"Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again"

(4.4 MB)

"I'll Hold You in My Heart (If I Can't Hold You in My Arms)"

(3.1 MB)

"[Lil Capn Travis] - Flattened by the Good Times"

(3.3 MB)

"National Lights"

(5.5 MB)

Editor: Will Robinson Sheff

Such is the life of the music-overexposed: the more I’m bombarded with niche-hyped releases du-jour by such celebrated indie bands as My Miserable Pathetic Piece-of-Shit Emo Life, The Slender Boys of Twee, and Big Porno Jim and his Ironic Cock-Rock Thugs (note: names may not correspond to actual bands), the more I retreat into the back catalog of major labels in search of classic music not coated in 17 different gunky layers of self-referentiality. In running in terror from these Indie Next Big Things, I have discovered for the first time a sincere love for the early songs of Dolly Parton, the first two albums by Tim Hardin, the Zombies’ neglected classic Odyssey and Oracle, and the warm aural hug of Philly Soul singles like Barbara Mason’s “Yes I’m Ready” and the Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child.” I have also re-discovered artists I’d temporarily forgotten about. For example, I spent the greater portion of a 30-hour drive to a friend’s wedding last week listening over and over again to old Neil Young albums and pondering the wonder that is Country-Rock.

Never really the Next Big Thing, there’s something perenially satisfying about country-rock, something that good ol’ boys can appreciate as much as hip rocker kids. It may be the country subgenre with the most carpetbaggers and the least claim to authenticity, but country-rock has also birthed some of the best country music of the last 50 years (of course, country-rock also spawned Hell’s house band, the Eagles, but I’ll be charitable and try to ignore them for the rest of this column). In addition to the wonderful works of Sir Neil, country-rock has blessed us with The Band, Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, and, of course, the great Gram Parsons, the figure who basically inspired the alt.country movement.

It may be argued that none of these guys was really all that country, but I think that’s part of what gives country-rock its appeal. Like the Beatles imitating Ravi Shankar (or, conversely, Bollywood film composers imitating American funk), rockers who twang create a version of “country” that might be totally inauthentic but is so passionately imagined, so inevitably tinted with their own dreams, that it possesses a beauty uniquely its own. Unlike the aforementioned fusing of Indian and Western styles, though, country and rock are close enough together (sonically and geographically) that their match seems almost natural, preexisting, perfect. Country characteristics, like primally simple chord progressions, amped-up emotion, and sentimental twang, sound like they were always crying for heavy rock backbeats and big guitar crunch. And fusing country with rock makes a lot more sense than fusing it with the slick anonymity of pop, which is what charlatans like Shania Twain and Faith Hill have the guts to do while still calling themselves “country” musicians. Neil Young may cover “Oh, Lonesome Me,” but he’d never be so bold as to call himself a “country” musician, even though his fiddles and steel guitars may be much higher in the mix than the those of the Dixie Chicks.

Thank God for country-rock. It’s not alt.country, it’s not cow-punk, it’s not electro-twangcore. Way back in the 1960s, it introduced rock fans to country fans and vice-versa, and it did so in a totally unassuming and unpretentious way - no western-style shirts or subscriptions to No Depression required. That’s nice. That makes me feel good. And that’s all I have to say.