Every road on One Buck Records leads into Americana...

 

...or so it seems, but you already knew that. From the country rock of the late 60s and early 70s to the alt.country from the early to mid-90s, to the various genre permutations until today, Americana is the one genre that is a contant throughout a ton of music that I like. But, as I said, you might have noticed, whether by listening to the All Pearls, No Swine series, or some of the One-Album Wonders, or hell, even by commercial giants like the Dixie Chicks who maintained a healthy, authentic link to the genre's past. So, it was obvious that at some point I would not only dip into the genre, but full on dive back into the Americana pool. If you have been around for a good long while, you might remember that there was already a full-on Americana sampler around here, back when I made a Blue Rose album sampler. Americana Vol. 1 has no borders or barriers,but also no particular theme, other than being a ton of cool Americana songs that I like a lot. 

There is some aural connect here, in sound and sensibility, maybe because this compilation focuses on modern Americana from the last 30 years or so. The oldest track on here should be Gillian Welch's demo for her classic "Orphan Girl", immediately covered by Emmylou Harris, which is like being knighted in the country rock scene. There's a bunch of groups from the birth of alt.country in the 90s - Whiskeytown, Old 97's and the previously featured Son Volt. Since we already mentioned the queen of Americana, there's other female genre royalty. Patty Griffin's moving "Wild Dog" is as good as anything on 1.000 Kisses - which means it's plenty good. And Alison Krauss with trusty band Union Station in tow as well as Neko Cse are reliable awesome as well.

This collection also collects (some) of the cream of the crop of the last decades in Americana, including one of its most emblematic figures and undoubtedly its best lyricist, Mr. Jason Isbell. "Last Of My Kind", featured here, is a moving, elegiac portrait of a young man from the country, lost in the big city...and the century. "Tried to go to college but I didn't belong, every thing I said was either funny or wrong / laughed at my boots, laughed at my jeans, laughed when they gave me amphetamines" and then juxtaposes this brilliantly with the down home wisdom from back on the farm, that doesn't hold up anymore: "Daddy said the river would always lead me home / but the river can't take me back in time, dand dady's dad and gone / and the family farm's a parking lot, a Walton's Five And Dime", "Mom says God won't give you too muc to bear / might be true in Arkansas but I'm a long long way from there". Isbell's storytelling and the precise way he chronicles the challenges of being a Southern man in a modern, changing society date back to his time in Drive-By-Truckers ("Outfit"), but he has only gotten better since. 

Another cultish figure who has grown more prominent in recent years is Sturgill Simpson and his decidedly retro, old school style  that is sometimes compared to the Outlaw country of the 70s. His signature cosmic cowboy anthem "Turtles All The Way Down" is featured here in a bluegrass version. Other talent rising in the last decade or so that ar featured here: Colter Wall, Lucero, Ben Nichols, Brad Armstrong, Charles Wesley Godwin and John Moreland with a terrific acoustic cover of "Thunder Road". Speaking of cool covers: Darius Rucker, formerly the lead singer of biggest/luckiest bar band in the world, Hootie and the Blowfish, was always a rootsy guy, but embraced full on country/Americana as a solo artist and covers Bob Dylan's never-fnished "Wagon Wheel" from the Bob Dylan & Billy The Kid soundtrack sessions.

So, lots of good stuff here, all coming with the OBG seal of approval. If you want to spend some quality time with some quality Americana music, this is the place to be, folks. Y'all have a good one with this one... 

The French Connection: L'Americana à la française...

Ah, 'tis the season. The rainy season. The getting dark early season. The season prone to slightly melancholic music. Or is it already The End Of The Season? To Redeye, it is. The French singer-songwriter who is behind the Redeye moniker, has studied the art of Americana well, and brings a pretty perfect simulation of the real thing made in France. 'All tracks written and performed by G. " Redeye" Fresneau' reads the booklet, somewhat akwardly. Mr. Fresneau seemingly hides his first name to, uh, hide that he's a dyed in the wool Frenchman, maybe? It's okay, Guillaume, Windows Media's automatic album recognition destroyed the mystery. Redeye's wish for authentic Americana-ness is cute, if not a little overzealous. Until this album, I have never seen a booklet proudly announce where it was printed. But since End Of The Season's was printed in Oregon, the booklet proudly announces this, as if to say 'See how Americana we Frenchmen really are? Even our booklet comes from there!'. 

There is, however, a good reason that Redeye's music sounds so close to the originals it tries to emulate: Fresneau spent four formative years in Austin, Texas, one of the capital's of No Depression/Americana. And like fellow Texans Midlake, there is a good amount of folk and psych elements in Redeye's music. D'ailleurs, the preferred nomenclature for his music, as per Fresneau, is psych-folk, but whatever you want to call it, it's really nice mood music if you are in the mood for some autumnal melancholy. 

This is the kind of sadly beautiful Americana that I would have killed for twenty five years ago and am still A okay with today. The tempo never rises above midtempo and Redeye draws in the same coloring book for most of this album.On the other hand, he has a real knack for this kind of music and this can proudly be put with your other melancholy Americana/singer-songwriter albums. Lucile Vallez' mournful violin wanders through most of these songs and give them a big part of their appeal, though there is also some tasteful accordion and saxophone on the cajun-style "Sunny Roads" and some horns on "Cold As Ice". This isn't just some guy strumming on his acoustic guitar, but beautifully produced music. It also seems no coincidence that the latter two songs with their expansion of Redeye's sound find themselves in the middle of the record, as if Redeye realized that to fight a certain sameyness in his music it would be wise to color a bit outside the lines on these tracks. A trumpet accompanies "Season's Ending" as well, another welcome bit of offsetting the usual instrumentation.   

Since this, his debut album, Fresneau has turned Redeye into a real band, now normally going under (This Is) ReDeYe, still plowing that psych-folk-Americana field he first worked on End Of The Season. But check out the beginnings of Fresneu's faux Americana (Fauxmericana?), because it's better than quite a bit of the 'authentic' stuff...

  

Call him Cool Hand Elvis or Cowboy Costello...how Declan McManus' West was won...

Storytime with ol' OBG, who's going to tell you a litte about how Elvis Costello could have become a country star, years before genre exercise Almost Blue got him in a country kind of mood. The year is 1978 and My Aim Is True has come and gone. It did some business as an import disc in the US, but couldn't get a distribution deal there. Single release "Alison" also failed to chart. But wait - somebody somewhere had to adopt the song, right?! The student community of the University of Texas at Austin embraced "Alison", making it a local hit record. Which got tiny local country label Tumbleweeds Record thinking. So an inquiry of Tumbleweeds Records reaches the offices of Stiff Records. Would Elvis Costello have more country-ish songs in the vein of "Alison", to be released locally on Tumbleweeds Records, with the hopes of a grass roots movement pushing that country rock record further than the Austin area.  

