Farm Report: the Classic Edition

By Crispin Sartwell

11 AM and it's already been quite a day here at Whoa-o-rama Farms. We woke before dawn to an unforecast blizzard. The young 'uns were thrilled, and we foregathered around the tube to confirm school closings. But what we saw instead was Tim Russert evaluating the results of the Iowa caucuses. Russert was talking about Alan Keyes, in with14%.

"Keyes! Shit! I hate that bitch!" yelled 9-year-old Vincie. That analysis seemed somehow sharper and more provocative than Russert's. That kid is my kind of television pundit, but Wanda needs to stop brainwashing him with her pink poltitics.

Actually, I like Keyes, because as I've testified before, I am a Christian farmer. For me, his frank homophobia is refreshing.

So anyway, now we're all trapped here at the end of a mile-long driveway complete with big hills. And I'm like wondering what to do and all and it hits me! It's been months since the last FR. But we got us a leetle problem. No one has sent me any CDs lately. Maybe it's just a production lull after the burst of Christmas releases, or maybe it's something more nefarious, something deeper, something more like a mind-numbing, hyperclimactic episode of the X-Files.

Maybe it's a CONSPIRACY. Maybe the record company publicity departments have tired of me and my incisive evaluations of their disks. The straw that broke the pr depts' back might have been when I called Sammy Kershaw a "flaccid moron,"or when I said that Reba McEntire deserved to be "spit-roasted by Satan." But anyway, now I got no disks to write about.

Then it struck me, the way lightning strikes a golfer, electrocuting him with the Truth. I could review a whole bunch of classics no one remembers anymore! I could dig out boxes of LPs from the tractor shed and play semi-obscure country music all day! It would be a blast and a public service. It'd be like the early 80s, when I was reviewing these same albums for those irritating fucks Smith and Strausbaugh at the *Baltimore City Paper.*

But wait. What would be Wanda's response? What price the Kendalls? If I played classic semi-obscure country music all day as Wanda tried to deal with stir-crazy boys who fancy themselves Cartmen, she would end up biting my balls off.

But then I reached down into my own stock of homophobia and remembered that I was a man, a MAN, baby. Surely I could listen to what I wanted in my own tractor shed. I had spent too many years placating this chick. I was whipped, henpecked, shrewed out of my own biological status as the alpha muthafucka. This simply had to end, and it would end right here, right now. Today, I would gesticulate at Wanda with my whip hand, dismissing her agenda as mere girlish hysteria. Today I would feel the testosterone THUMPING in my veins. Finally I would subdue the irritating little bint to my masterful will.

So I put on John Conlee's *Greatest Hits* (MCA LP, 1983; don't bother with WEA's *Best of JC,* which does not have the right songs; MCA had an excellent *20 Greatest Hits* CD out in the early nineties, but it's out of print). This little dude was once the biggest voice in country, and had a slew of classic hits to his credit before his star faded in the late eighties. I was wallowing in "Rose Colored Glasses," one satisfied heterosexual. And then we got to the last song, "I Don't Remember Lovin' You":

I don't remember lovin you

And I don't recall the things you say you put me through

You say I quit my job and then I drank myself insane

You say that I ran down the highway screaming out your name

Now that's not the kind of thing that I would do.

I don't remember loving you. . .

You might talk to my doctor

He comes by each day at two.

Everyone I meet here in this place is very strange

If you hand me my crayons I'll be glad to take your name

In case I run into the guy you knew

But I don't remember loving you.

And then a surreal thing happened. Wanda said, "that ROCKS." She thought it was funny and she dug the stripped-down 1981 production and she started getting on this thing about how country was so much better way back when and pretty soon *she* was looking through my LPs and asking me to put this or that on the table and as you can imagine I was so like damaged in my self-esteem as a man and I didn't know what to do.

So I retreated to my shed with a copy of the farmer's friend: Epictetus's Enchiridion. I was seeking that solace only ancient stoicism can provide. I'm still pussy-whipped, I told myself, but maybe it'll be a little more pleasant to the strains of "Teach Me to Cheat," one of the best cuts on one of the best albums ever made, the Kendalls' *Lettin You in on a Feelin* (Mercury LP, 1981; or maybe their best is *Heaven's Just a Sin Away,* Ovation 1976; all their early albums were cut out, and can still be found at vinyl stores cheap; but any of the several greatest hits packages on CD are good). I re-emerged from the shed, a eunuch reconciled to my fate.

