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Rednecks, Hippies and Mr. Disney
By David Ritz |

When Dennis Hopper, easy riding his way to the end of the movie, turned and shot the shaft to the redneck driving the pickup truck, the redneck, we recall, blew off Dennis’ head with a shotgun. At the time, that seemed a frightening and, in some sociological sense, a critical moment in our cultural history. I felt personally afraid, not so much for my own safety, but for the fact that I was living at a time when such extreme lifestyles were at war with one another, or thought they were. That moment-Dennis on his motorcycle, his finger raised in defiance – also became popularized in poster form, sold for one or two dollars at your local head shop and record store and could be viewed, shortly thereafter, in thousands of college dorms and teenage bedrooms throughout the land. Nonetheless, the terror of that film was very real. It was something, in movie form, like the assassination of Kennedy: you were stunned, chilled by a murder which struck too close to home. That happened in the late 60’s.



How is it possible, then, that just four or five or six years later, the hipper of those two previously antagonistic groups has not only made peace, but has literally embraced the style of its former adversary on the musical stages of places like Austin and Dripping Springs? Even more shocking is the fact that the hip young now emulate the redneck look, have themselves adopted the clothes and manners and drinking habits of the man who murdered Dennis Hopper. To spend an evening at Armadillo World Headquarters in our state’s capital is to see that strangest of phenomena: teenagers dressed up like Ma and Pa Kettle, playing the parts of farmhands and cowboys, of “real” Texas root people. And behind all this, or in front of all this, is a musical movement which has drawn national attention, a group of singers, musicians and songwriters who have themselves moved to Austin and caused something of a stir. I am, of course, talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, and, among many others, the venerable Willie Nelson. What is all the commotion about? Is this redneck rock real – and is it any good? Why are we hearing about it now? What does the whole thing amount to?

Think, for a moment, about another movie which was released a couple of years after Easy Rider: Five Easy Pieces. The movie opened with Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By Your Man,” the droning sound of which seemed thoroughly and authentically suggestive of the country-and-western life that Jack Nicholson, we would later learn, was attempting to create for himself. It was a splendid film. And what perhaps moved us most was Nicholson’s need to leave his middle-class trappings behind and find something in the arms of his truckstop waitress and the life she represented. The theme of the movie was his failure to do that, the impossibility of ever doing so, the naiveté implicit in arbitrarily trading in one cultural lifestyle for another. (Strange, but Nicholson also played in Easy Rider; he was a smalltown lawyer who left the straight life to hook up with Peter and Dennis and pursue their non-middle-class adventures.) Still, Tammy’s singing was powerful, teasing us into romanticizing the charms of redneck America. It was, in contrast to the society Nicholson felt compelled to flee, raunchy and real.

The white-middle-class-adolescent-teenage-college kids blues is not a recent invention. In the early and middle 60’s, Muddy Waters and the funky Chicago South Side musical lifestyle was being followed closely and imitated religiously by boys like Mike Bloomfield. (The album on which the youngsters – Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Buddy Miles – play with the Masters – Muddy, Otis Spann, Sam Lay – is called Fathers and Sons. The cover is an illustration of Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel fresco in which God and Adam nearly, but never quite, touch one another. Here, though, God is drawn as an old, black man and Adam, His new creation, a hip, white kid with sunglasses.) There was that pressing need, in the hearts and minds of an endless number of kids, to escape the suffocating climate of the suburbs for an earthier life on the streets. Ever since the post-World War II music boom began to explode some 25 years ago, that need has been apparent. When revolution was hot, so were groups who claimed to want to burn it all down. MC5, the Motor City Five, enjoyed a brief infamy for their pure radicalism. The Stones, too, had dutifully radicalized themselves.

I remember, in graduate school in 1968, a mock war between students and local cops just off the campus. As the kids “fought” the police (by screaming and racing around the block, threatening to “occupy” the administration building), someone from an upstairs apartment, in sympathy with the young warriors, blared Mick Jagger singing “Street Fighting Man” -a miserable song, I must add, sung by a miserable singer. A year later everyone was wearing fatigues. Funky chic had been salvaged land renovated from the leftover bohemianism of the 50’s. Salvation Army stores had unwittingly captured the youth market. And out of the weekly allowance given by Dad, you could buy your revolutionary bullet-belt at Wool worth’s or Penney’s, just the way Mom bought you your Davy Crockett outfit -coonskin hat, jacket and toy gun -ten years before. The vicari-ousness of it all was astounding.

So a pattern is there. And music, we know, can be a way to dream ourselves out of one life into another. We pack our bags, grab the guitar and join the workers, or the farmers, or the cowboys. That, of course, is nothing new; the tendency to reject complex music (and complex lives) for the simple strains of folk songs has been going on a long time. We quickly forget, but folk music, as it emerged and submerged and emerged again throughout the 50’s and 60’s – the music of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez -had, at its heart, a desire to identify with a group of people usually different from that of the singer. The identification usually involved politics and, more specifically, left-wing politics. And if the politics were sometimes bearable, the music was not. It always seemed our equivalent of the heaviest of Russian social realism. By that, I do not mean that the music was written according to the party line, but certainly a party line, whatever that line might have been. Music made to fit ideology becomes tedious, obligatory and finally self-righteous and self-congratulatory. What we miss are the contradictions of our emotions; instead, we get ready-made answers, delivered according to text. And out of that hip, lefty folk tradition stepped the figure whom I believe has had the most telling influence on what is sometimes referred to as progressive country music, known in these parts as the “Austin Sound.” I am talking about Bob Dylan.

Dylan began as a folknik singing in the Village, protesting without benefit of amplification or any of the rock or the roll which would come later. He hit it big. The protests were heard and responded to. Then, taking it upon himself, he added electricity. That turned off the purists, but lit up an even larger public which -to mix metaphors – was already at the starting gate of the rock era, rearing to break out. Dylan (along with the Stones and the Beatles) led the way, burned up the track and, like Sinatra and Elvis before him, wound up in the winner’s circle. There he remained – hero of a generation, hero of a decade – and then he went away. He had an accident. He was quiet. Drugs, make-believe revolutionary politics, yippies -it was all getting to be a bit too much. The 60’s were running their course. No brave new worlds had been discovered. And when Dylan came back, at the end of one decade and at the beginning of another, he brought with him – to the surprise of everyone – Johnny Cash.

Now Cash was real, a consummate country-and-western singer, not a folk singer, but a man who sold millions of records to the people who might have applauded the murder of Dennis Hopper. Cash, fitting the mold of the archetypal country singer, had been through it all. He was scarred; he had been to jail, drank, popped pills, seen and done everything. And if the psychedelic period was marked by a sort of crazed idealism, a music which literally burned itself out with a need to raise the heights of consciousness and experience -I am thinking of Jimi Hendrix – then Johnny Cash represented the antithesis of all that. His guitar playing was simple; he was sobering up after a lifetime of, in the language of his music, heartache and sorrow. Down-to-earth, the expression goes. Down-to-earth came Bob Dylan, leaving behind him the ruins of a naive and frenzied period of music. Janis Joplin had begun to move back towards home, signing, on her fine Pearl album, a touching rendition of Kristof-ferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” But it was too late; by the time the record was released she was dead. It seemed as though Jimi and Janis had gone up in smoke. Dylan, instead, came down to Nashville to sing a little country with Johnny Cash.



Albums began to appear with groups photographed in front of old log cabins. The country folk posed in the pictures. Dogs ran around the yard. Kids played on swings. Lakes, creeks and oatmeal abounded. Ecology crept in where politics had sneaked out. The early days of America, the railroad, the bison, the blacksmith were celebrated in song. I am thinking particularly of the first three albums of The Band which was, of course, Dylan’s band, but a group far superior, in voice and poetry, to anything that their Master had produced. “Living with the Animals” was the name of Mother Earth’s album and it, too, celebrated the simple and spartan life. Softer singers -James Taylor and, with far mushier sentiment and far less taste, John Denver-started to sell big, they too beating a path back to the Berkshires and the Rockies.



So why not go all the way back to Austin? The hills are there; the countryside is right, rural, a bit backwards, very folksy and far from the urban confusions of Houston and Dallas. The university -a built-in market-is there waiting. No real industry threatens the air. Finally, then, Austin becomes a music center with, they say, the possibility of turning into another Nashville. Its principal inhabitants-its star citizens – are already on their way to national fame. And they sing country, not commercial country (of the sort one might associate with Charlie Pride or Buck Owens) but a more informal, a more laid-back, and if one is to believe what Jan Reid has written in The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (Heidelberg Publishers, 1974), a less gimmicky music.