Costello is in London busy working on what will be This Year's Model. But, in turn,  Elvis gets to do some thinking. The guys at Tumbleweed Records want another "Alison"? He's got that. They want more tried and true country stuff? Well, he got that, too.Kind of, sort of. And to give the Tumbleweeds records guys a whole album, he's diving into his back catalogue. Deeply back. 

Costello has two very recent, obvious contributions lying around: The fantastic, George Jones-esque (soon to be recorded as a duet with Jones!) tearjerker "Stranger In The House", that the powers to be at Stiff convinced him not to put on My Aim Is True. And he has "Radio Sweetheart", a number he cut as a demo for Dave Edmunds at the behest of Stiff Records. But two albums do not an album make. So Costello reaches back to his semi-recent past on the pub rock circuit. More explicitly, to his time with Flip City, the pub rock group that dabbled in country rock, or more precisely the kind of vaguely soul-inflected roots rock that a lot of pub rock bands were doing. And it so happens that Flip City recorded a song that sounds like an absolute dead ringer (or rather, a blueprint) of "Alison", "Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver)". Plus a bunch of other vaguely country-ish songs, including covers of The Amazing Rhythm Aces' "Third Rate Romance" and Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". 

So, with the two country numbers he hasn't found room for elsewhere and the best of the Flip City stuff, Costello has the country rock record that Tumbleweeds Records wants. To sound more country, Flip City are being redubbed The Flip City Ramblers, while Mr. Costello gets of course top billing. Yet Radio Sweethearts, the resulting album, doesn't sell much outside of the faithful, and the two singles Tumbleweeds Record launches ("Imagination" and "Radio Sweetheart", are little more than turntable hits on student radio. So, Elvis' career as a country star have to wait, while he strongly rebounds with This Year's Model, paving the way for another country sojourn down the line...

Well, this is where we get back to reality, where no such record exists - until now! One Buck Records is proud to present how the first country record by Elvis Costello could have really sounded like...

Now, that rusty ol' truck there needs some remodeling, hoss...

You ever had the long slow burn of an album that’s a grower? No, I don’t mean in the days after getting it. An album that doesn’t just grow over the first couple of listens, but takes its sweet time, growing and growing and growing...over a couple of years. Rusty Truck’s album Luck’s Changing Lanes is such an album, at least for me. It’s an album that’s been sitting pretty in my record collection since 2013 and until last year it was sitting there waiting to get played once a year, maybe. And then, over the course of a couple of month, something strange happened. Having had its yearly outing, the melodies and words kept creeping back up on me regularly, and I caught myself humming or singing a couple of lines...then had to remember what they were...then realized...Rusty Truck!?

When I picked up this album I had never heard of Rusty Truck before. Nor did I necessarily know who Mark Seliger was. But a sticker promising, among others, special guests Sheryl Crow, Jakob Dylan, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, and Gillian Welch had me intrigued. Googling Mark Seliger, I realized that I had probably seen the name a bunch of times, seeing how he was essentially the house photographer of Rolling Stone magazine for more than a decade, shooting most of their iconic covers from the 1990s and the photo series for articles. Becoming friends with Jakob Dylan, towards the end of that run, had Seliger pursue his life-long love for country music. Dylan produced a first demo and fellow wallflower Rami Jaffee put together the band that became Rusty Truck. And despite the array of famous guest stars and helpers, Luck's Changing Lanes isn't some sort of all-star revue, a sort of alt-country Supernatural. Most stars' contributions are playing an instrument or the occasional backing vocal. 

If I remodeled the album, that’d already be the second paint job on Rusty Truck's debut album. The record was first published in 2003 as Broken Promises on the tiny Coda Terra label, and despite all the guest stars went almost immediately out of print. It may pay to have friends in places, but not if neither you nor your friends can get heard. The album then got re-issued five year later by Rykodisc as Luck’s Changing Lanes, dropping two songs from the original release and replacing them by two others, which is the version of the album I have. And it’s here where they fucked up terribly with an absolute screw job of epic proportions in terms of sequencing.

I remember my initial, sharp disappointment with much of the disc. Having picked this up in a record store in Edinburgh, there we were driving up the hillsides into the Highlands, and after a promising opening track and an okay second one the album just sort of vanished into a vapor of samey-sounding elegant but sleepy midtempo sound of country crooning that bordered on boredom...”What did you put on there?” my wife inquired for it was she who was driving, “that’s gonna put me to sleep”...and out of the car’s CD player the disc went to then make its very infrequent appearances over the years. I could not even blame my wife, but rather blame whoever put the disc together. Sequencing, maaaaan, you ever heard of it? 

Unfortunately, no one involved with Luck’s Changing Lanes seemed to take the importance of an album's flow much into consideration, as after the first two tracks the album programmed four mid/slow tempo songs which all more or less sound the same back to back to back to back. That’s a lot of back there, hoss. Any momentum the album wanted to build was immediately undermined by a section that invites fingers to approach the skip button. So I did what I do with a disc that has such strange sequencing errors, I essentially skipped the “boring” first side entirely and started with track seven to the imaginary second side which had both stronger tunes and a better flow. I hadn’t started to tinker with re-sequencing albums yet, but boy, if ever an album needed some help to find a better flow, it’s this one.

And it’s worth it. Because those lines and choruses I started to hum almost unconsciously...that happened for a reason. Luck’s Changing Lanes, now re-sequenced for a better listening experience with no prolonged lulls in the middle of things, is full of charming, but ultimately extremely endearing tunes. The instrumentation is rich and varied, some songs like the reggae groover “New York Fallen Angel” with Burning Spear on backup vocals (one of the two new songs) and “Malibu Canyon” are almost pure pop and the only thing that makes this alt country is that Nashville and its radio confections don’t sound like this, unfortunately. The weakest thing on here is probably the duet with Willie Nelson (which gets very close to the ol’ Willie countrypolitan sound), but even that one is endearing. 

For further listening pleasure I attached a couple of live bonus tracks at the end plus two tracks from the follow-up album. It’s interesting to see how they turn “New York Fallen Angel” from a reggae-pop tune into a honky tonk one live. Without further ado (as that was a lot of ado already!), here’s that ol’ twice  remodeled Rusty Truck.

This Just In: Brownsville Boy Beats The Devil...

