the Sturgill Simpson c/d

M@tt otm re outlaw canon

this conversation is so weird

the whole "outlaw" thing was more PR than anything else, it's not the subject or even the subtext of all that many of waylon's songs.

and the "don't you think this outlaw bit's done out of hand" thing was a reference to being arrested for possession, like "wait, i didn't mean i was _literally_ an outlaw." it's a joke.

Yeah

Of course, I took it as more outlaws of the Nashville machine

Except David Allan Coe that guy is a fucking lunatic

And/or crazy good (enough) at self-hype, also made some good albums.(warning: the following contains a favorable mention of Kid Rock, but he had recently made a good album too)(1999 also the alibi for any stylistic excesses) Some Coe-rrespondence:
http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-08-03/music/fumin-emotions/full/

Can't believe anyone would forget Tompall. That guy was great.

As long as we're derailing poor Sturgill's thread, anyone read this?

http://www.amazon.com/Outlaw-Waylon-Willie-Renegades-Nashville/dp/0062038192/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420249260&sr=8-1&keywords=outlaw+kris

I saw this cable doc on DAC, and it was amazing, he was drinking with Pantera dudes and telling the most outlandish stories...his racist album is a real pile of shit tho kinda kills the charm of his persona

Still haven't heard that, and hope I never

Friend gave me a CDR years ago listened to it a couple times and felt embarrassed to have it & gave it away

it's not even funny. if you've gotta be misogynist and racist, at least be funny.

iirc a lot of the stuff circulating on those albums - at least the 'unofficial' ones - aren't by DAC but by some dude called "Johnny Reb" or some dumb shit. I don't know that DAC had more than a couple of those sorts of tunes (not that that excuses it).

Anyway, his first album, Penitentiary Blues, should be in everyone's collection. After that, err, not so sure you need too much DAC (though I will admit a certain fondness for "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" and his version of "Slide Off Your Satin Sheets"). Anyone ever hear his 'psychedelic' album, mostly spoken word and sound effects? It's way crazier (and way more entertaining) than his 'x-rated' stuff. I can't recall the name of it but it's tough to find.

Yeah, I've heard that a lot of the DAC stuff circulating is actually Johnny Reb(el) stuff. My uncle had a tape full of the latter's stuff, much more horrifying than most of DAC's racist stuff.

Funny that Merle's independence eventually had him denouncing "Bush Wars" (all three of 'em!) in post-9/11 shows, and yet he never got Dixie Chicked---maybe because he was considered an outlier by then, or maybe because if even he was doing it, might lead some others to go public with their doubts, at least at that point

not being a "chick" probably helped, too

he wasn't selling many albums either.

Good song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evw-vjclHg0

The stuff I heard was all DAC and the Johnny Reb stuff I heard once was different sounding so I wouldn't let DAC off the hook that easily

The DAC one is kinda half sex stuff I guess, Johnny Reb I only heard once but it was way old fashioned sounding iirc

The moody, downbeat, beat-down, and kinda Beat Generation fatalism x restlessness, sometimes flairing way up, and mebbe out, for a while: you find that in some country artists, def. in both Coe and Simpson (ditto Townes Van Zandt). Also, something I wrote about DAC later, speaking xpost of Penitentiary Blues, and how the jailbird flights still seemed to pertain in '06 (glib-ass ending is cos this is taken from some show previews, re him and irrelevant etc)

In 1969, Dave Coe was a 30 year-old parolee, resident of a hearse parked outside Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Old Opry...Coe told tall tales of his years behind bars -- unless you believe he really did teach Charlie Manson to play the guitar, and that the State of Ohio lost all evidence of his alleged time on Death Row. With the name on the contract now matching the one on his rap sheet, David Allan Coe's life after prison soon became equally improbable, as he got a chance to make his first album, Penitentiary Blues, backed by some of Nashville's finest.

