When outlaw country set to burn the Grand Ole Opry down in the early 1970s, it had as much to do with seizing the means of production (Johnny Cash was a Marxist!) as it did with the slick sounds then emanating out of Nashville.
Rebels like Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, David Allen Coe, and Hank Williams Jr. simply wanted off the “assembly line” (Waylon’s phrase) of codified rhinestone conformity that dictated how country music was “supposed” to sound. They wanted the right to find their own producers, record their own songs, and look any goddamn way they wanted (long hair, dirty jeans, battered leather jackets). And they aimed to toss a dirty ass rock and roll spanner into the works while they were at it. It sounds almost quaint nowadays, but all they were fighting for was total artistic freedom.
Jennings was the first to hurl Molotov cocktails at Nashville’s Music Row in the form of 1973’s Lonesome, On’ry and Mean. (There were other moments, but the LP’s as good as any.) And Jennings basically wrote the manifesto with “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” in which he made it clear that outlaw country was as backwards looking—to the unadulterated music of Hank Williams and his ilk—as it was visionary. And he made the argument for change more overtly than any of his fellow revolutionaries by writing protest songs about the conflict.
He went on to produce a timeless body of work, just a taste—but what a taste—of which you’ll get on 1979’s Greatest Hits. It doesn’t have everything an outlaw music fan would want—you won’t find his take on Rodney Crowell’s “I Ain’t Living Long Like This,” his cover of Neil Young’s “Are You Ready for the Country,” or the great “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand” on the comp. But it’s as good a little old sampler as I’ve ever run across, and a great place to start your love affair with the Che Guevara of Country.
The compilation opens, appropriately enough, with “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean.” It’s a harmonica-driven honky-tonkin’ road song; Waylon’s on his way to Shreveport by means of a bus with a dog on the side of it, and he’s singing about how doing things his way—which is what outlaw country’s all about—is souring his mood. And he’s not alone—there’s a woman in New Orleans name of Codeine who feels the same way. You get lots of tasty picking, cool guitar fills, and a nonstop rhythm that adds miles to that old Greyhound bus engine. And you’ve got to love the way he takes the song out with an old school yodel.
The less maniacal than you’d expect “I’ve Always Been Crazy” has Jennings singing about getting busted for things he both did and didn’t do, and how he’s always been different with one foot over the line, and it proves it’s the country guys who get all the best lines—that “I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane” is a doozy. And the song goes out in a blaze of Mexicali horns.
“Honky Tonk Heroes (Like Me)” is the National Anthem of “lovable losers, no account boozers, and honky tonk heroes,” and opens on a happy-go-lucky note before kicking into high gear. Waylon’s not’s so bleary-eyed that he doesn’t know he’s as much lovable loser as honky tonk hero: “Them neon light nights, couldn’t stay out of fights/Keep a-haunting me in memories/Well is one in every crowd for crying out loud/Why was it always turning out to be me?”
Jennings opens “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” in warm-throated crooner mode, asks if it isn’t time to get back to the ABCs of romance, and tells his gal it’s time to head to Luckenbach, where folks still read the Book of Love and have boozed themselves beyond the pain threshold to boot. It’s a big-hearted love song to both his gal and his outlaw pals, one of whom, Willie Nelson, joins in about halfway through—I can only surmise he was late because he was busy rolling one of his legendarily paralytic marijuana cigarettes.
On the jaunty live cover of Ray Pennington’s “I’m a Ramblin’ Man” Jennings issues a warning to every woman between New Orleans and Chicago—with detours to Cincinnati, West Virginia, and California—that’s he a high-risk heartbreaker, and that you best just leave him alone if you know what’s good for you. They may call him “the man of joy” down in Alabama, but you best not stand “too close to the flame.” Ouch. “Amanda” is a lovely ballad complete with ethereal backing vocals—Waylon’s a musician acquainted with the joys of playing in a hillbilly band, but he’s a bad romantic investment and he knows it. ”Fate,” he sings to his lover, “should have made you a gentleman’s wife.”
Waylon hooks up with Willie again on the Ed and Patsy Bruce classic “Mamas, Don’t Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” the best ode to hillbilly motherhood this side of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother,” which gives it to white trash asshole-producers and gives it to ‘em good and hard. The cowboys in Bruce’s song aren’t assholes, mind you—just lonesome, hard to love and harder to hold, puppy-loving guys drawn to guitars and old pickup trucks.
Mothers, sings Waylon, would be best served by forcing their little cowboy-to-be’s nose in a book then packing him (or her) off to law school, but if they did Waylon and Willie wouldn’t be able to follow the song up with “A Good Hearted Woman,” which was recorded live for the good of mankind at the Western Place in lovely Dallas, Texas. It’s a loping bass classic of the long-suffering but all-forgiving country woman genre, and its subject is a true saint. You wouldn’t catch her pushing her offspring into the professional classes—she’s much too soft-hearted and resigned to the fact that they’ve been preordained to grow up to be just like their good-timing daddy.
Closer “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” is a two-chord simple indictment of a grand old music that had lost touch with its hillbilly roots, and Jennings gets straight to the point: “Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar/Where do we take it from here?/Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars/It’s been the same way for years/We need a change.” And he’s honest enough to admit he’s as guilty as the next guy: “Lord, I’ve seen the world with a five-piece band/Looking at the back side of me/Singing my songs, and one of his now and then/But I don’t think Hank done ’em this way, no/I don’t think Hank done it this way.”
The good news is Jennings was being too hard on himself—along with his fellow desperados he shook up country music the way you would a snow globe and helped restore to it an authenticity that would have made Saint Hank proud. He may have sickened of the hype; ”Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Gone a Bit Too Far” bemoaned the way the press gave outlaw country the grunge treatment (“Someone called us outlaws in some old magazine/And New York sent a posse down like I ain’t ever seen”).
And by doing so they inspired a literal-minded law enforcement community to put a target on his back. “What started out to be a joke the law don’t understand,” he sings, “Was it singing through my nose that got me busted by the man/Maybe this here outlaw bit’s done got out of hand, out of hand.” A classic example of cleansing the temple and being punished for your sins, but Waylon wouldn’t—no couldn’t—have done it any other way. “We need to change,” he sang, then he picked up his guitar and done just that.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