The Kendalls were a father-and-daughter team who had a few minor hits in the seventies and eighties: maybe their only top-five was an insanely lovely re-make of the Louvin Brothers' "My Baby's Gone." They specialized in cheating songs and the weirdest moments came when the two of them were cheating on or with each other. Why it's enough to give a girl like me an Elektra complex. And they invented whole genres of country, such as the football cheating song ("Pittsburgh Stealers," "Just a Dallas Cowboy (and a New Orleans Saint)," and the cheating gospel song ("Heaven's Just a Sin Away." "You'd Make an Angel Want to Cheat": possibly Keyes would disapprove).

But anyway Jeannie's voice is not mighty, just perfect: nasal as the day is long and capable of definitive interpretations. This may be their best single LP (it contains the unrequited anthem: "If You're Waiting on Me (You're Backing Up)", though I'm happy to own about eight. Someone needs to find these folks and throw money at them.

Y'all remember the Whites? There was a brief window in the mid-eighties when you could almost actually do bluegrass on the country charts: Emmylou and her compadre Ricky Skaggs were the instigation. Anyway, one of the best results of this was the trio of daddy Buck, and daughters Cheryl and Sharon (Skaggs's wife).

Their debut was called *Old Familiar Feeling* (Warner Bros/Curb LP, 1983; the WEA/Elektra/Curb *Greatest Hits* CD is fine) and consisted of simple semi-bluegrass songs that were a joy to hear coming outcher radio. I especially love "You Put the Blue in Me," the kind of simple, traditional song that could never appear on the country charts now. As a matter of fact, after a couple more dips, the Whites never appeared on the radio again and settled down to a permanent gig at the Opry.

Chart banishment has also been the fate of the biggest country star of the eighties: Hank Williams Jr. Hank was never quite taken seriously by us critics and connoisseurs, because he liked to launch novelty songs, because he wasn't as good as his pappy, and because he had an extreme reactionary hillbilly persona, viz. "A Country Boy Can Survive." However, no one has ever been as good as Hank Jr.'s pappy, and the persona made him an Elvis-like legend in the rural south. And Junior wrote and performed some truly great songs.

Hank has been through a number of incarnations in his career, from a childhood Hank Sr. imitator (how weird is *that*?) to the Hillbilly hero "Bocephus" to characters named "Rockin Randall" and "Wham Bam Sam." He was doing Randall when he made his best LP: "Five-0" (Warner Bros./Curb LP 1985; available on CD) which features some of the best country songs of the eighties, in particular "I'm For Love" and "This Ain't Dallas," (the soap opera, not the city) which combined highly hilarious lyrics with rocking good tunes. Now we've got Hank Williams III to deal with, but let's not neglect the middle child.

Asleep at the Wheel never really made the charts, but in the mid-seventies they were one of the greatest country bands that has ever existed. The choice between killer albums such as *Wheelin and Dealin,* *The Wheel,* and *Comin Right at Ya* is more or less arbitrary, but I'm going with *Texas Gold* (Capitol/EMI LP, 1975; the best coverage of this period of their career is the Capitol/EMI disk *Best Of*), I sort of associated Asleep at the Wheel with the headshop-swing band Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen (who'll make a later Classic Edition): they both had amazing players, but were too hippie for Nashville. They brought Wills-style Texas Swing through the dark era until it arrived safely at this year's Grammys.

The Wheel's lineup in the seventies included leader Ray Benson: the deep voice, the amazing guitar; Leroy Preston: who wrote and sang many of their best songs; singer Chris O'Connell: not that far from Jeannie Kendall; great instrumentalists Floyd Domino on piano and Lucky Oceans on pedal steel. On "Texas Gold"; Ray sings "The Letter that Johnny Walker Read"; Leroy sings "Let Me Go Home, Whiskey"; Chris sings "Bump Bounce Boogie," and it's all a stone gas, baby. By the time I finished with this one I felt *good.*

So now it's 2. The kids are happily watching "American Pie." Wanda's listening to Janie Fricke. And I'm sitting here typing this sentence while the blizzard rages, basking in the warmth of Alan Keyes. Tomorrow we'll be stuck, hungry, out of tp, ready to kill each other. But right at this moment life is just damn sweet.