Outstanding songwriter. Charismatic actor. One-of-a-kind singer of his songs. Activist and defender of those that couldn't defend themselves. 

Where others buckled or crouched, he always stood tall. Really fuckin' tall. They truly don't make 'em like that anymore. 

R.I.P. Kristoffer Kristofferson, 1936-2024

 

The best Neil Young album...made by not-Neil Young. Say howdy to Israel Nash...

I figured I'd post this fabulous album some time here at One Buck Records and the time is now. Actually I was just reminded these last days of how awesome Israel Nash can be when listening to his latest, Ozarker, that I picked up from the library this week. That album with its glammed-up cover shows has Nash going the way of like-minded retro artists like Jonathan Wilson, after the 70s sounds of their repective sophomore albums he has now also arrived at an echo-filled, synth-esque 80s style that sounds like he also listened to Springsteen circa Born In The USA (or, you know, Taylor Swift's 1989). Actually, the evolution of Nash across his records is interesting. Predecessor Barn Doors and Concrete Floors,  still with his last name Gripka attached, has hints of a closeness to the sound of Neal Young in songs like "Baltimore", but "Louisiana" also suggested the country side of Exile On Main Street and most of the album is a muscular, no-frills Americana recording in the 90s 'no depression' mould of Uncle Tupelo or Whiskeytown. But his sound changed relatively significantly for his sophore album, our One Buck Record of the day, Rain Plans. 

Rain Plan, or rather Israel Nash's Rain Plan, is a record that doesn't sound like any Americana album from the 90s, it goes back further, much further. As the title might have tipped you off, think early 1970s Neil Young at his most blissfully stoned. A dude walks up Sugar Mountain, or in Israel Nash's case, down Myers Canyon, in a poncho, and probablly with more than a handful of peyotle in his pocket.  

Gripka also changes his vocal style, going from more of a rock'n'roll growl to a not quite-falsetto that approaches the vocal style we associate with Mr. Young. The instrumentation is still Americana, with cascades of steel guitar washing over these songs, then mingling with slightly psychedelic elctric guitar, often recalling Young's brothers in arms instruments Crazy Horse. There is a real hippie vibe to the thing, right down to the artwork, Lesanka Honighs animal paintings and a mirror foil with the inscription "See the Beauty That Surrounds You". Cosmic American Music lives on! 

If you liked Luke Gibson or you are a fan of the psychedelic Topanga Canyon retro music of the Beachwood Sparks, you should love this record. If you love Uncle Neil, you obviously will. But, really, if your musical sweet spot is, like mine, slightly off-kilter country-influenced rock that sounds straight out of the early 70s, give Isreal Nash's Rain Plans a listen. It's good stuff, maaaaan!

PS:

One Album Wonders: He's A Gypsy Boy, He's A Miracle Man, He Is Bob Carpenter

The story of Bob Carpenter is one of unsteadiness, reject, and uncertainty, of wandering through life looking for purpose. Carpenter was half-Ojibway, born into the First Nations tribe on the Northern Ontario Tamagami  reservation, from which an unhappy childhood full of orphanages and foster homes followed. This broken childhood most certainy instilled not only a sense of restlessness but also a strong resistance against being told what to do, something that would ultimately derail his music career before it even began. He went to the Navy, but was discharged for mischievous conduct on drunken shore leave. After some years of rambling and wandering around he ended up in the Yorkville folk club scene of Toronto, where basicall every Canadian folkie paid his dues. 

The story of Bob Carpenter is also that of a man banging his head against the recording industry and its conventions. Trouble started early when finally trying to harness the power of Carpenter's songs into records. Recording sessions with Neil Young's producer David Briggs in 1970-1971 fell apart when they clashed about the direction of his music. Enter producer, fellow Canadian and future Mr. Emmylou Harris Brian Ahern. Recording Carpenter seemingly was like pulling teeth, and the promising partnership soon took a turn for the worse. Ahern believed in Carpenter's songs, but not necessarily in the stark manner Carpenter presented them in. Where Carpenter wanted to,play his songs as simply as possible, Ahern thought bringing in studio cracks and overdubbing embellishments was the way to go. A minor disagreement with Ahern concerning the use of instrumentation and the general 'sweetening' of the record grew into a bigger conflict that finally unraveled Carpenter's burgeoning career. 

Carpenter had also signed with Ahern for the publishing rights of his songs, but that deal was about to expire at around the same time that the release of Silent Passage was scheduled. Ahern insisted that Carpenter resign with him, but Carpenter decided that he didn't want to and tried to hold out for other publishing deals. Though the exact rundown of things is unclear and no one - especially not Ahern - detailledevents, things went something like this: Ahern essentially took Silent Passage hostage, withholding it from release and essentially blackballing Carpenter from the music industry while the conflicts with him weren't resolved. And we're not talking about 'accidentally mislaying the master tape' either, 30.000 copies of the album were sitting in a warehouse ready to ship when Ahern, backed by Warner Brothers, decided to withhold the album. Warner Brothers first postponed, then cancelled the release, with all of those records being melted down a while later. 

When Canadian specialist label Stony Plain finally released Silent Passage in 1984, almost a full decade after its scheduled release, the era of the folky singer-songwriter had long gone the way of the dodo, and so had Carpenter's ambitions of a music career. In 1984 Silent Passage was on first release essentially an archival release. Whatever moment the kind of country-folk and singer-songwriter music had in the early 70s was gone, and so was Carpenter's shot at a career. What's left is Silent Passage, and the music itself.   

So, that orchestration and those backing singers that caused so much strife? Yeah, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Ahern's 'more is more' approach works wonders on opening track "Miracle Man", which faithful One Buck Heads might remember from the very first volume of All Pearls, No Swine. With slide guitar by the late great Lowell George, backing vocals by Emmylou Harris and a fabulously catchy tune, "Miracle Man" does go big and works great. But the slower, more introverted numbers probably didn't need more than a voice and an acoustic guitar. Blame the whole orchestration debate turned fiasco on the times. As a folkie/singer-songwriter on Warner/Reprise in the early 1970s you basically were assured that some string accompaniment was going to end up on your record, with Lenny Waronker's work with Gordon Lightfoot being the prime example.  

Compromised in their form - at least in Carpenter's mind - or not, the songs of Silent Passage are sturdy to withstand whatever embellishments Ahern put on them. The title song is an absolute marvel, with some of my favourite opening lines to any song ever: "Before the war I had no need for traveling / indeed I do not know what made it so important to leave." And the great lines just keep on coming: "Upon this ship of life, we are the mast, the sails and the wind", yet by the end of the song "we are scattered on the oceans once again". Masterpiece, pure and simple. It's sailing and war imagery will be picked up by "First Light" a little bit later on, to almost eually stunning effect.

