...To Son: It's Shooter! (...and OBG helps with a little the aim...)

The eagle-eyed among you have seen that the title to tuesday's post was a bit odd, but that was of course to set up part two of Jennings week here at One Buck Records. After daddy Waylon (the only one who'll walk the line) here's son Shooter, carrying the coutry rock outlaw torch into the 21st Century. Or so I thought. I picked up The Wolf for a couple of bucks mainly on the strength of the cover art. Seriously, that is a bad ass cover right there, indicating that there is some bad ass music within. Take a look at the back cover picture (below): four rowdy-looking dudes, ready to cause a ruckus. Men, lock away your daughters (and wives?!) when these bad motherfuckers come to town. And cover your ears, for there is surely some bad ass  countryfied rock'n'roll in here. 

Or so I thought. And it starts out that way, with opener "This Ol' Wheel", where Shooter raps over a countryrock beat like he is a more authentic Kid Rock. Things slow down a little for the breezy "Tangled Up Roses", then there's a really cool cover of "Walk Of Life" which happens to be my favorite Dire Straits song. So far, so good. But then the album ran in trouble. Other than "Slow Train", a lovely and lively number featuring The Oak Ridge Boys, the next four numbers were all slow numbers, bringing the groove of the album to a grinding halt. And after another slightly more lively section, the album goes out on another stretch of slow-ish or too poppish numbers. In other words, The Wolf needed some help. 

One was a re-sequencing that would spread out the slower numbers more evenly and try to get a better, sustainable flow. I also decided to ditch a couple of numbers, then looked for replacements. I checked Missed The Boat: Demos And Rarities for some more bad ass tunes that could take their place. The demos for The Wolf numbers didn't match their album equivalents, but I found two outakes from around the time frame of the album, then decided to turn these into the new opening numbers of side one and two of The Wolf. The first, "A Rejected Television Theme Song", sees Shooter and the boys be more of the bad motherfuckers I imagined when buying the album. And "A Classic Television Theme Song" is exactly that, and one you'll be very familiar with. 

The rest was figuring every number's place, while I also wanted to leave the sections that worked relatively intact. Thus, "Tangled Up Roses", "Walk Of Life" and "Slow Train" stayed more or less in place, and the second half trio of "Higher", "Blood From A Stone" and "Last Time I Let You Down" got shuffled a bit, but stayed more or less in place. The new opening let me push ""This Ol' Wheel" to the beginning of the second side to lively it up. And while I'm not a huge fan of mariachi instrumentation, I'll let that slide for "Old Friend", 'cause the song is nice, it was just misplaced on the original album, and as the new album closer I can let it ride out on that mariachi groove. 

So, uh, that was probably once more a lot more info on my whole alternate album machinations than you needed or wanted, but there you go. The end result is, I think, a real improvement on the original album.  So, fire up The Wolf and see what kind of ruckus Shooter Jennings & The Three Fifty Sevens can comeup with...