I have a great deal of trouble with this “new” music, I must admit, because I have a great deal of trouble with the man who looms behind it -Mr. Dylan. I have always thought Dylan a lousy singer and, as painful to my sensibilities, a childish and pretentious poet. I have always maintained that he simply cannot sing. I can scarcely believe that he agreed to release his last album – Planet Waves – on which his voice seems lost and gone forever. It is embarrassing. Even worse, I think, is that Dylan paved the way for an entire generation of lousy singers or, to put it another way, gave scores of people with mediocre vocal talents the courage to display their mediocre vocal talents. His half-baked, surreal, sometimes-angry, sometimes-loving lyrics always sounded to me like the kind of writing a freshman English teacher comes upon the first time free-form essay assignments are turned in. There are, of course, exceptions – the simpler love songs like “Lay Lady Lay” and “Tonight I’ll be Staying with You” and some of the early stuff-“Like a Rolling Stone” -could be touching and lovely. But in the main, the sociology of his persona aside, Dylan has always been a bust.

So to immerse oneself in the Austin sound, to listen to the albums of B. W. Stevenson, Jerry Jeff, Murphey, et al, can be exhausting and unpleasant. And when I hear these records I cannot help but think of Jack Nicholson, looking for peace and happiness with his truckstop honey Rayette. It is a culture, I find, which the singers wish upon themselves. It is a mythology which they invent for themselves. B. W. Stevenson does have a large and sometimes satisfying voice; once in a while Michael Murphey can be charming, especially when he strays from Cosmic-Cowboy-Austin-as-a-Vi-sion-of-Heaven nonsense and sings stranger songs like “Honolulu.” (Mur-phey’s poetic and musical debt to Dylan, by the way, is huge. And, like Dylan, his voice, particularly on his Geronimo’s Cadillac album, is hardly there.) Rusty Wier seems more of the same. His album is called Stoned, Slow, Rugged. As with so many of the others, he sounds like a middle-class kid trying to be country old and whiskey wise. Willis Alan Ramsey shows signs of humor and a sense of lyricism the others lack. But for the rest, he falls into the same cliches, especially with “Northeast Texas Women,” which is a simplistic celebration of the females who populate our region. Of the bunch, I would pick Jerry Jeff Walker as the most convincing writer and singer. His voice is better, deeper, more reflective, more mature. And his material is not as young. He repeats, in one form or another, the “Mr. Bo-jangles” motif, and that, as you might expect, becomes tedious. But there are stirring and very sober moments with Jerry Jeff, and to my mind his Viva Terlingua album is full of good music (“Desperados,” “Backsliders Wine,” and the hymn of the movement, “London Homesick Blues”). But then again, Walker is older than the rest of the gang and I think, in terms of his particular brand of music, he benefits from his years.

Willie Nelson exists apart. He is to the Austin boys what Cash was to Dylan-the real thing. Already having made it, and made it big, in Nashville, Nelson adopted Austin and the new hill country sound as his own. He serves as the area’s Spiritual Father. Like Cash, he carries the battle wounds of a lifetime in the field and, also like Cash, he is very much in the tradition of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. He sings with taste, with restraint, with enormous self-discipline. A great many of his countless RCA albums are difficult to get through, overproduced and perfunctorily performed. His recent things on Atlantic are better. They are more sparsely set (thanks, it would seem, to producer Jerry Wexler who has a fine sense for getting to the essence of things as he had shown with his early work for Aretha Franklin). Nelson’s singing falls into set patterns which can be far from exciting; the lyrics of his songs can sound canned. Finally, though, he is the winner, for his stance, his presence, his sense of himself is overwhelming. (A female friend of mine says that Willie has a Humphrey Bo-gart kind of charm.) He was completely captivating on a KERA-TV special last month which was among the finest productions that I have seen on the station. It is interesting, too, that on Tracy Nelson’s newest album -she is the mother of Mother Earth -she teams up with Willie to sing a rousing “After the Fire is Gone.” Tracy’s powerhouse voice is almost too much for him and, as good as they both are, together it is a bit like watching Kate Smith dance with Woodv Allen.

The difficulty, of course, with the boys who want to be Willie is that they must assume a stance which is not only unnatural, but awkward at the age of 25 or 30. The country-and-western sensibility is closely tied to the loser syndrome. It is a music of defeat, of broken hearts, of packing up and leaving, of catching the bus and heading back to Memphis, or, as Johnny Cash says, being flushed from the bathroom of your heart. It is a downer. It is lots of beer, lots of pills, lots of tears. Unlike soul music, unlike black blues, it is hardly optimistic and self-asserting. It is, in some definitive sense, a resignation to the fact that the doldrums, that the seedy side of things will never be overturned. That is the posture taken, for example, by Kris Kristofferson who, also influenced by Dylan, was and is instrumental to this movement. He may be as bad a singer as Dylan; his themes reflect the same down-and-out attitudes. “I want to be a country singer,” they all seem to be crying, “and look at these empty beer cans, this sea of whiskey that I’m drowning in. I suffer! I’m real! Like Johnny! Like Willie!”

I derive somewhat more pleasure from those who spoof the seriousness of the new country sound. Leon Russell has the good taste to take on another name entirely in order to appear in hillbilly dress. His country album is called Hank Wilson’s Back and, of course, it is Leon who is Hank, having a good time singing “Jamba-laya,” “Truck Driving Man,” “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Goodnight Irene.” At least if you’re going to a masquerade party, admit that it is a game and pick out a suitable costume. Kinky Friedman’s game, I think, is more cynical and, like Esquire magazine, his humor is so hip I doubt whether he himself knows which edge he really wants to cut. He doesn’t even pretend to sing, but follows the lead of Ed Sanders and his old Fugs and merely does comedy skits as songs. His deal is being a Cowboy Jew, but that is hard to take seriously, especially when he was brought up a good middle-class child-of-an-academic in Austin. It’s a posture, and one which wears thin. The notes of his album, Sold American, quote Newsweek as saying something about Kinky becoming the first Jewish country music star. Newsweek, though, forgets that Dylan’s real name is Zimmerman.

The only genuinely funny song that I know to come out of this business belongs to one of the strangest of pop singers, Loudon Wainwright. I am thinking of the song he calls “Down Drinking at the Bar”; it does, in musical terms, what Sid Caesar might have done with the same subject on the old “Show of Shows”:



I call you up on the phone

But nobody’s at home

Then I do my usual thing

I let the telephone ring and ring and ring

I’m standing there in the phone booth

Coping with the ugly truth

I know where you are…

Down drinking at the bar…

I can picture you on that stool

Drinking like a drunken fool

Sittin’ there on your ass

Mutterin’ in your glass

Paying for your low-life thrills

With wet quarters and soggy one dollar bills…

Dean Martin’s on the jukebox I’ll bet

Or maybe it’s Tammy Wynette

The tear-jerkers are jerkin’ your tears

Salt waterin’ your beers

You got the Miller High Life bouncing balls

You got the Utica Club waterfalls

I know where you are…

You’re down drinking at the bar…



I wish there had been more humor in Jan Reid’s Redneck Rock and I wish, too, that he had taken a closer, more analytical approach to the music. But the book is surprisingly good -carefully researched and, for the most part, well written. If Reid had remembered D. H. Lawrence’s old warning -to trust not the teller but the tale – he might have avoided half of those fruitless interviews with the Austin stars. It is to Reid’s credit that he admits how tired he became of the interviews and, generally, of pursuing his subject. The book was written out of obligation, not out of love, and he is honest enough not to hide that fact. The last chapter is the most interesting; there he seems to see through the superficiality of the movement without ignoring and without failing to appreciate the real pleasures of coming home. (Reid is from Wichita Falls.)

What Reid misses, though, is in my opinion the essential frivolity of progressive country as a serious musical phenomenon. Are we really to be amazed that hip musicians are now identifying with their adversaries? Have the victims decided to relate to the enemies? Perhaps. But if that is the case, if lazy beer drinking and chewing the Texas fat in the hill country outside Austin is fashionable, why not? Because the original movement itself – back to the easy riders running around the country – was not very serious. That, I think, is the point. Back in 1968, the media, theuniversities, our parents and theworld tended to look on the youthmovement as though things reallyhad changed, as though the radicallydifferent lifestyle did represent abrave new world. Thin and silly bookslike The Greening of America werethought to be gospel. All of that, I amafraid, was more of America’s innocence showing -the world can bechanged in an instance, society canturn green overnight. So if it nowseems topsy-turvy, if the young havestarted to emulate the very folks theythought their antagonists, it is notvery important. It is not very important sociology. It is not very important music. But it is important torealize that it is not important, asimportant as realizing that Steak andAle is not really Merry Old England.Armadillo World Headquarters felt tome like another ride in Disneyland-Redneck Rock Land. Buy aticket and you get a motif, a smalladventure into a pre-fabricated environment. Pizza Inn is Italy; Roy Rogers’ roast beef is the Wild West, TacoBell, Shakey’s and on down the road.Eastern Europe has Mr. Marx, but wehave Mr. Disney, who told us, whoshowed us, that we can become whomever we want.

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