That's why Kiss and Poison won out over Willie and Waylon in high school, but neither of those bands do a damn thing these days to lessen the sting of crushing debt or the grim creep of mortality like a Willie or Waylon tune on the jukebox at last call when you're the only one left in the room.
Yet, by the mid-80's, even Willie had thrown his hands up in the air trying to keep up with country music's increasing pop fixation, issuing a set of jazz standards (1981's Somewhere Over The Rainbow), an album built around a song Merle Haggard turned down (1982's Always On My Mind), and then having the audacity to ask his fans to buy an album called Without A Song (1983).
While each of these albums was a wild success, none of them sounded at all country. The same year Willie went to #1 with City of New Orleans, his hastily-recorded follow-up Angel Eyes seemed aimed at a very specific new wave demographic and missed the charts completely.
One of country music's greatest songwriters would go eight long years without recording a single original composition, yet would continue serving up a minimum of one album a year just to keep the money train a rollin' while his film career went into overdrive.
The top of the country charts had come to resemble a Stepford Wives club as full of shoulder pads and mousse as the pop side of things, with Marie Osmond, Anne Murray, Reba McEntire, and Crystal Gayle scoring many of the year's top hits.
Meanwhile, even dependable rock acts had begun trading perfectly good guitarists and drummers for synthesizers and drum machines, leaving rock fans scratching our heads.
Simultaneously, the underground rock press began taking an odd shine to the likes of the Long Ryders, Jason & The Scorchers, Green on Red, and Rank and File, among others.
For those who'd fallen in love with the devil-may-care attitude of punk, there was a lot to like about country music's rag-tag team of lovable outlaws, but nobody who'd yet thought to mix the two.
Nobody except Steve Earle, that is, whose Guitar Town hit record stores in March. Was it a rock record, was it a country record? Did it matter?
Of course, one couldn't overlook Lyle Lovett, whose masterful debut took country in a more jazz and blues-inflected direction, but whose eccentric appearance seemed to owe at least some debt to Willie DeVille.
Meanwhile, there was something brewing on the rock side as those reviews of Walk The West and True Believers that had once graced the back pages of Creem and Trouser Press were starting to find their way closer and closer to the front, with numerous national publications declaring a "New wave of American guitar bands - with a country twang!"
Next thing you knew, the neighbor kids were using the term "cow-punk" in passing. It was officially time for yours truly to take a closer look.
What helped seal the deal was that two of the year's finer "new country" offerings just so happened to come from otherwise dependable punk labels; Frontier Records releasing E.I.E.I.O.'s Land Of Opportunity while Slash Records issued the BoDeans' debut Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams.
What were the chances that two Wisconsin bands would find themselves recording in L.A. roughly around the same time, thus allowing T-Bone Burnett, who would become the year's unofficial MVP (Most Valuable Producer) to include theirs among the handful of great albums Burnett produced and/or played on that year, which also includes:
- Elvis Costello's distinguished country record King of America came five years after his all-covers country record, Almost Blue. In that time, he'd taken the Attractions about as far as he was willing to go and saw this new project with Burnett as a bridge to a new chapter of his career, which he has grown into quite fabulously.
- Peter Case's self-titled solo debut for Geffen Records, which, even as a fan of his work with seminal L.A. rockers the Plimsouls, did little to prepare us for Case's countrified rock sound or the albums sweeping, literary scope.
- Last but not least, Burnett's own self-titled solo record for the newly-revived (and then re-shuttered Dot Records label may not have set the charts ablaze, but you can bet that this album got passed around among many a major artist over the years, as Burnett's dance card remains full to this day.
Nothing proved this more than the fact that on July 19, 1986, Columbia Records dropped Johnny Cash. Whatever storm the man in black may have been weathering commercially, his record label of 28 years was apparently unwilling to stand with him.
In August, Dwight Yoakam's Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. was released. We were all set to show you a clip of Dwight killing it at Farm Aid, which also happened in 1986, but we came upon this clip of Dwight jamming with Dave Alvin from the Blasters and decided to show ya that instead.
Last but not least, a man by the name of Randy Travis arrived on the scene and his debut album, Storms of Life, put up not one, but four Top 10 country hits, including two #1's, "On The other hand" and "Diggin Up Bones".
While there were certainly success stories to be found, the misses far outweighed the hits as notable "new country" artists died on the vine. None were more notable than veteran singer Gail Davies' rocked-up country outfit Wild Choir, whose RCA debut was tailor-made for country radio, but found few takers.
This despite featuring the first - and still superior - version of the oft-covered Kennedy-Rose composition"Safe In The Arms Of Love" as well as a few John Hiatt sides, RCA suddenly couldn't promote a song that has since gone on to be a hit for all else who have touched it.
Here in Chitown, countrified rockers Insiders were inking a deal with Epic Records and playing to packed houses. Dig the above clip of newly-uploaded footage from guitarist Jay O'Rourke of the band from The Vic in 1986.
That a band with a roots-rock/country hybrid sound would come from the country capital of the world (uh...Nashville) should come as no surprise, so when Walk The West signed to Capitol, they seemed set to fight fellow Nashvillians Jason & The Scorchers (freshly signed to EMI) for the hearts and minds of a rock audience in need of some new thrills.
Meanwhile, if one needed any proof that the pop industry saw "country-rock" as the future, they need look no further than the firepower behind and connections pulled for California country-rock act Lone Justice, whose Jimmy Iovine-produced LP Shelter was a major priority for Geffen Records.
The most combustible plug in the entire country-rock engine surely belonged to True Believers, led by brothers Alejandro and Javier Escovedo, who found themselves the unwitting leaders of Austin TX's "New Sincerity" movement.
The buzz on the True Believers as Rounder Records prepared to release their debut was such that EMI Records quickly swept in and signed the band to a reportedly massive deal and re-released the album almost instantaneously as an EMI/Rounder co-release.
Sadly, the band's second album was a casualty of the EMI-America label folding and, by 1987, the band was a casualty of its own hype, with a little drug abuse thrown in for good measure.
The death of EMI-America also left Jason & The Scorchers' heavily-hyped album Still Standing dead in the water. The Scorchers would later signed to A&M.
E.I.E.I.O. would abandon their country roots to make That Love Thang, a full-blown Stones album that did little to further their advancement up the industry ladder. By 1988, they too would be on the skids.
Insiders' first single "Ghost On The Beach" received heavy rock radio airplay, dipping its toe in both AOR and modern rock formats, but the label and band seemed to move on to a second album before the debut album's commercial potential could be fully realized.
The band's second album then took seemingly forever to finish as the suits at Epic hemmed and hawed about a single until an executive shake-up left them free agents with no way to get their hands on the album they'd finished.
Only Steve Earle managed to make a sizable dent on the pop charts with his 1988 album, Copperhead Road. His increasing drug habit became tabloid fodder and an unintentional promotional tool that helped The Hard Way crack the Top 100 before Earle's life and career went sideways.
He would return in 1996 with I Feel Alright, but the highest charting album of his career on the pop charts would not come until 2009 in the form of his loving tribute album to Townes Van Zandt called simply, Townes, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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i'm a little bit country