After the one-two punch of  "Miracle Man" and "Silent Passage" settles into a number of songs, in which the protagonist - an eternal wanderer in search of reason, purpose and companionship - always seems to be at least partly Carpenter himself. "I'm searching always for better wheather", he sings in "The Believer", "I'll chase my shadow 'till I remember". And consider the title character in the backwoods gothic tale of "Gypsy Boy", the song Tony Joe White covered: "I think it's time to leave now, but I don't know where we're going...for I am a gypsy boy, and my home is where you find me."

These observations make it seems like it's some sort of solipsistic record to rival the L.A. mellow mafia guys, but that could not the further from the truth. Carpenter's tone is mystical, all these characters seem to live in a netherworld that is not quite here and not quite elsewhere, vaguely familiar but also strange, both hostile and inviting at the same time. There is something deeply unnowable in Carpenter's words and his songs, a sense of mystery and myth that never completely get uncovered before the listener. Ed Ochs' great essay on Carpenter ponders this and the other enigmas of Carpenter's life and music and is well worth reading in whole. 

But really, it all comes back to that music. Silent Passage is one of the great, way too unknown treasures of North American music from the 70s. So with the miracle man, the gypsy boy, set sail on his ship of life, and see where this Silent Passage takes you... 

P.S.: Even though he is technically a one album wonder, if you like Bob Carpenter and Silent Passage, rejoice: there will be more Carpenter and Carpenter-related material here at One Buck Records. 

One Album Wonders: The stoned'n'beautiful perfect day of Luke Gibson

A pastiche artist like Jonathan Wilson would give half an arm to sound as beautifully, beatifically stoned as Gibson does here, in a way only a 1970s record can. You can study the mannerisms and sound, but the feel of such a record is hard to duplicate. As it turns out, even for Mr. Gibson himself, who never got to record another album. That's a true shame, considering the quality of his single outing here. But hey, this also means that Gibson could not tarnish it with weak follow-ups, instead having his music frozen in time in 1972. "He's called it 'Another Perfect Day' and it is", says an ad from the time, and they're right. it really is. 

Dave "Luke" Gibson was a stalwart of the Toronto music scene, biding his time and learning his trade as a folkie in Toronto's Yorkville district, coming up slightly later than famed Yorkville luminaries Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot. It was of course also the epicentre of Toronto's hippie scene, and it's fair to say that Gibson was definitely a part of that. He co-founded electric blues band Luke & The Apostles in the mid-60s, remarked for their 1967 single "Been Burnt", but infighting had the band implode almost directly afterwards, especially since Gibson had an offer to join local psych rockers Kensington Market. He then reformed Luke & The Apostles in 1970 for another one-off single, then went solo.

Another Perfect Day came out, like Luke & The Apostles' 1970 outing, on True North records, but it was distributed by Columbia Records, so clearly there was some faith in Gibson's outing. But Another Perfect Day came and went, and when it did nothing Gibson left the music business altogether, to become a set painter in the film industry, before reuniting Luke & The Apostles in the 1990s. 

The basis of Luke Gibson's music here is folk, but not the warm, romantic type his countryman Lightfoot popularized. Gibson's folk, with hints of country in it, is fuzzier and earthier. What unites the men is their declaration of love for the nature around them, but where Lightfoot uses romanticized terms to create a Norman Rockwell-style depiction of Canada, Gibson depicts a less romantisized picture on songs such as "Lobo". "Hotel", a tale of a poor drifter trying his fortune in a new town becomes a tale of indifference towards the ill-fated in life. I am also particularly fond of the beautiful, bouncy "Full Moon Rider", a song that gave Gbson's publishing company its name. "All Day Rain", already featured on the very first All Pearls, No Swine, sounds like a stoned hangover, watching the day go by behind rainy windows. 

But really, Another Perfect Day is a fantastic album, top to bottom. Maybe not a perfect day, but a perfect 40 minutes to spend with some very fine music...

Saddle Up...with Beyoncé

A couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have thought I would post an album (or rather, a variation thereof) from 2024 and I would have even less thought it'd be an album by Beyoncé. I probably haven't thought about Beyoncé in fifteen years, because in 2009 "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" was everywhere and had the potential to annoy the heck out of you. The last time I looked forward to hearing Beyonce is probably about twenty years ago (sheesh...) when "Crazy In Love" came out, which was a great single, no matter how you slice it. So color me as surprised as you are by what ended up our One Buck Record of the day. 

Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter at the end of last month as part of an ambitious multiple album project (this is seemingly 'Act II', so all i's in the songtitles are doubled. Artistic or silly, you ask? Both, I'd say!), this time venturing into country territory. And, as you all by now, you can always lure the One Buck Guy with something country-related. When I posted my little Hick Hop compilation a couple of weeks ago, I was probably unconsciously pushed to do so by having heard "Texas Hold 'Em" a couple of days before, which in turn reminded me of Bubba Sparxxx' "Deliverance" which in turn...well, you know. So rather than just letting that spark of inspiration lay where it came from, I decided to dive deeper into Beyoncé's so-called country record. And boy, is there some diving to do. Because Cowboy Carter (I'm sure the title has some gender-critical point to make that I can't care to bother with) suffers from what I called in the comment thread of my Hick Hop platter the rap album problem, namely a tendency to overstuff their albums with too many songs and a number of skits and interludes. Cowboy Carter might not be a rap album, but it suffers from that exact issue, running a rather unreasonable 78+ minutes over a whooping 27 tracks, including skits with country outlaws Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, plus a bunch of other guests. 

Cutting through all the clatter and filler was the first issue. There is some very good, and some very interesting music on that record, but it gets bogged down by too much of everything a bit everywhere. However, the idea of saving the highlights and have a much more streamlined alternate album took root almost immediately. The idea was to keep mainly the vaguely country-related stuff and build around that. Cowboy Carter isn't strictly speaking a country album, it is rather - like hick hop - a hybrid between beats, country instrumentation and imagery, and Beyoncé's background in modern r'n'b. But the country stuff does give a through line to what is now Saddle Up, a leaner by more than half collection of some of the strongest Cowboy Carter material, including her covers of the Beatles' "Bluebird" and Dolly Parton's "Jolene", complete with new lyrics. 

