Recommendations of the editorial team
No, this is not about country rebel: inside like The Highwomen, who are currently turning everything on the left in Nashville. This is about outsiders: inside in the most idiosyncratic interpreted country tradition. To have special forlings with a sci-fi-fime and cowpunks in the fairway from The Gun Club, who not only paved the way to alternative country and Americana, but also changed Julia Lorenz ‘image of Country as reactionary men’s music.
Your 10 insider tips:
Peter Grudzien – The Unicorn (1974)
Long before Lil NAS X conquered the mainstream as a gay cowboy, this outlaw sang in downdated, psychedelic, spun country songs about his homosexuality. Peter Grudzien’s debut album The Unicorn from 1974 is a small treasury full of songs that sound when a Nashville appears in drug dreams. The audience punished the outsider artist Grudzien for a long time with lack of interest. When Isabelle Dupuis’ and Tim Geraghty’s documentary “The Unicorn” from 2018 finally made him a little better known, the uncompromising loner had been dead for five years.
X – More Fun in the New World (1983)
X, the band from Los Angeles, who with “I Must not Think Bad Thoughts” one of the most beautiful (post) punk songs of the 80s, oh what: ever!, Have their roots in the country. You just listen to the galloping rhythm of “The New World”! Or the truck stop sound from “Hot House”, to which Billy Ray Cyrus would also be satisfied-in order to be torn out of the ram dinner from the band’s energy later. If you like it: Under the name The Knitters, parts of the band recorded the Country Album Poor Little Critter on the Road (1985).
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy-Rock-IT to Stardom (1984)
If you have managed to land with a song both in various “worst music ever” lists, but also to pack David Bowie, you have to be a visionary-or a nerd. Norman Carl Odam from Texas is both. As a teen, he found western, space travel and Thelonious Monk Super, since the 1960s he played the music that has to be followed logically as a legendary Stardust Cowboy: Lo-Fi-Country and blues with sci-fi sounds, infected with psychedelic and madness of the screamin ‘Jay Hawkins brand. His song “Paralyzed” from 1968, newly recorded for this-his first-album, influenced Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club, Bad Seeds UA), who toured with Odam in the 80s-and also Bowie, who covered him on his 02er album HATHEN (“I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship”).
Yip Yip Coyote – FIFI (1985)
Yip Yip Coyote, one of the sloped appearances in the so-called Cowpunk, were the revenge of the poppers for all stupid country clichés. The British band combined Wave-Pop and Country, rapid drum work and elastic basslines with banjo-tunes and howdy-show-how. The result sounded as if Bow Wow Wow’s Annabella Lwin tried to record the soundtrack for a spaghetti western at night – which is expressly meant as a compliment. Because Yip Yip Coyote not only had great pop melodies, but also humor and the unbeatable knowledge that you can only overcome stereotypes if you take them very, very seriously. In the mid -80s, the band stopped by John Peel and released their only album with FIFI – then the trail of the coyotes lost.
22-Pistepirkko-Big Lupu (1992)
How do you imagine America from Finland? In a country where there is certainly a lot of emptiness and loneliness, but no desert highways, the trio 22-Pistepirkko made its way into the US music tradition from punk rock on bumpy paths.
On their fourth album Big Lupu, the three made their own rhyme on Country, Blues and Americana – fuzig, funny and exhausting.
Country Teasers – Satan is Real Again, Or Feeling Good About Bad Thoughts (1996)
The country is mainly in the name – and in detail. The outsiders from Scotland play broken on their best album (post-) punk with Honky Tonk, Western quotes, WEEN-humor and bitter indignation, clever in the texts. If Ben Wallers with his caustic scratching voice thanks the Lord to be a man (“Thank you God for make an angel”) or in the fantastic “It is my duty” advises a young man in a wheelchair to get up and work, the last thing is likely to be like absurd (and) cruel patriarch and capitalism.
Daniel Antopolsky – Acoustic Outlaw, Vol. 1 (2016)
If you like, Antopolsky is the Rodriguez of the Outlaw Country. In the 70s he traveled to the United States as an emerging musician with Townes van Zandt. After he almost died in his presence of heroin, he retired and disappeared into a farm in Bordeaux. Antopolsky began to record and publish his weird, acoustic Outlaw Country songs a few years ago. With the documentary “The Sheriff of Mars” from 2019, the director Jason Ressler set a monument to him.
Souled American – FE (1988)
The band name was already the mission of the band from Chicago: she wanted to snatch the sovereignty of interpretation about root music. Souled American sounded as desperate on her debut as the violent Femmes without their adolescent drives, so desperate and slacker that they would have fit Seattle almost better than Nashville.
Freakwater – Feels Like the Third Time (1993)
Anyone who introduces the archetypal outlaw as a man who is waiting for the return of his lost love on a veranda can be instructed by freakwater. Catherine Irwin and Janet Beans serve the genre -typical instrument, but sing on their third album Feels Like the Third Time so self -willed and granite -soft about the present, about the needs of single mothers and friends that have expired to alcoholism that they can be reanimated as a shelter for outcasts on their own.
Holly Golightly – Truly She Is None Other (2003)
Anyone who had not noticed how the Medway scene around Billy Childish had pumped fresh blood in blues and garage in the 80s and 90s could only be surprised at the eccentric visitor to the White Stripes on the successful alignment Elephant. Holly Golightly Smith published her eleventh solo album with the truly she is none that was released at that time. The work rests on the pillars of blues, sixties pop and just country, well, cow bells.
Golightly gives the poisonous Nancy Sinatra, who is not in the mood to wait for Lee on the tank, but rather jerk alone over the country roads. And she still jerks.
This article was first published in the ME-06/2020.