|
Broken Hearts, Four Leaf Clovers, and Glue Sniffing: The Old 97s By Sam Costello Every so often, a magazine will anoint a band "the best band you've never heard of." Well, this is a magazine, so it must be time we do that. Texas's Old 97s are the best band you've never heard of. And they're a country band. Oh, the horror! Yeah, they're a country band, but not in the way you're thinking. This isn't Alan Jackson or Brooks and Dunn. This isn't those pre-packaged Hollywood transplanted to Tennessee, fake good ol' boys you see on The Nashville Network. The Old 97s are a country band the way country was meant to be: raw, fun, sorrowful, but most of all, sincere. Named after the Johnny Cash song, "The Wreck of the Old 97," you know they're off on the right foot. But when you hit the play button, spinning up their first CD, 1994's Hitchhike to Rhome, you know you've got something special. Rhome's first song, "St. Ignatius," kicks off with a fairly standard country twang guitar, but as soon as rhythm guitarist/lyricist Rhett Miller starts in on this tale of love gone wrong, something is definitely different. "Outside St. Ignatius, outside of the law you walked by so gracefully I just stand in awe you're a goddess, you're the oddest oddity I've found we could go swimming in our skin and hope that we don't drown." Can you imagine Hank Williams, Jr. singing that? No, and neither can anyone in Nashville, which is why the Old 97s are stuck between genres. Nashville wants a formula. A formula sound and formula lyrics that add up to large profits. The Old 97s don't fit that formula, being neither Hollywood good ol' boy enough, nor poppy enough to succeed in the increasingly mainstream country market. The album's second song, "504," makes that clear in the opening verses: "I was playing every Monday on Burgundy in some shitty
little bar. I was working on a novel called New Orleans Ain't No
City - It's a Scar. The heroine does heroin, the hero wears his hair just
like The King. He says, "It ain't my job to sweet talk you. My job's just to sing." And that's the difference. The Old 97s see their job
as singing, not sweet talking. And you can be sure that no high powered
record executive is going to promote a single to folks in South Carolina
and Arkansas in which one of the main characters does heroin. It's just
not going to happen, folks. And that's why you've never heard of the
Old 97s. And it's your loss. Not only do they sport some of
the best songwriting of this decade, but also have crafted a distinct,
engaging musical style, and kick ass live. Rhome's next eye-catching
song is "4 Leaf Clover," a song about unrequited love, a theme that
pops up all through the 97s' work. However, this is not the love of
"oh, my woman's left me." It's the darker, further- down ruminations
of a man who's had far too many drinks and too much time on his hands.
What could be an unrelentingly negative song, and could lead to an overall
feel of malaise, though, is leavened by Miller's keen, understated wit:
"I got a four leaf clover, and it ain't done one single bit of good, I'm still a drunk, I'm still a loser, living in a lousy neighborhood." "Clover" also stands out musically. Even with its undercurrent of country guitar, this song would be comfortably placed in between alternative rock songs, or even mild punk (in fact, on their third album, Too Far to Care, the Old 97s remade this song, more up-tempo and loud, as well as with guest vocals from punk veteran and former X frontwoman, Exene Cervenkova). The chorus' pounding drums and deep reverb underscore this feel. Miller's humor is out in even fuller force in "Wish the Worst." Another song about unrequited love, but with a darker twist: "Why aren't you here? It's almost 4 a.m. I finished off all of your beer now I'm starting on your gin I went through your diary flipped through your phone book called all your friends
