Welcome to the second installment of Brett’s Dollar Records. Brett scours the bins for treasures and shares them with us each Thursday. This week: Barefoot Jerry “Watchin’ TV”
The more old music I listen to, the more I believe there really is no “good” or “bad.” Some stuff, I’m compelled to hear again. Other stuff, I’m not. Cruising the dollar bin, I’ve come to seek out that phenomenon where a “bad” album is at least misguided in enough directions to make me wonder what the artist could have been thinking. By the time I have handle on that, I may have listened the album enough times to get used to what’s wrong with it.
Barefoot Jerry | Watchin TV
Barefoot Jerry’s Watchin’ TV (purchased for 99 cents at The Groove in East Nashville) may be the dumbest album I own. The title (and cover–see above) alone puts it in the top ten. Then then there’s the title track, a Little Feat-flavored paean to the pre-cable stoner tradition of switching on a radio, muting the television, and fucking with the vertical and horizontal hold dials until the picture is an eye-strain-inducing, psychedelic mess best suited to smoking dirt weed while listening to a band from Madison called Barefoot Jerry.
The curious thing: Barefoot Jerry really is very smart music. In the early 1970s, these guys were sorta like Nashville’s Derek and The Dominos–a virtuosic musician’s group full of pros and studio cats, built around a guitar hero (leader Wayne Moss, who contributed the guitar lick to Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”), playing FM rock that seemed tuneful and groovy in equal proportions. These guys were a big deal; Charlie Daniels even namechecks ’em in “The South is Gonna Do It Again!” Thing is, their songs are kinda…funny? I dunno, take “Funny Lookin’ Eyes,” for instance. It’s a ready-made, arms in the air, outdoor festival hand clapper…about opening up a newspaper to find a pic of your buddy gettin’ busted and it turns out now the cops are smokin’ all his fuckin’ weed, man!!
If these stoner motifs seem a bit heavy-handed, they’re also at odds with the increasingly clean, Christian-oriented lineup Moss was cultivating by this point. Side Two sports a pair of sappy, not-especially-secular ballads: “There Must Be a Better Way” and “If There Were Only Time for Love,” the latter containing the lyric: “I think Jesus lived and died/So we would not be crucified.” “Tears in Heaven,” it isn’t.
It’s the clean side of the BJ that present-day Moss projects for his weekly Sunday afternoon sets at Madison’s Piccadilly Cafeteria. (Considering the venue and time-slot, perhaps that’s not such a bad idea.) The real legacy, though, is closer to the progressive bluegrass, smarty-pants instrumental jam of “Pig Snoots and Nehi Red.” This is the brand of hip, complicated, Nashvillian country rock Moss and company (Kenny Buttrey, Mac Gaydon, David Briggs, among others) banged out in the proto-Jerry outfit, Area Code 615, very much worth investigating.
For all its (glaring) flaws, I’ve heard Watchin’ TV enough times to like it. Recorded at Moss’s Cindarella Studios in Madison, it sounds ballsy and deep; The playing is hot and engaging; I had a roommate who would listen to the radio while watching TV on the reg’; And then there’s Lynn, previous owner of this album, who decorated the liner with magic marker hearts and arrows, along with her name, address, phone number, declaration of love for some guy named Steve, and the words “BAREFOOT JERRY” in HUGE, multi-colored lettering on the blank side. This slice of 1970s adolescent folk art enhances my attachment to Watchin’ TV, one of the dumbest “good” albums I own that doesn’t say “Bachman-Turner Overdrive” on it.