Highlights written by Beyoncé and her collaborators are the two singles, "Texas Hold 'Em" and "16 Carriages", the sultry "Alligator Tears", the beautiful ode to her daughter, "Protector" and "American Requiem" which is both personal and political ("Can we stand for something? / now is the time to face the wind", while interpolating Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Cowboy Carter runs for more than 78 minutes, Saddle Up runs a vinyl-era appropriate 38 minutes. If it were a vinyl record, tracks 1-7 would be the a-side, and tracks 8-13 the b-side, for all you nerds (like me!) out there. 

                                                    Like a rhinestone cowgirl...

In order to get the music into a shape I like and enjoy listening to, I mercilessly cut things down to the bone, both in terms of tracks used (I think "Ya-Ya" and "II Hands II Heaven" are great songs on their own, but they didn't fit what I wanted to do with Saddle Up) and the tracks itself. "American Requiem" is entirely re-edited to eliminate some parts I didn't like, "Sweet Honey Buckin'" lost more than half of its running time (and the, uh, 'buckin' part, thus the title change), I didn't much care for the opera stylings in the second part of "Daughter", so turned it into a medley with" Flamenco" and so on and so forth. Cowboy Carter is ambitious and overstuffed, and deserves credit for the former while the latter is now being taken care of. The album's overreaching is actually to its favor, as Beyoncé reckons with country music, its history, its meaning - especially on a personal and family history level - and its makers and listeners. 

A part of the project was seemingly to counter the harsh rejection of parts of the country establishment (you can easily guess which ones) to her first country foray, "Daddy Lessons" in 2016. This is what she is referring to in "American Requiem" when she sings "Used to say I spoke 'too country' / and the rejection came and said I wasn't 'country enough' / Said I wouldn't saddle up". But saddle up she did, ain't no doubt about that. 

Cowboy Carter is one of the most talked about albums of the year, if not the last years, or if you believe Stevie Wonder (one of the cast of thousands who played on this thing), "of the 21st Century". Yet I imagine most of you probably haven't heard it, because it's not your jam. I didn't think it was mine, either, but now, as Saddle Up, maybe I can get some of you to check out what Beyoncé's ambitious, messy, complicated take on country is about...

So, folks, let's all saddle up...

Ciao, Bruce - Ti piace la musica Americana?!

It must've happened sometime in the middle of the 1980s. For almost two decades the Netherlands had been Europe's undisputed capital for everything country rock. And while the Dutch still love their line-dancing and their country music, another relatively unexpected country took their place as the place to be if you like country music and - as it came to be known in the 1990s - alt country or Americana. That place is Italy. Do you know what Italians also like? Bruce Springsteen! So, it seemed logical, for a small group of them, to combine their interests. And from that the idea of For You was born - Italian Americana artists covering Bruce Springsteen. Now here's a concept you don't see or hear everyday...

The most recognizable name of the line-up is...not what you'd expect. I - like a lot of people - discovered Alexi Lalas - at the Football (soccer to our American friends) World Cup 1994. He was instantly recognizable with his long red locks and beard. What I didn't know until very recently was that that appearance was enough to get him signed to a small first-league (Serie A) club in Italy and that he also was a budding musician in his spare time. And so, somehow, Lalas ended up on two tracks from the first For You compilation, both very good and present here. Other than that, the artists here are as much a mystery to me as they probably are for you. If they aren't, do tell me more about Francesco Lucarelli, The Blue Bonnets, Rossana Casale, Ricardo Maffone or the Modesta City Ramblers. These are presumably all low-key regional artists, but that doesn't mean that the job they're doing of bringing the Boss' music to life isn't a good one. 

                         Not the F.B.I. (full-blooded Italian) you were expecting, huh?!

There were two volumes of For You - the original compilation from 1995 and a belated follow-up in 2010. I picked more or less pasimonously from both volumes to make a sort of 'best of' For You, specifically picking the artists that covered some of Springsteen's lesser known songs. For one, because songs that aren't done to death are more interesting - and secondly, because the songs covering the old warhorses often sounded like well-meaning karaoke. Admittedly, I played it safe by opening with The Wild Junkers' cover of "Better Days" which...does sound a little bit like well-meaning karaoke. But the good kind! And from there, things do get a little more adventurous. Deep cuts like "Jesus Was An Only Child", "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Iceman" and "The Angel" make their apparition, often in interesting, arrangements that tweak things in an Americana direction, though not so much as to denature the originals entirely. On these twenty selections here, the artists find the sweet spot between paying homage and doing their own thing. 

So, here it is for you: Italian artists conering that most quintessentially American of songwriters. Some of these work better than others, but all of them deserve the benefit of doubt and a fair listen. So, here they are, For You...

Peter Fonda's hired hand and The Hired Hand

If you have never seen Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, you should probably rectify that omission. It is a fabulous and unique movie, part of the wave of revisionist Westerns that the New Hollywood brought with them, and yet it's own thing entirely apart. It was directed by one of the spearheads of the New Hollywood, coming freshly off Easy Rider, with a blank cheque for his directing debut, yet it has no signs of hipness or appealing easily to the counter culture the way Rider did. Of course it was a disaster to market, bombed and got taken out of cinemas almost immediately. Its failure alienated Peter Fonda from the Hollywood industry for years. It is a Western unlike any other. 

Part of its otherness, even within the genre, is the screenplay by Scot author Alan Sharp. Here, men aren't stoic and stay cool in every situation, the stereotype of the Westerner. When men die here, they wince and are afraid, they cry for their mother, or for a friend. "Hold me, Arch." Women aren't just there to support the men of action around them, they are their own boss. The decide what they do with their lives, with their bodies. When Peter's sister Jane watched the film, she told him that he'd made a feminist film. She isn't entirely wrong. 

Another part of its otherness is the outstanding work by DP Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Frank Mazzola. Especially in the first half of the movie - more impressionistic and less plot/dialogue-heavy - they create a Western unlike any other. Zsigmond's outstanding filmography - often only using natural light - was amplified by Mazzola's editing, with freeze frames and impositions, to create painterly tableaus that you haven't seen like this. Fonda wanted to make a film about the elements, and it shows, even if he had to be convinced at first to keep the stunning sequencees Mazzola created out of Zsigmond's fantastic images.  

And the last part of the otherness is Bruce Langhorne's music score, for which he played dozens of instruments, including unexpected ones like Sitar or flute. A true one man band. A review described his music as "both earthy and ethereal", which is right on the money. The earthy part are the choice of instruments, inspired by what instruments really were played at the time. The ethereal part is the music itself, which is extrememy beautiful, but also ghostly and otherworldly at times, perfectly supporting the slightly off-kilter atmosphere of The Hired Hand, especially in genre terms. 

