Are You Ready For The Country?

I've been a rock and roll fan my entire life. That's undisputed. Other genres haven't really made much of an impact for the majority of my time, despite working for a hip hop radio station for several years. Country Music has always been an interesting thing with me. I vividly remember going through my father's records as a young boy and being struck by one album cover in particular, between endless spins of Sgt. Pepper and Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man":

I was quite intrigued by this cover, the gritty, handwritten liner notes on the back, and the pull-no-punches song titles: "Folsom Prison Blues", "Cocaine Blues", "Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog", and more.

For a long, long time I thought Cash was serving time in prison during the record. This was my only exposure to country music for most of my life. It was all i needed. I had no interest in rhinestone cowboys like Garth Brooks or Brooks and Dunn, or any of that other neuovo-country shit.

Through my rock and roll listening, I've certainly come across country-flavored songs. In fact, my favorite song by my favorite band is Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones. There's also country touches in Wild Horses, Far Away Eyes, You Got The Silver, and many, many more.

Neil Young made several straight-country albums (and wrote the namesake song for this entry).

It wasn't until this year that I got into The Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons, in particular. Gram was the guy to get the Byrds to record the Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album and pretty much single handedly invented country rock. He quit the Byrds on the eve of a South African tour in order to hang out and do drugs with Keith Richards (and given the chance, who would have passed up on that?). He brought out the country in the Stones and had a big hand in the arrangements of Wild Horses and Country Honk, among others.

He also recorded 2 solo albums, the second of which came out after he died. The ability to keep up with Keith Richards' partying isn't something most people are equipped with. Gram Parson's most famous legacy may in fact be what happened to him after he died, when his friend and manager, saying that he was honoring Gram's last wishes, kidnapped his body from LAX and burned it at the Joshua Tree. (Note to my friends: This is a wholly acceptable way of disposing of my mortal remains.)

I guess as I get older, my appreciation for the genre grows. I still love Johnny Cash, and dig Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis' country stuff, the Everly Brothers, and other "classic country".

I still can't stand the modern country crap like Big and Rich and those other morons, but give me Gram Parsons or the Flying Burrito Brothers any day of the week, maybe you'll even catch me shedding a tear in my beer.