Among the prime Nashville Cats on Penitentiary Blues was the late drummer Kenneth Buttrey, who had played on Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35." Buttrey got to march, pound, and roll Coe through the echoing halls of this portrait of the Longhaired Redneck as young bluesman. Its songs don't all deal with prison life, but, in this context, they sure seem like cells, both connected and separated. Places where your thoughts crowd you and people are alone together, in little cages like stages, because somebody's always watching and being watched.

Penitentiary Blues -- long out of print, recently reissued by Hacktone/Shout! Factory in time for Coe's 66th birthday -- now seems like the blueprint for Coe's enduring worldview. He sees himself and his lady friends as forever finding and losing each other in the maze of life, like ships that go bump in the night. If one of the pair discovers or accuses the other of bumping someone else, Coe's always ready (sometimes eager, sometimes sad) to hit the road, to stay away from conflict, and any other confinement.

And that applies to most other situations too, as in Coe's most famous song, "Take This Job And Shove It" ("I ain't workin' here no more"). Another standby, "You Never Even Call Me By My Name," establishes an ironic distance between himself and the clichés expected of country performers, which allows him to come back and use them again per his mercurial mood. Like the latter-day Dylan, he seems to live and thrive on an Endless Tour, and in endless reissues. Performing combinations of old and (carefully rationed) new songs, he moves kinda slow onstage now. But still, when Coe appears, it's nature's way of telling us to party.

so I wouldn't let DAC off the hook that easily

Far from my intent, he has enough odious stuff fairly credited to his own name.

i'm pretty sure the DAC x-rated stuff i have is DAC and not johnny reb -- i'm familiar with those johnny reb 45s and they aren't the same.

i think DAC has a /ton/ of great albums, like way more than one could possibly imagine given, you know, who DAC is. he's a straight-up great ballad singer, not quite in the johnny paycheck or merle stratum but close. i fuck with a lot of DAC albums all the way through the 1980s.

I've never seen a derail quite like this.

i agree, this derail bit's done got out of hand

:)

all the outlaw country stars were real outlaws, sticking up small town convenience stores for Grapette n shit

That's actually a pretty rare bunch: outlaws who were actually outlaws. Haggard, Paycheck, Shaver, DAC, Cash, Steve Earle, all pretty much badasses who served time, were shot and/or shot people. Who else?

lol Cash just did a bunch of overnight/misdemeanor stays, hardly "outlaw"

out there obeying the law

all those other dudes were in for violent crime (well, I dunno about Earle, assume that could just as easily be drug charges), kinda different imo

xp

i feel like shel silverstein probably killed someone but got away w. it

Randy Travis seems pretty outlaw, in a drunk-spousal abuser way. (Could include John Denver too if we're going by that criteria).

Well, Cash, like Earle, was usually picked up for drugs. He never stayed more than a night in jail, sure, but he did get jailed on multiple occasions. He's no DAC, or Paycheck, or Shaver, but no one could call the dude a poseur.

anne murray was involved in a driveby shooting in ontario in 1987

garth brooks has several outstanding warrants for doing the dine-and-dash at a string of Applebees

At the least, his wife should be arrested for that breakfast recipe.

anne murray was involved in a driveby shooting in ontario in 1987

http://images.coveralia.com/audio/a/Anne_Murray-Something_To_Talk_About-Frontal.jpg

wearing this outfit

Coe and Haggard done time for property crimes---Coe vastly and variously exaggerated his exploits, while Hag told the story on himself, in one of his memoirs, went a little something like this: he and another young punk were discovered by property owner, who called the cops, and they hid under a house, where they were discovered by an armed kid, who made then wait for the cops. Cops said, "You boys that scared of a bb gun?" They thought it was a .22.
Shaver killed a guy in a bar a few years ago, successfully pleaded self-defense.
Paycheck, who got his name for forgery, for which he also done time, later wounded a guy, also claimed self-defense, served about two years.
Spade Cooley, the very talented western swing star, killed his wife in front of his daughter, served eight years before dying of a heart attack.

