, but I traded that for cocaine and a whore."  The center of that sentiment is so simple and strong it supports that final snort.  The tune is careful enough that it can survive three solid rounds of guitar play at its end.

Johnson's second record, That Lonesome Song (the disc's currently a paltry $7.99 at Amazon, how dare you not?), has been hanging out in my sidebar since a trio of Times crix teamed up around it on last year's best-ofs.  It's a good'un, a mix of growers and shiners.

Sometimes it serves best as a gateway drug.  Might seem cruel to squeeze his stuff between two timeless classics, up top there, but that's where the singer-songwriter (with an assist from the alphabet) has situated himself:  Album closer "Between Jennings and Jones" finds Johnson critiqued, filed, even geographically plunked (Nashville's tiny Jennings St. seems to stretch towards a Potters Field Cemetery) twixt two icons who got to sing out their own legends.  George Jones had as many ways to break your heart as he had tunes, and "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is a wrecking ball.  If you don't go to rubble when Jones' voice cracks at "I love you," then you stand alone.  Waylon Jennings - who himself cited of Bob Wills and Hank Williams, who married traditionalism and rebellion - gets two other nods on "Lonesome."  It isn't until Johnson's cover of Allen Reynolds' "Dreaming," the one Waylon made a standard, that you realize how outmatched the new guy's material is.  That's both a shame and a compliment.

There are actual country music blogs, by the way, if you find yourself yawning wide yon Indie Nation.  The 9513 has nicely set itself up as a central source, Twangville (which unfortunately has an abbreviated RSS feed, so I never ever read it) leans more alt-, Setting the Woods on Fire will hook you up with some Way Back When.  There are others, find your own way around.

*

"Cryin' shame?"  "Fightin' mad?"  John Rich, you big shot, I wanna like your Common Man Protest Song but it's real world lame, refrigerator magnet sentimentality.  "That New York City town?"  Your lyrics need a bailout.

And Detroit's capable of writing its own goddamn songs.

Death - Politicians in My Eyes (mp3)(buy)

Death's ...For the Whole Wide World to See is Album of the Year material, though it's tough figuring exactly which year that should be.  Brothers David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney (myspace) recorded these songs - originally inspired by Alice Cooper and The Who, but of a piece with the legacy of hometown protopunkers The Stooges and The MC5 - as a demo tape in 1974, self-released "Politicians" and "Keep on Knocking" as a single in 1976.  The rest of the material sat in an attic in Vermont - the band had moved there from Detroit, changed its name, moved from hard rock to gospel and reggae - until last year, when one of Bobby's sons found that original single demanding huge bucks on eBay.  World came out on Drag City in February, and if it sounds dated at all it's less to do with time than the benevolent afterglow of November's election.

That will fade, the music's alive and well and in the hands of the next generation.  Three of Bobby's sons - Bobby, Jr., Urian, Jewels - and a couple of their friends formed Rough Francis (named after David Hackney, who passed away from lung cancer in 2000).  It has to be the most legitimate excuse a tribute band ever had to exist, and - after mentions ranging from their hometown Burlington Press to The New York Times - why these kids haven't been pushed out on the road and snapped up by eagle-eyed festival programmers (cough) is beyond me.

(Big-ups to Ryan from MBV for being the first place I saw the release mentioned and to Stereogum commenters for bringing up Rough Francis.)

tags: jamey johnson  death  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit