by Bob Stanley
Glen Campbell was another displaced Southerner working in California when he cut Jimmy Webb’s ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ in 1967. He must have felt as uncomfortable as Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, and all his best songs were thumbnail sketches of the South. Among the best were ‘Gentle on My Mind’, with Glen as a drifter, serenading from a distance the one girl who never tried to tie him down; ‘Galveston’ (US no. 4, UK no. 13 ’69), which could have been set in either the civil war or the Vietnam war (‘I can see her standing by the water … looking out to sea … is she waiting there for me?’); and ‘Wichita Lineman’ (US no. 3 ’68, UK no. 8 ’69), the everyday tale of a man fixing phone lines which nevertheless features the most beautiful line in the whole pop canon, one that makes me stop whatever I’m doing every single time I hear it – ‘I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.’
Hazlewood, Gentry and Campbell were all Southerners trying to make a living outside of Nashville’s straitjacket. Internal flights became more affordable in the mid-sixties, and the modern world created a new wave of less localised country writers. Glen Campbell worked with John Hartford (who wrote ‘Gentle on My Mind’) and Chris Gantry (‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’); Elvis worked with Jerry Reed (‘Guitar Man’) and Mickey Newbury (‘An American Trilogy’); Tom T. Hall wrote Jeannie C. Riley’s conservative-bashing ‘Harper Valley PTA’ (US no. 1, UK no. 12 ’68), while Joe South came up with the philosophical ‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’ and ‘Games People Play’ (employing a very un-Nashville sitar), as well as Lynn Anderson’s strangely chilly ‘Rose Garden’ (US no. 1, UK no. 3). They dominated the late sixties, but another crop of transplanted Southerners were set to conquer the seventies.
Central to country and western is the myth of the frontier, the point at which settled domestic life and chaotic, perilous adventure meet. The actual, official frontier was closed in 1894: there was no more land left to move into, or to steal. In 1960 Kennedy had made his speech, which relocated the central mythical site of the frontier somewhere in the liberal political imagination. No one exemplified this brave new internal adventure more than the Band.
The stream of country influence on post-Beatles pop became a flood after Bob Dylan’s touring band, then known as the Hawks, spent 1967 in Woodstock. Staying in a huge, pink-washed house for $125 a month, they improvised a home-recording studio in the basement and shut themselves away from Monterey, psychedelia and flower power. Dylan, who lived only a few miles away, would call round most evenings, and they would run through a bunch of songs that ranged from ancient folk numbers to things they wrote on the spot (the results would be bootlegged as Great White Wonder, and later became known as The Basement Tapes). They began to grow moustaches and beards and wear tall hats. Their neighbours called them the Band, and it stuck. They looked old and wise beyond their years.
Four fifths of the group were Canadian, but they were at pains to point out their backwater woodedness: Arkansas-raised drummer Levon Helm was the only Southerner; bassist Rick Danko, the son of a wood-cutter, claimed to have grown up without electricity but with a wind-up Victrola, and ‘always wanted to go to Nashville to be a cowboy singer. From the time I was five, I’d listened to the Grand Ole Opry, the blues and country stations.’ Guitarist Robbie Robertson ‘used to listen to country music a lot’ and wrote songs that crossed Brer Rabbit with Grimm’s fairy tales.5
The Band’s yarn-spinning felt natural and cosy in 1968 alongside the brash bubblegum of the Ohio Express’s ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’. 1968 was also the year in which Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; these Canadian kids dressed up in bootlace ties and hobnail boots, with promo pics shot in sepia tones, may have been less connected to their lyrics than the Monkees were to ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, but – to a world cowering in fear of 1968’s urban revolution and decay – the Band’s prairie tales seemed as reassuring as Slim Whitman’s ‘Rose Marie’ had been in the post-war, pre-rock era, and a genuine alternative. That they were blessed by Bob Dylan didn’t hurt them either, and they were canny enough to include his – as yet unheard – ‘I Shall Be Released’ on their 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink.
Their song titles – ‘Whispering Pines’, ‘Up on Cripple Creek’, ‘Acadian Driftwood’ – blended the old pioneer stories with Kennedy’s new frontier spirit, and sated what Rolling Stone called a ‘hunger for earth-grown wisdom’; they opened a door. Creem was less kind about the new wave of country-rock frontiersmen, calling them ‘city boys who’ve suddenly taken to wearing spurs and howling at the moon’, but the Band’s influence was instantaneous. The most prominent country-ward moves came from Bob Dylan, who brought out the liberal left’s favourite country star, Johnny Cash, to sing on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, whose debut album added smooth harmonies to the Band’s driftwood potage. Beyond this, the Rolling Stones cut ‘Honky Tonk Women’ in ’69 and then, if its inspiration wasn’t already clear, they recast it as ‘Country Honk’ on Let It Bleed; the Bee Gees wrote the cowboy lament ‘Don’t Forget to Remember’ in ’69 and ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’, a country-soul US number one in 1971; the Byrds – who had dropped country-flavoured songs onto most of their previous albums – abandoned their cosmic progression entirely in favour of country on 1968’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo; another forebear, Michael Nesmith, quit the Monkees and formed all-out country-rockers the First National Band in 1970; in the same year, Elton John sang about those good old ‘Country Comforts’, which was soon covered by Rod Stewart. When the Beatles split, a lonely Ringo Starr made an entire country album called Beaucoups of Blues.
At the heart of the seventies hippie Utopia was the original American dream: the idealised land of the settler, the gold-rush world of the old West. The Band sang about ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’; Bob Dylan sang about ‘Country Pie’ and yearned for a home on the range. In the UK, the poverty and a real sense of loss (through loss of jobs and large-scale redevelopment of cities) in the seventies meant there was as ready a market as there was in the States for music to nurse people through the bad times. The idyll that Dylan, the Band and their alternative-lifestyle cohorts were in search of was really not that far from the desires in mainstream country – ‘What I’ve got in mind’, sang permed Nashville singer Billie Jo Spears, ‘is a small cafe, out of the way.’ She shared space in the UK singles chart of 1976 with Dolly Parton, Don Williams, the Eagles and another transplanted Canadian, J. J. Barrie; K-Tel issued 20 Town & Country Greats; EMI put out the TV-advertised Country Life compilation. By this time, the misty-eyed American mindset of country and western had become an international dreamscape.
The Eagles were the group who joined up the remaining dots between country, western and the new frontier. Don Henley had come to Los Angeles from Texas, where he had been the token hippie in an otherwise straight town, and joined a band named Shiloh. Glen Frey was a soul fan from Detroit who had followed a girl to California and stayed. They were spotted at LA nightspot the Troubadour by ex-Stone Poney Linda Ronstadt,6 who plucked them both for her backing band. In 1970 they decided to go it alone as the Eagles, with a little writing help from other Troubadour regulars J. D. Souther and Jackson Browne. Following in Crosby, Stills and Nash’s slipstream, they played with sensitivity but weren’t averse to aggressive, clean-cut rocking. Their timing was perfect.
On ‘Take It Easy’ (US no. 12 ’72), ‘Witchy Woman’ (US no. 9 ’72) and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ (US no. 22 ’72), steel guitars and banjos were swaddled in denim, and the result was just as smooth as countrypolitan. The lyrics – ‘I like the way your sparkling earrings lay against your skin so brown, and I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight’ – were simple, noble cowboy fare, much like a more forward Jim Reeves. They were low-profile, they wore blue jeans and sneakers and had a platonic, California-tanned, sun-loving image. Rolling Stone reckoned they were ‘full of desert loneliness’.
It’s worth recalling the good press the Eagles
received at the time, because it has been largely airbrushed from history. ‘Desperado is an American version of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust,’ said Barbara Charrone in Sounds. ‘Like Bowie’s portrait of life as a rock star, Desperado draws a perfect analogy with the lawless gunman and the renegade rocker.’ Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth claimed ‘there are few bands who can match them in the vocal harmony department and fewer still who can capture the ambience of California so well … I’m hard pressed to name any other band that can boast a drummer with the vocal talents of Henley. Only the Beach Boys can really match them for the number and variety of voices available.’
The Eagles became the biggest-selling country act of the seventies, which – internationally – was the biggest decade for country music. Somewhere in between the Eagles and the blonde-beehived Tammy Wynette fell Olivia Newton-John (‘Have You Never Been Mellow’), Linda Ronstadt (‘You’re No Good’), Don Williams (‘I Recall a Gypsy Woman’) and John Denver, who had four US number ones – ‘Annie’s Song’, ‘Sunshine on My Shoulders’, ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy’, ‘I’m Sorry’ – all of which also topped the country chart. Denver wore denim, like the Eagles, but had a blond mop and granny glasses, and looked for all the world like the kid most likely to be bullied at school. Former Sun Records veteran Charlie Rich, who had the bearing of an American eagle and an intimidating mane of grey hair, didn’t see the Colorado kid as part of the family. At the Country Music Association’s awards in 1975, Rich was meant to open an envelope and announce that Denver was CMA Entertainer of the Year; instead, he set fire to the envelope.
On the Eagles’ 1975 fifty-nine-city tour, some eight hundred and fifty thousand people paid $5 million to see them. Their Greatest Hits album has since sold forty-two million worldwide; in the US its twenty-nine million sales make it the neck-and-neck all-time number one alongside Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The Eagles’ phenomenal success is down to their city slickery as much as their country stylings: as well as wearing cowboy boots and having super-smooth harmonies, they had a logo like a hard-rock band. They could slip into pretty much any category American pop fans wanted. This slipperiness is part of what has kept country as America’s best-selling musical genre.7
Country has changed in the last forty years from being an essentially local network of male musicians into a full-blown industry, still largely independent of modern pop moves; quite possibly this is what Chet Atkins always envisaged. In the twenty-first century it continues to absorb stars from other genres which have ceased to be part of mainstream chart pop – Jon Bon Jovi and Lionel Richie would both feature on the Billboard country chart in 2012. While their recent albums still wouldn’t be coded ‘country’ to British ears, they fit the soft, rock-ballad genre which is now a major part of the Nashville sound.8
Country remains as riven as it was in the fifties: these days alt country, like bluegrass, sells itself as the ‘real thing’, only to a different audience. A fan of the former wrote on a message board that ‘mainstream country is for people who don’t like country music, they just like singing about how country they are. Alt country is for people who love country music, and when they sing they don’t have tell you how country they are.’ In 1973 the Eagles had worn spurred boots and posed as cowboys on the back cover of Desperado; in 2009 the smug Easton Corbin scored a huge hit with ‘I’m a Little More Country than That’. Songs about small-town life remain as popular in the States as ever, even though most of the population live in cities. The opposing wings, the bickering keepers of the flame, are as starstruck as each other – on every level, country music remains a mass American fantasy.
1 Tammy Wynette’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’ also reached the Top 20 in ’75, and was followed by Billy Connolly’s comedy cover, which provided yet another number one.
2 There’s a large contingent who believe bluegrass is the one true country music. Bluegrass is a high-chord, fast-picked banjo style devised by Bill Monroe from Kentucky – ‘the blue grass state’ – in the late thirties. ‘It’s pure, it’s clean,’ Monroe declared in 1976. ‘There’s no sex in it.’
3 Singing cowboys make up the ‘western’ part of the country-and-western equation, not movies – both cowboy ballads and hillbilly country would be played on the same radio stations in the thirties and forties, leading to their musical merger. The term was officially recognised by Billboard in 1949, when the country-and-western (C&W) chart replaced the hillbilly chart.
4 A little later, the young Dolly Parton experimented with the girl-group sound in 1965 and ’66 for two strong singles, the Shangri-Las-influenced ‘Don’t Drop Out’ and anguished soul thumper ‘Busy Signal’. The country/pop/soul interactions of the mid-sixties also created two of the very best northern-soul singles, Barbara Mills’s ‘Queen of Fools’ and Bobbie Smith’s ‘Walk On into My Heart’. Alabaman Sandy Posey sang back-ups on Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ before scoring three US Top 20 hits of her own, the best of which – ‘I Take It Back’ – had a Patsy Cline weepie chorus allied to a sassy spoken-word verse straight out of the Ellie Greenwich songbook.
5 Rolling Stone summed up the impact of their first album, Music from Big Pink, with a remarkably prescient review in 1968: ‘The Band dips into the well of tradition and comes up with bucketsful of clear, cool, country soul that wash the ears with a sound never heard before. Music from Big Pink is the kind of album that will have to open its own door to a new category, and through that door it may very well be accompanied by all the reasons for the burgeoning rush toward country pop, by the exodus from the cities and the search for a calmer ethic … by the thirst for simple touchstones and the natural law of trees.’
6 The Stone Poneys’ ‘Different Drum’, a Michael Nesmith song with flashes of baroque in its strings and harpsichord arrangement, was a US Top 20 hit in 1967. It was unquestionably country-flavoured, Ronstadt’s voice having a similar emotional catch to Patsy Cline’s.
7 Hip hop overtook it in the nineties, but country re-established its lead in the 2000s.
8 This isn’t a totally new phenomenon: a bunch of first-generation rock ’n’ rollers wound up being country artists (Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash); and a pile of folk-rockers became mainstream country (a late vindication for the Byrds’ significance in forging country rock was that Chris Hillman’s Desert Rose Band became one of the best selling country acts of the eighties). Country seems to be pretty good at sucking up influences from outside itself and selling them back.
37
BEFORE AND AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: LAUREL CANYON
At the end of 1968 Penny Valentine, one of the best pop journalists in Britain, spent an afternoon in a Bayswater flat with three singers: David Crosby (ex-Byrds), Stephen Stills (ex-Buffalo Springfield) and Graham Nash (ex-Hollies). She reckoned they were ‘not making pretentious music, they are not trying to shatter our minds, but to clear them’. She heard no blues, no heaviness, just a few songs that ‘lie somewhere in the Simon & Garfunkel/Buffalo Springfield category, and yet are really a whole new personal, gentle, persuasive power’. Valentine was only with them for three hours but ‘came away from that flat more excited and elated than by anything I’ve heard, seen or talked about in the music scene since I first saw the Beatles’.
David Crosby had proved to be the bridge between the Los Angeles and San Francisco scenes at Monterey; when he got on stage at the festival to sing with Buffalo Springfield he also effectively evicted himself from the Byrds. The Springfield’s Stephen Stills was closest to Crosby, and had a few of the group’s best songs on his CV, including the scene-encompassing ‘For What It’s Worth’ (US no. 7 ’67). They would harmonise at parties thrown by Mama Cass Elliot and the Monkees’ Peter Tork, both considerably wealthier than Crosby or Stills. Nash, meanwhile, had led the jobbing Hollies from Merseybeat (‘Stay’), through folk rock (‘Look through Any Window’) to psychedelic pop (‘On a Carousel’), all of which they excelled at, with a five-year unbroken string of UK T
op 20 singles to prove it. Then Nash presented the group with hippie anthem ‘Marrakesh Express’, at which point the other Hollies – with conventional cigs in their coat pockets – got cold feet. Graham Nash decided to leave his band, his wife and his kids in Manchester and start a new life in a new city. He left it all behind for Crosby, Stills and Nash and for California, specifically for a sparsely populated valley in greater Los Angeles called Laurel Canyon.
Imagine an evening in New York: the shadows are long and the light is soft, but its edges are clean and strong. In Los Angeles the light glows differently, more brightly, and the edges blur. When America’s pop HQ shifted from New York to LA at the turn of the seventies, the whole process of making pop music shifted with it. New York is over-caffeinated. People shout. Things get done. LA has a mantra of mañana. In 1969 it was the perfect home for sleepy troubadours with time on their hands and money in the bank; Crosby, Stills and Nash and LA were a perfect fit.
This may sound mean, but it’s the truth. Besides, their 1969 debut was proof – it sounded exactly like a set of sunrises. Crosby’s ‘Guinnevere’ was especially lovely, with dark thrummed chords on meshed guitars; its unsettling passing notes underscored something that sounded exactly as a song by a former Byrd should have sounded in 19691 after living through folk rock, Monterey, bad acid, lost women and dwindling fame. It was different, mellow and smudgy. The world hadn’t changed for the better after all; outside things weren’t all all right, they really weren’t. This was balm for the Vietnam protest veterans. ‘Seagulls circle endlessly, I sing in silent harmony.’