.... I pulled back your sheets now I'm crawling in your bed every drink's one more defeat and every footstep hurts my head .... Why am I here? I've got better things to do I could hang out on the pier down by the Hudson sniffing glue." Reading the lyrics by themselves, this song teeters between absurdly funny and frightening. After all, it's about a man who's broken into his girlfriend's house and is rooting about in her things. However, when the light, hummable music is added, and Miller's melodramatic performance are factored in, this song becomes, at once, uproarious and heartbreaking. People like to say that country music is just about losing your wife and your house and your dog. Rhett Miller knows that just as much as anyone, and in "Wish the Worst" he's tipping his hat to the cliche: The down and out loser complaining about the woman who ruined him. However, for Miller, it's not just a tip of the hat, but perhaps also a bit of the bird. The self-awareness of this song, and of so many of the Old 97s genre pieces, is clearly their attempt to challenge the genre and the cliches, play with them, allowing them to stay true to the heart of country music, while achieving a degree of the ridiculous which makes their work so much fun and so defiant of the country music ghetto. And they do this again on "Doreen" (another song they redid, this time on their second album, Wreck your Life). An almost absurdly fast-picked banjo opens the song, immediately setting a furious pace for the tune (the later version replaces the banjo with a guitar). Yet another song about a woman, this time of questionable faithfulness, "Doreen" rollicks through three amusingly desperate verses. Rhome really hits its stride after "4 Leaf Clover." The album races through the songs already mentioned, moving to "Hands Off," a love song containing the immortal chorus: "It's all your fault, you spiked my malt, you slipped a mickey in my heart." After "Hands Off," the band tips their nonexistent cowboy hats towards someone who made their type of country music possible in the first place: Merle Haggard. In a fine, fast cover of Haggard's 1971 classic, "Mama Tried" (owner of the unforgettable chorus "I turned 21 in prison, doing life without parole"), the Old 97s let us know where they're coming from and where they're going. A song about hard luck, but one which never fails to get the blood pumping, and often the crowd shouting the chorus, not just singing it, "Mama Tried" is nothing less than an anthem. "Mama," being directly in the middle of Rhome's meatiest numbers, starts the climb up to the album's crescendo. Following it is "Stoned," the song containing the album's title lyric. "Stoned" song finds Miller turning down the woman this time--"You're quite a woman but I don't want to be your man"--though he seems to be already involved ("I must have been stoned when this whole thing started"). "Stoned" gives way to the album's, and without question one of the band's, best songs, "If My Heart Was a Car." This song, about a love affair waiting to fall apart sports a brilliant metaphor, a terrifically up-beat tempo, and fine songwriting. "It was early Monday morning in the Central Standard
Zone You were quiet like the TV, hung up like the telephone
You were sleeping next to me, I might as well have been
alone It's a long way back to El Paso. And if my heart was a car You would have stripped it down and sold it off To the greasy man in the salvage lot As it is it's just a heart No, no, it ain't worth nothin'." More than anything else about the Old 97s, it's Miller's songwriting which makes the band stand out. The songs, admittedly influenced by the short fiction of Raymond Carver, are beautifully rendered, fully self-contained worlds,Êwhere the protagonists are not heroes, but are simply average, hard luck men. Despite their bad luck, though, they have the eyes for fine detail and ears for lyrical turns of phrase which make anyone interested in writing step back in intimidation from these songs. Of course, like every album, Rhome too has some forgettable points ("Miss Molly," "Old 97s Theme," and "Ken's Polka Thing"), however, these songs, with the exception of the instrumentals "Theme" and "Polka," are written by non-band members. As with every great band that no one has ever heard of, inevitably, they will want to become a band more people have heard of and as soon as they try to do this, they start to go down the toilet. The same thing, sadly, has happened to the Old 97s. After three classic albums, 1999 saw the release of the major label "Fight Songs." On this travesty, well worth fighting over, all of the country which sets the Old 97s apart from legions of other alt.rock bands has been produced out of both the guitars and Rhett Miller's voice. Thankfully, though, the market has not encouraged them, and Fight Songs has not sold enough copies for its record company, Elektra, to even recoup its costs. Perhaps the boys will see the lesson in this thematically appropriate hard turn, and return to the style, themes, and sound that made Hitchhike to Rhome such a wonderful record. Sam Costello is a senior media studies major at Ithaca College. |
