Restless Heart

I've been watching a Netflix documentary about Laurel Canyon and rock music of the nineteen sixties ~ please check it out ~ it's awesome.

All genres of music have lapped over the edges of others. What the documentary, Echo In The Canyon, labels "folk rock" I would call country rock. The Byrds would have been country had they come on the scene twenty years later. The Eagles aren't folk rock ~ they're country rock.

I'm a sucker for the many manifestations of country; Honky Tonk, Neo-Traditional, the Bakersfield Sound, Western Swing, Americana, some forms of Bluegrass. But I began life as a rock 'n roll child and remnants of a past life linger. While I love and appreciate what can be accomplished with three simple chords, I've always been drawn to more complex melodies and harmonics. Restless Heart wasn't exactly country rock, but they were close. The first track I ever heard from the group was this one, and it sucked me in:



I love "Wheels". There is no live performance video to be found, but this is country rock at its finest:


 

More:







Larry Stewart left the band in 1992, and Restless Heart essentially ended. Larry had one number one hit:



Bands don't last much more than a decade unless you're the Rolling Stones. But a decade is a long-ass time. A decade can be a seminal pillar in one's life.

I thank Larry Stewart and the band for one hell of a seminal pillar.

Clint Black

For a variety of reasons, barroom songs are the best songs. I grew up around bars, or what one might now call "tap rooms", with a juke box and a local band playing on weekend nights. The whiff of stale tobacco mixed with gin and bourbon smells like home. There's nothing like the morning after, when tables need to be cleared, to soak in that cloud of obliterated good times.

As a kid I only knew about the music and that people seemed to be having tons of fun. I could perch right outside the entrance of my uncle's bar, and later my dad's bar and take in the abandon displayed before me and the thumping of an electric bass and the crash of drums; even though I couldn't quite discern which song the band was playing. I didn't even think to make judgments about the masses inside ~ the sad men bumped up against the bar nursing a tall frosted glass or the wiry arms draped around hairspray-stiffened fake blondes in red booths in dark corners. Once a quarter got dropped into the juke box slot, men who had, after three whiskey sours, developed a certainty of their dancing prowess would coax the ladies into their arms and onto the dance floor, and they would two-step to Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" or Buck Owens' "Foolin' Around".

It was all exciting to me because it was different; foreign.

For reasons that all pointed back to my dad, I renounced bars for a couple of decades thereafter. The fun is fleeting; the repercussions are piercing daggers that stab for a lifetime. But sometime around 1987, I felt a craving to re-immerse myself in the fun times ~ experience the abandon as a fully-grown woman. There was a renowned country bar in my town called The Dakota Lounge that brought in all the best regional bands on weekends and had a scrolling neon sign inside that flashed all the upcoming acts. The club was dark, as all bars should be. Faux cowboys strolled in around eight o'clock, black hats perched atop their sideburned coiffes; shiny pointed boots inadvertently pinging against bar stools. The gals would saunter in as a clutch around nine; red kerchiefs circling their slender necks, a powder puff of Jovan Musk wafting off their breasts. The cowboys began to circle, scoping out the prettiest, and then the juke box would kick in as weary bar maids took drink orders.

Decades had passed since Ray Price had boomed out of a Wurlitzer's speakers, but the tableau was just the same. It requires a special vibe to commence the ritual; mystic, yet immediately agreed upon. The song is a toasty embrace with a pulsing heartbeat.

This was that song:



Had Clint Black never recorded another song, "A Better Man" would still be celebrated as the ultimate country hook-up song of the nineteen eighties.

But he did record more:



What Clint did was, he didn't forget country music:



And Clint was no flash in the pan. This track, from 1997, is as good as it can be:



Thanks to Saving Country Music, I found this wholly original video:





Ken Burns may have brushed Clint Black aside, but I won't.

Clay Walker

I had a friend and co-worker, Lynnette, who was in love with Clay Walker. I wasn't in love with him (shoot, I didn't even know him!) but I heard a song on my car radio in 1993 as I was pulling into a parking spot at West Acres Mall in Fargo (yea, memory is inexplicable) and I thought I knew the singer, but I actually didn't. (Remember the days when you'd hear a new song on the radio and you'd try to pinpoint the artist, and then it turned out it was someone brand-new? Clay Walker was brand-new.)

I stopped before I turned off the ignition and listened:



There was an exhilaration in his voice that was mesmerizing. I can understand why Lynnette loved him.

Clay's recordings were eternally optimistic and that was refreshing.







This one is a bit different, and I like it almost as much as I like "What's It To You":



Shall we date ourselves?



Clay Walker is still going strong, as evidenced by the news on his site.

I like that we don't just go away; that we keep going. That latest twenty-year-old can't erase us. I was older than Clay when I first him on my car radio and I'm still here.

I'm not impressionistic like Clay Walker was in his heyday, but I like to be reminded that brightness still exists.

I wonder if Clay is still that idealist.

I hope so.

Travis Tritt

The period from the late eighties to early nineties was so rife with exciting new music that I almost took it for granted. Like a spoiled child, I expected more and more. I'd heard "Country Club" on my local FM station ~ it had a good beat; you could two-step to it; but it didn't strike me the way a spanking-new George Strait single did. "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" was actually a better track than I gave it credit for at the time.

But it wasn't until 1991, when a new show on NBC called "Hot Country Nights" appeared out of nowhere as a summer replacement that I really sat up (on my couch) and took notice of Travis Tritt. He sat on a stool in center-stage with just his acoustic guitar, and this is the song he performed:



For a voice with so much soul, his performance was heartbreaking in its simplicity. Sometimes it's not the bells and whistles that grab you ~ sometimes it's the quiet. This sure wasn't "Country Club".

Then he did a complete turnabout and released this song, which is sort of the nineties' kiss-off answer to "Take This Job (And Shove It):



Soon Travis teamed up with Marty Stuart to record a duet that embodied the time-honored tradition of the bass-thumping country shuffle. And I loved it:



I will readily admit that my favorite Travis Tritt recording is a remake of an Elvis song that was awash in insipid artificiality, like most Elvis songs. THIS version, however, is extraordinary:



Like most artists of the period, Travis parted ways with his label, but never fear ~ he's still out there and making music. I learned, in fact, that he just did a concert with my latest obsession, Tracy Lawrence. I discovered this via Travis's website, which is an actual site and not a tiny-fonted slap-together page like poor Ricky Van Shelton's.

Travis Tritt is a musical chameleon. I can't pigeon-hole him, and I bet he likes not being tucked inside a neat package.

The last track that caught my ear, when I still listened to terrestrial radio, was one that sums up most of our philosophies as we glide through this big blue ball of ether:



And Ken Burns be damned ~ Travis Tritt represents everything about the nineties that Ken forgot.

Ricky Van Shelton

I think it was my older sister who first introduced me to Ricky Van Shelton. Carole was not necessarily a music aficionado; she just liked what she liked. She'd breeze in from Texas once a year and lay down the gauntlet of songs we all needed to hear. As an example, she was an early fan girl of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia", and I thought, well, okay...

Like all music people tell me I need to like, I was naturally resistant to Ricky Van Shelton. I think he had a cover song on the charts at the time, and I was inherently scornful of artists who earned their chops by copying someone else. Grudgingly, however, I went out and purchased Van Shelton's debut CD, "Wild-Eyed Dream". I was buying CD's like they were candy gumballs anyway, so what was one more pointless purchase? Turned out the album had some original tracks that beat the covers all to hell. A hot artist, I'm assuming (maybe naively) should have his pick of songs; so why Ricky recorded so many cover songs perplexes me. Maybe he simply wanted to memorialize the classics. Regardless, I preferred the songs I'd never before heard, like this one (of course the official video is unavailable ~ because we need to scrub the late eighties/early nineties from everyone's consciousness):





 Much like this one:




Those two tracks alone, never mind all the covers, made the album an A plus for me.

There's myriad reasons why shiny careers fade ~ the label loses confidence; tastes change. Not everyone can be a George Strait, with choice songwriters breaking down their door. Ricky Van Shelton's career suffered from either the lack of good original song choices or his own proclivities. I would have loved to see Ricky perform in a bar setting ~ his natural milieu was stacked speakers, a thumping bass, and a telecaster.

That aside, he recorded a great rendition of "Statue Of A Fool", whose original recording by Jack Greene suffered from the lack of a great singer:




My sister was right. I'll cop to it.

After all these years, he deserves more than a faint memory. Number one, he needs a website that isn't lame ~ Ricky, are you listening? I would link to it, but I don't want anyone to be embarrassed. Wix dot com is essentially free ~ even my band has a site.

Granted, Ricky retired in 2006, which is almost unheard of in the music business. Retire? The brittle-boned Rolling Stones are still touring, for God's sake! According to his pitiful website, he's a painter and a collector (still need a site to sell your paintings, though.) Maybe the good songs weren't forthcoming; maybe he just wanted to enjoy life off the road. More power to him.

Nevertheless, Ricky Van Shelton is worth remembering.

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

I was searching for Halloween pictures to bring to work for one of my department's holiday initiatives. Okay, it was sort of my initiative, but nevertheless, it was a good idea and an attempt to lighten the workplace mood a tiny bit. I've since learned that some people hate fun, but naysayers are everywhere. I'm choosing to ignore those people.

The thing some folks don't get about work is that every job isn't soul-quenching. For most of us a job is simply a means to an end ~ the end being a way to pay our monthly bills. We're not uplifted by our daily tasks, nor do we expectantly await never-delivered kudos. Work is essentially drudgery, but we deplete the large measure of our essence at work, so if we want to alleviate some of the slog by having a bit of fun, is that too much to ask?