It's maybe fitting that Bruce Langhorne himself is somewhat of a hired hand - a studio musician who would lend his acoustic fingerpicking skills to many a folk artist from the 1960s, most prominently Bob Dylan. It is by established by the man himself that the title character of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is Langhorne himself. The Bobster himself said "'Mr. Tambourine Man,' I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne. Bruce was playing guitar with me on a bunch of the early records. On one session, (producer)Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind. He was one of those characters...he was like that. I don't know if I've ever told him that."  Like the inscrutable title character of Dylan's tale, Langhorne jingle-jangled, and played, and continued playing, never drawing much attention to himself. A true hired hand. He never made a solo record until 2011, an album that never came out on a label. It was called Mr. Tambourine Man and featured Langhorne and his big-ass tambourine the size of a wagon wheel. 

The Hired Hand, the movie is a total mood piece, and so is The Hired Hand, the music score. In keeping with that I worked the score into a single long piece, a sort of mixtape that keeps all the magical parts of Langhorne's score, mostly in chronological order, and eliminates a couple of minutes of more incidental music.The original score wasn't very long to begin with, around 25 minutes, and you'll get a little more than 17 minutes of that here. Just the best for the readers of One Buck Records, same as it ever was. 

                                  Now that is a grown man's tambourine right there...

Let Langhorne whisk you away for a magical quarter of an hour, then go and find out how you can see The Hired Hand. You will regret neither. 

Let me give you some flowers...blue roses, maybe...

You probably have to be both Europe-based and have a specific affinity for Americana and all kinds of roots and country rock to know the label Blue Rose. They're a German specialist label for distributing  exactly this kind of music, which - as you might have noticed - is exactly up the One Buck Guy's alley. So the idea of doing a little Blue Rose album sampler - albeit from yesteryear - came up quickly in thinking of fun things to post on this blog, especially because they feature artists that aren't universally known. It's sort of like an All Pearls No Swine, exclusively featuring roots-based artists from around the turn of the Millenium. Some of these were getting "next big thing" hype, some were probably always bound to being loved by hundreds rather than thousands. What they have in common, besides the chosen area of musical interest, is that there is some very fine music gathered here for your listening pleasure. 

The biggest name on here is most likely Ian Matthews, whose album A Tiniest Wham got distributed by Blue Rose, of  which "The Power And The Glory" is featured. The other big name is Alejandro Escovedo, whose masterpiece A Man Under The Influence got distributed in central Europe by Blue Rose."Rhapsody"showcases the sustained excellence of that album. And the Continental Drifters, Blue Rose's first signing and release, were of course a sort of Americana supergroup, including The Bangles' Vicki Peterson, the dB's Peter Holsapple, the Dream Syndicate's Mark Walton and Susan Cowsill from, uh, the Cowsills.  

                      It ain't no cheesecake, but that Trish Murphy is a purdy girl for sure...

Blue Rose Bouquet also shows the flexibility of the genre, which is mainly defined by how little defined it is. The Volebeats with "Radio Flyer" are essentially twangy power poppers, recalling Big Star. The Waco Brothers come from the rock, even punk-ish, side of the equation. Fred Eaglesmith's "Time To Get A Gun" is punk folk country, whereas Mount Pilot with "Last Respects" are pure bluegrass. The lovely Trish Murphy is coming from the pop side of the Americana spectrum. Blue Rose Bouquet also shows that the genre isn't defined by where it's from. The Volebeats hail from the Motor City, usually known for other music than country rock, whereas Reto Burrel is an Americana specialist from that well-known hotbed of American roots music: Switzerland! The Schramms continue the underknown and underrated tradition of country rock bands coming from New Jersey, in this case Hoboken. Ans Jim Roll, here with the ultra-catchy "1955" is from Chicago's suburbia. 

Jupiter Coyote is a Southern Rock band out of Brevard, North Carolina. Arthur Dodge is a grumpy taxi cab driver from the lovely town of Lawrence, Kansas (Go Jayhawks!) by day, country rocker leading his band The Horsefeathers by night (or vice versa). "A Delightful Disease" is as bad ass as country rock can be. Andy Van Dyke has the honor of being featured twice, first leading his band Rainravens - stalwarts of 90s alt country - through "Travellin' Heavy", then going solo acoustic with the fantastic "Taking You With Me". And there's more to discover within this lovely bouquet of hand-picked roots music for the discerning Americana fan. 

And now, just follow the advice of Hensley Sturgis in the lead-off track: Just enjoy the ride...

Gene Clark's Rough And Rocky Road Towards Cosmic American Music

The story of Gene Clark's ill-fated 1972 album, the follow-up to his classic White Light, is a complicated one. I'll try (and fail) to be brief: After the critical success but lacking sales of White Light A&M gave another shot to Clark, footing the bill for sessions all across the summer of 1972, with cracks like Spooner Oldham and old alumni like Michael Clarke supporting Clark on his new album, which traded the rather spry acoustics of White Light for a more of a full country rock sound. Disaster struck when - during Clark's absence - engineer and producer Chris Hinshaw invited acquaintance and former clients Sly & The Family Stone into the studio. Stone and his entourage ordered food for hundreds of dollars from nearby restaurants, all on the bill of an unsuspecting Clark. With the budget spiralling out of control and Clark only having eight finished tracks in the can - half of them covers or remakes - A & M angrily cancelled the rest of the sessions, the album and for all intents and purposes, their association with Clark. 

Having stayed with him throughout the fantastic and not-so-fantastic expeditions of Dillard & Clark and the critically successful but non-selling White Light, the production problems here were the final straw, as well as a convenient excuse to get rid of Clark. Faced with an album (or rather, two thirds of an album) of country rock without a seeming hit single and an artist who would not go out on the road to promote the album, they decided to cut their losses. Clark's old handler in the Byrds, Jim Dickson, remixed the finished tracks and convinced A&M to license the tracks - together with leftovers of a never released 1970 single including all original Byrds and a track cut with The Flying Burrito Brothers - for a release in Holland only, then Europe's capital of country rock fandom and home of the busiest bootleggers for such fare. The album was called Roadmaster after one of its (cover) songs, and released with cheesy, ill-fitting art work: a green silhouette of a leather-clad biker Clark (from the first Dillard & Clark album) over some bright yellow with motorcycle pictures. The release was done in order to recover some of A&M's investment and beat the bootleggers, but looked like a bootleg itself. 

Interesting, you say (hopefully), but what about the music itself? 

That story is equally complicated, mainly due to Jim Dickson's decision to remix the album. In John Einarson's Gene Clark biography he claims that, not having access to Chris Hinshaw's original mixes, Dickson could only make what is called a ruler mix, putting all settings at about equal. But that theory never seemed convincing, considering Dickson wasn't some sort of rank amateur who didn't know any better ("Gee Whiz, that sure is a lot of knobs and twiddly things - I'd better put them all to the middle. Yessir!"). It sounds even less likely if you listen to the Hinshaw mixes and consider what has changed. Dickinson wilfully buried a ton of instruments and performances in his mix and basically flattened out the sound of the songs for what became Roadmaster. Dickson had a soft spot for Michael Clarke as a person, but not for his drumming here. On Roadmaster's "Full Circle Song" the drums are so deeply buried in the mix as to barely be audible, so at first it's almost distracting to hear the original drum track in the Hinshaw mix. But the drums seem to generally be mixed down, perhaps also due to some, erm, performance issues from Clarke. In the case of "In A Misty Morning", for example, there seem to be some dropped beats in the drumming (though they could be tape imperfections, as some problems elsewhere, that I tried to eliminate as best I can with my limited audio editing skills, sound like record skips). You know who also has vanished in the mix? Clark's old Byrds colleague Roger McGuinn, not even listed on studio logs, he probably also added some guitar and lent his voice for background vocals. On "Rough And Rocky" and "She Don't Care About Time" you can clearly make him out in the background in the Hinshaw mixes. 

The biggest loss in the Roadmaster mix, though, is the disappearance of Clarence White's spacey guitar lines. White's work here is marvelous and immediately identifiable. Those notes could have only come from White's string-bender, the innovation he and Gene Parsons were responsible for. In the Hinshaw mix, White's twangy guitar stands out, whereas in Dickinson's Roadmaster mix you can hardly tell he's there. And this is where the reasoning of Dickinson's remix becomes obvious. In the Hinshaw mixes, Clark's songs sound a lot trippier, with some of them having an almost psychedelic 'swirling' sound to them, notably "In A Misty Morning", "I Remember The Railroad" and "Shooting Star". Clark is already hinting at the adventurous nature and the cosmic american music of No Other on this album. So when Dickinson got his hands on the tapes he minimized the extravagant backing vocals and trippy guitar lines. The Hinshaw mixes sure sound more adventurous, and that seems to be what Dickson wanted to get rid of. He made the recordings sound more traditional - and duller. In comparison, it turns out that the 1972 recordings in their original version really were the missing link between the austere acoustic folk-country of White Light and the heavily enriched, ornamental sound of No Other. 

So, is there an album coming you ask, along with all of this info? 

Most assuredly, there is! 

The first idea for Shooting Star was that it should be an album as imagined in 1972, meaning the three tracks of recycled material are gone. (They will show up in appropriate alternate albums). Also, when The Lost Studio Sessions was published in 2017, it unearthed two other songs from the sessions: The traditional "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" was thought lost after Clark's vocals were erased to give the instrumental track to Terry Melcher (!) to sing over. The discovery of the track was most welcome, as it's possibly Clark's finest vocal performance from the period. The second track, however, didn't beg for inclusion. Clark's cover of "Bars Have Made A Prisoner Out Of Me" sees him working the country humor vein, something he was notoriously bad at (see: Dillard & Clark's country vaudeville "Corner Car", that absolute rarity: a truly bad Clark song). So, that one definitely wouldn't find its way on the new album I decided to retitle, firstly because it seems more appropriate to name it after one of Clark's own tracks and secondly, because the new title tracks seems to be woefully underappreciated. But, we'll get to that... [He says vaguely threateningly, as this post is about to enters its sixth paragraph]

I then tried to sequence the album, which admittedly is a little high on slow numbers , to spread out the mid-tempo numbers. This bumped the clear choice for a good album opener, "Full Circle Song", to second place, replaced by "In A Misty Morning", with its first introduction to the epic, semi-psychedelic sound the Hinshaw mix permits. At six minutes long, it would have seemed risky to open with that, but it really lets the project's proggy country rock sound fly (or rather swirl), setting up what to expect from this album.  After the aforementioned "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" we get to would have been the closer of the a-side, "Rough and Rocky". It's the track I reworked the most. In the original Roadmaster version it's slow and has a mournful violin hanging over it, turning it into a dirge on an album that arguably has too many of them. The original Hinshaw mix with more of a rock arrangement is much more lively, yet the forlorn piano-led version of the song unearthed on The Lost Studio Sessions is also fantastic. So, unable to choose between them I voted for - both, putting them together as a sort of Part I and II. Tell me whether you think this works or not, it does for me. 

Side B would then start with an uptempo number, due to no other contenders, it had to be "Roadmaster", slightly rowdier in sound and with much clearer instruments including some horns you've never heard before in Dickson's mix, followed by the mini-classic "I Remember The Railroad" and his slow, cosmic country remake of "She Don't Care About Time", longer and more elaborate-sounding than the released Roadmaster version. Clark's take on the old country weeper "I Really Don't Want To Know", arguably the album's weakest song, had to be placed somewhere, so here it is, followed by the new title song as the album closer. 

"Shooting Star" is a weirdly underrated song in Clark's songbook, no one seems to have it as a favorite or even a song worth mentioning. Which, I feel, is a great injustice. It follows a tradition on Clark albums that also seems to be weirdly ignored. Like Jackson Browne, whose tendency to put his philosophical stances in the last songs of his albums is always remarked on, the same tends to be true for Clark, starting with White Light. "1975", "Shooting Star", "Lady Of The North" and "Silent Crusade" are a fantastic quartet of Clark at his most philosophical. "Shooting Star" also, again, clearly presages the sound of No Other, floating off into the sky on a string of wondrous notes. 

Wow, if you've made it all the way down here, you probably now know more than you ever wanted to about Roadmaster, about Shooting Star, and about what I try to do when constructing alternate albums. So, now the only thing left to do is - ahem, sorry Tom Johnston - let the music play...

Here Come The Country Dreamers...

Woof, welcome to the longest post on this here blog. Perhaps inspired by the fabulous work on Faded Love, a country-rock box set over on C90 Lounge, I decided to give the whole liner notes thing a try, not realizing how many words this will eventually add up to. But hey, you wanna do things right, you're gonna do things right, right?! 

So, Country Dreamers. A collection of country songs by artists who normally aren't associated with country music. Putting this together was long on my mind and here's the result. These tracks are, in many ways, one-offs, that wouldn't get their due in the miscellanous places they are scattered. But hopefully, in this collection, they do. And now, without futher ado, the songs:

Paul McCartney & Wings - "Country Dreamer"

The track that gave me the idea and title for this compilation. A b-side from the Band On The Run era, it is a total charmer, despite or because of its unassuming nature. It's a true group work: Linda wrote it. lead vocals are split between Paul and Denny. "I want to roll down a hill with you, would you like to do it too?" asks Sir Paul, with childlike innocence. Yes, yes I would. 

