A Timeless Wavelength

Southern Culture on the Skids – Doublewide

I doubt I can come up with a better description of Southern Culture on the Skids than Chuck Klosterman.  In his book Killing Yourself to Live:  80% of a True Story, he describes the band as looking like ” a cross between the B-52s, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the kind of U.S. citizens usually described as ‘the unemployable.’”  Bassist Mary Huff wears towering bouffant wigs and often stops playing to apply more makeup, lead singer Rick Miller sports a goatee that looks like it actually came from a goat, and drummer Dave Hartman dons a straw porkpie hat that makes him look like he’s traveling through rural Arkansas campaigning for the job of railroad commissioner.  Their music is a countrified mix of surf and rockabilly, their lyrics celebrate banana pudding and possum stew, and their live shows frequently find the band throwing fried chicken at the audience.  And I love them.

When I lived in Tampa, the band had (and hopefully still has) a longstanding tradition of playing New Year’s Eve shows at Skipper’s Smokehouse, a venue which looks like it was made for them.  It’s made of plywood and tin and painted with a head shop motif, as if the biker nomads from Mad Max had decided that what they really wanted was a place to hear bands play Allman Brothers covers and so carved an amphitheater out of hurricane debris.  I had the good fortune of seeing SCOTS play there twice, and it was just about the only thing I miss about north Tampa.

But Tampa’s infamous “Suitcase City” still wasn’t the least respectable place I’ve ever lived, and as a former trailer park denizen I can almost relate to the song “Doublewide.”  I say almost because only stuck-up bourgeois types need more than a single-wide.  Plus the song celebrates the joys of home ownership and lauds the mobile home as a house the working man can afford.  I, on the other hand, was renting my little corrugated trash can for $200 a month.  Yes, there was a point in my life in which I was less classy than Southern Culture on the Skids. How far I’ve come.

Luther Wright and the Wrongs – Comfortably Numb

How thin is the line between irreverent parody and the sincerest form of flattery?  Can we always even make such a distinction?  These questions come to mind when I listen to Luther Wright and the Wrongs’ excellent album Rebuild the Wall, which reimagines Pink Floyd’s 1979 epic The Wall as a country and western concept album.

The Wall was the album that effectively broke up Pink Floyd, turning it from a group effort into a vehicle for Roger Waters’ self-indulgent musings about his childhood anxieties and the alienation of fame.  It certainly did nothing to counteract the band’s reputation for pretentious art-school music.  Nevertheless, it contains a lot of great songs and remains, despite its faults, one of my favorite albums.

Luther Wright and the Wrongs’ Rebuild The Wall manages to preserve much of what I like about The Wall while  lambasting its flaws.  On the one hand, when Wright re-envisions the somber “Goodbye, Blue Sky” as an upbeat Grand Ole Opry-style number or inserts barnyard noises into “Comfortably Numb,” it turns some of the album’s more serious moments into comedy.  On the other hand, the somber solo banjo version of “Is There Anybody Out There?” and the honky-tonk rendition of “Young Lust” work at least as well as the originals, if not better.  Whether you think The Wall is worthy of praise, derision, or both, Rebuild the Wall is definitely worth a listen.

Toots and the Maytals – Take Me Home, Country Roads

I’m always interested in strange new combinations of musical genres, and one area of crossover potential that I’m surprised hasn’t been exploited more often is the intersection between country and reggae.  It might sound like an odd combination:  the music of the urban shantytowns of a Carribbean island and the music of rural America.  But if you listen to the rhythm parts of a typical country song, and that of an early reggae, ska, or rocksteady song, you’ll hear the same bass-on-the-downbeats, chords-on-the-upbeats structure, and perhaps some of the same chord progressions.  The similarity is especially striking when you listen to the reggae of the early 1960s, before electronic effects and turntable manipulations became standard.

Recently there have been a few attempts at combining reggae and country.  The most notable was probably Willie Nelson’s Countryman album, which I actually have yet to hear; some of Camper Van Beethoven’s songs (such as “Never Go Back”) approximate a country/reggae sound.  But it turns out that musical cross-pollination between Nashville and Kingston was already taking place while reggae was in its infancy.  The musicians of Jamaica couldn’t always get their hands on records from the States, but radios were relatively common, and a few American stations broadcast with enough power to be picked up in Jamaica.  These stations carried not only rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but also country music, and all of it influenced the burgeoning reggae scene.  The influence was so profound that Trojan Records were able to release a three-disc box set of classic country reggae songs.  Here’s one of my favorite tracks from that collection, a Jamaicafied version of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by ska pioneers Toots and the Maytals.

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys – I Ain’t Got Nobody

There’s an unfortunate tendency to divide American popular music into “white music” and “black music,” and to act as though an unspoken but strict form of segregation were in force.  White rappers and black country singers face an uphill battle before they can win any sort of respectability.  One might assume that this situation was much worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when racism was far more overt and segregation was legally enforced.  And one would be wrong.  In some ways, previous generations had even less a tendency to Balkanize music along racial lines than we do today.

Country music is supposed to be the music of rural whites, while jazz was the creation of urban blacks.  But as record companies  became interested in exploiting these niche markets, they provided new opportunities for musicians from these different genres to come together.  Many of the “hillbilly records” of the 1940s and 1950s were made with session musicians who normally played with jazz groups, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that elements of jazz began to seep into country music.  Even the instrumentation of country music changed, as the upright bass and drums were borrowed from the traditional jazz combo.  The end result of this mixing was the new genre known as Western swing, with Bob Wills its undisputed king.

Western swing may be considered a type of country music, but many tracks sound like they’d be equally at home in the jazz or rythm and blues sections.  That’s especially the case with “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” a jazz standard done in a Dixieland style.  (Rock fans will recognize the chorus from its use in a medley with “Just a Gigolo,” first performed by Louis Prima and later, for no easily justifiable reason, by David Lee Roth.)  But the jazzlike instrumentation, rhythm, and backing vocals are complemented by lead singer Tommy Duncan’s inimitable country yodeling.  And it works. This track will make you take back every unkind thing you ever said about yodeling.