It wasn't always this way. I used to work in an environment in which Halloween was almost a national holiday. Employees looked forward to the day. It started innocently enough, with a company announcement that folks could dress up. Before long, props got incorporated; and finally actual group performances became the expected norm. A cheap gold-plated trophy was the prize, and we worked damn hard to win it. It is correct to assume that no actual work got done on that particular day ~ in addition to performing for the roaming band of judges, we traversed the office to ogle other units' costumes and affirm our own superiority. Generally, too, there was a pot luck lunch involved, and mass quantities of fun-size candy bars.

I recall driving to work in the dark on Halloween morning hoping to hell I wouldn't get pulled over for some infraction and having to explain why I was dressed as a freak. I remember fluorescent work bathrooms and makeup being artfully applied by a willing accomplice. I remember the local second-hand store's costume basement and rifling through shelves to find just the right costume accessories. It was a quest ~ a holy mission. After all, that peeling-chrome trophy was within our grasp! Halloween was better than Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter, rolled into one big ball of excitement.

As a naturally shy person, I'd always indulged my creative impulses with solitary pursuits ~ a bit of writing, photography, crafts. I spent my life itching for the next new thing that would allow me to create...anything. It's not that shy people don't crave attention as much as the next-door extrovert; it's just that we're mortified by the thought of being ridiculed. We're convinced we'd die if that ever happened. Creativity expressed behind my own four walls, therefore, was safe; though obviously not celebrated by the world at large.

In my first year of employment at the apple company (no, not "Apple"), a fellow cube-mate who I found loud and obnoxious approached me about doing a group Halloween ensemble. I don't know why I said yes ~ that wasn't like me. I don't even know why she asked me. Maybe everyone else had turned her down. Once committed, though, I wholly dedicated myself to playing my part. And guess what? I liked it.

 (I'm Ace Frehley ~ third from left ~ I had no idea at the time who Ace Frehley was.)

By the following year I was a supervisor; thus I was obliged to join the other supes in their dress-up concept. We were still doing nothing besides showing up in our thrift store wigs and castoffs. 

(I'm the faux blonde on the right.)

By the time 1997 rolled around, I was in charge, at least of my own division. And by then dressing up just wasn't going to cut it. In order to grab that trophy, one had to put on a big show. I canvassed my staff and someone said, "Hee Haw!", so that's what we did. We became hillbillies. We even had our own Minnie Pearl and an old man puffing a corncob pipe. Someone brought in an iron and ironing board. I was missing a tooth and I had a cap that spelled out, "CAP" and one of my shoes read, "left".

(Apparently I also carried a jug of apple cider.)

Things settled down a bit in '98. I don't remember if we were too busy to bother with Halloween much, or had run out of ideas. My staff expected a show, though, and I didn't want to let them down. My treasured friend Laurel and I became Sonny and Cher. We had no performance planned, but daily announcements turned into a Bob Dylan-ish a capella rendition of "I Got You Babe".

My last Halloween at the apple company became the ultimate blowout. I'd never before seen the movie "Grease" (truly), but somehow I found it that year and became enamored. That was it ~ we would turn our little corner of apple world into Rydell High School. Because I had short hair, I would be Danny Zuko. Lovely Laurel was thence Sandy. An employee's daughter had once done a Grease dance routine with her cheer squad, so she came into the office to teach Laurel and me and a phenomenal group of staff members the dance moves. We practiced in my office behind closed doors, accompanied by gales of laughter and quizzical glances from people passing by. We decorated our corner of the building as a county fair, and when the judges made their way into our area, we shocked the hell out of them with a spectacular performance of "We Go Together".

Needless to say, there was no contest that year. We walked away with that tarnished trophy.

Ahh, Halloweens past, when we actually knew how to have fun.

I don't regret my late-in-life awakening to making an utter fool of myself. I'm rather proud of it.

Tracy Lawrence

I'm beginning to get a bit pissed off about nineties country artists being ignored. It may have begun with Ken Burns' "Country Music" series, which completely overlooked the most iconic artists of a decade when country music was at its best (see: George Strait). For me, country was represented by artists like Tracy Lawrence, Mark Chesnutt, Clint Black, Diamond Rio, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Collin Raye, Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, Clay Walker, Restless Heart, Earl Thomas Conley, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Foster and Lloyd, Ricky Van Shelton, Trisha Yearwood, et al.

The nineties was when country and our hearts soared. Even the sad songs made one at least feel alive. I don't know what country's like now; and frankly, from everything I've read, I don't care to know. Country for me was laid to rest somewhere around 1999. I'm told, though, that it's a pallid imitation of the genre formerly known as country.

So for the uninitiated, I'm bringing the nineties back. Mark Chesnutt warranted his own singular post, but let's not overlook the others. In posts to come, I will introduce novices to actual country music and remind those of us in the know of artists who may have slipped our minds.

I'm a big booster of Tracy Lawrence, as described here. 

In case you've forgotten or never knew, watch these:










Yep, I'm bringing nineties country back. Stay tuned.