Dust - "How Many Horses"

Urban cowboys! Dust was a New York-based power trio, one of many who sprang up in the wake of Cream, and  included future Marky Ramone Marc Bell. Their trade was heavy metal, and they were rumored to be the hardest and fastest band in and around the big apple at the time. Their second and best album Hard Attack, ironically a much 'softer' attack than its self-titled predecessor expanded their scope and sound and included a couple of country sojourns, of which "How Many Horses" is featured here. Great slide guitar work. 

                                                 Urban cowboy country dreamers (?!)

Aerosmith - "Once Is Enough" 

Another harder rocking group trying their hand on country, no doubt urged on by secret country fan Steven Tyler. They of course did it a couple of years later to huge success with "Crazy" and "Crying", but this track from a rare-ish (because only issued in Japan) EP in 1988 did it first. The original has a second section that replays the song in Aerosmith's typical boogie rock style, so I only kept the true 'country version' of the song. 

Counting Crows - "Amie"

Before issuing their covers album Underwater Sunshine, Counting Crows were known as a rootsy band, but no one considered them particularly interested in country music, or classic country rock. It was thus slightly surprising to see them cover two stone-cold country classics, of which Pure Prairie League's immortal "Amie" is featured here. 

The Beach Boys - "Cottonfields"

The Boys were unhappy with Brian's production on the song on Wild Honey, with lead vocalist Al Jardine especially unhappy about what he felt was an unfinished recording, so they recut a new version a year later, augmented by steel guitar from the legendary Red Rhodes. Jardine was right, as while this more countryfied version of the traditional (their last Capitol single) stiffed in the U.S., it was their biggest hit internationally in years, hitting number one in Australia, Norway and Sweden and barely missing the top in several other countries. 

                                   Well, at least one of them is wearing a cowboy hat...

Jon Bon Jovi - "Blood Money"

Mr. Bon Jovi issued a whole album full of songs about cowboys (Blaze of Glory, "inspired" by the movie Young Guns II, with the title song becoming a number one hit), but with one exception none of the songs sounded country in any way. That exception is "Blood Money", also the only song that is decidedly about Billy The Kid and Pat Garrett, whereas the other songs trade in more general and stereotypical outlaw and Western imagery. A lovely country ballad, it wasn't what anyone expected from Bon Jovi at the time, which might explain the truly odd editing job, with the song fading out in the middle of the (first!) chorus. I suspect the song was much longer than the mere two-and-a-half-minute glimpse we get here, but was somewhat brutally hobbled because it wasn't what the demographic was looking for. Even at half a song, it's a great half of a song!

Van Morrison - "I Wanna Roo You (Scottish Derivative)"

A country waltz, as in a true waltz (the wife and I taught a couple how to waltz for their wedding to this). Morrison, like Counting Crows, was always a rootsy artist, but until his pure country & western genre exercise Pay The Devil in 2006 hadn't recorded a full-fledged country album. Pay The Devil is pure pastiche, but the one truly great roots-and-almost-country album in his discography is Tupelo Honey. Pedal steel runs through the majority of the tracks, until recently I hadn't realized that even the r'n'b-inspired "Wild Night" has some of it. The album's themes and imagery are rural, reflecting Van's country retreat to Woodstock with wife Janet Planet and their infant son. Van's country dream wouldn't last, but for one fantastic album, it was glorious. 

Candi Staton - "Jolene"

Coming at the tail end of her tenure at Fame, where the queen of Southern soul did her best work, this Dolly Parton cover was left in the can and thus without the customary orchestration, making the track better by substraction. Riding an atmospheric, almost eerie loping rhythm, the relatively bare bones production underscores Staton's pleas not to take her man perfectly. 

Metallica - "Mama Said"

Heavy metal dudes going country, a theme for this compilation, this comes from the uneasy post-'black album' period where Metallica were not sure how to follow up their bestseller, then tried a bit of everything for the follow up Load, including this country ballad, which is one of the better results of their experimentation. 

Blackfoot - "Rainbow"

And yet another group of hard rockers going country, though in fairness by this time Blackfoot were only Ricky Medlocke and whatever backing musicians he had, though interestingly the guitar player on this is the recently featured late, great Neal Casal. Medlocke's road tale is augmented by some tasty pedal steel. He also covered "Tupelo Honey" on the same album, so maybe Morrison's rootsy classic was on his mind when he cut this. 

The Hollies - "Boulder To Birmingham"

Some words on the Hollies and Americana have been said very recently on this blog, though by the time they cut this cover of Emmylou Harris' harrowing eulogy for fallen partner Gram Parsons, Mikael Rickfors was long gone and Allen Clarke back in the fold. The instrumentation isn't particularly country, and they don't come anywhere near Harris' intensity, but the lovely harmonies make this a kind of country gospel.

Marc Cohn with Aimee Mann - "No Matter What"

Marc Cohn's cover album Listening Booth: 1970 was a very hit-and-miss affair, with more misses than hits on what came off as a bit of well-meaning karoke. But he didn't miss on this cover of Badfinger, turning it into a relaxed country shuffle and getting Aimee Mann for extremely overqualified support work. 

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "City Of Refuge" (acoustic version)

The original version on Tender Prey is a sort of deranged psychobilly affair, but this acoustic version, released on an obscure bonus single, shows it to be a country ballad at heart, with the Bad Seeds providing unusually subtle back-up here with their decidedly 1960s-sounding choir vocals. In this state, you can easily mistake this for an old Marty Robbins number. Or maybe not, but you catch my drift. 

England Dan & John Ford Coley - "Showboat Gambler"

I hesitated to include this, because this dastardly duo was much closer to country than the other artists here, but their main trade was in a folksy soft rock idiom, a little bit later in the decade with (of course!) some disco influences. "Showboat Gambler" is one of the lesser known numbers, though popular enough to be included in their Very Best Of collection. 

Mick Ronson - "Woman"

And we ride into the sunset with a second Pure Prairie League cover, by the man who helped Craig Fuller and George Ed Powell to put the classic Bustin' Out together, after the first PPL line-up imploded. Here, Ronson covers a song the band themselves covered on their debut album, and it's interesting to hear Ronson's take on it, Brit accent and all. 

And now, really without further ado, the album. Enjoy.