Not that those other guys aren't very talented (and not that the late Paycheck wasn't), but Cooley was almost as good as he was bad, at times.

I thought Merle robbed a bar in Bakersfield, which is why he got sent to San Quentin for 3 years.

That may have been the property in question, I don't remember, but def. cornered by the BB Kid, or so he wrote.

Would make it even better if he, the budding sticker-upper, was foiled by his ballistics ignorance.

I don't think Shaver killed him, just shot him in the face. Here's a quote for you:

"I am very sorry about the incident," Shaver said outside the courtroom. "Hopefully things will work out where we become friends enough so that he gives me back my bullet."

There was also that stretch where Shaver's son OD'd on heroin and he had heart surgery right after. The last time I saw him, a few years ago, he ripped open his shirt to show the scar, basically a cross in his chest.

Glad the guy didn't die! Shaver credited Willie Nelson with persuading him to perform the night his son died, said it might make him feel better (think he did a guest turn during WN's set, but might have been more). Shaver knew about Nelson's son killing himself, trusted Willie, and found that he was right. Also, his wife died, and yeah the heart surgery too---then Kinky Friedman drafted him for a tour. "But I need to recuperate." "I need you."

Good 2014 Billy Joe album: Long In The Tooth.

Slate's Carl Wilson from their end of the year roundtable chat-- on 2014 country albums he likes, and then starting trouble re Sturgill:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_music_club/features/2014/slate_music_club_2014/the_best_podcasts_about_music_2014_s_best_protest_songs_and_answer_songs.html

I’m glad Craig also shouted out the new albums from Lee Ann Womack and Angaleena Presley, whose incisive American Middle Class dramatized a woman’s perspective on the 99-percent experience even more assertively than Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry Go ’Round” did last year. Womack’s indie-label The Way I’m Livin’, with its unsparing portraits of hard-drinking, hard-loving, self-snafu’ing lives, would gobsmack anyone who knows only her hit high-school-grad valedictory, “I Hope You Dance.” There was also Sunny Sweeney’s Provoked, Lydia Loveless’s Somewhere Else, and the big sister many of us have mentioned, Miranda Lambert’s Platinum, one of the most fully realized albums of the year, which still earned it only middling airplay.

I’ve been just a tad chagrined to see Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music get so much more notice on year-end lists than most of the above. Maybe people are thankful to hear a male pick up the clue, or maybe when they think of trad country they just want to hear someone with a deep Johnny/Conway/Merle voice. Not that Simpson’s music isn’t singular and strong, but it’s also the sort of album we heard fairly routinely at the peak of “alt-country” a decade-plus back, a period many critics seem to scorn. Why the turnaround? To me Metamodern didn’t have the crackle of necessity that, say, Presley’s set did. What’s more, why always Simpson and never Ray LaMontagne’s Supernova, for instance? As with hip-hop, there’s a rock-crit default country album every year, too.

idk what "crackle of necessity" means

So he's singular and strong and has a deep voice that sounds like other singers people like. That's a pretty high start for a supposedly undeserving album. I'm not sure I recall much alt-country stuff from back in the day that sounded like, dunno, Waylon or Merle. Bit of Buck Owens and the Byrds, etc., plenty of rock-country fusion, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly and Sun stuff and whatnot, but stuff that sounds like Merle Haggard or Jennings? Not so sure about that. While I haven't paid attention to any 2014 year-end stuff, and would be sad if Sturgill made it on lists that Womack and Presley missed, I'm not sure how anyone could say the Simpson is somehow not worthy of any year-end ranking that those others deserve.

So his point is that if you were obligated to include one and only one country record, it should not be the Simpson?

I don't see the connection here either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X294h3dl2_I this sounds like some shitty generic indie rock

xp

I do like that Womack record, that's a good 'un