You remember K-Tel, don’t you? If you watched television in the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, you do. They’re the folks who brought you those “greatest hits” collections by Boxcar Willie and Slim Whitman, along with sets like the greatest love songs of the ’70s, all of them “not available in stores.”
A couple of things have changed at the Minneapolis-based discount label. Their latest release, “Exposed Roots”, will be available in stores (as of June 29, 1999). And this collection of “alt-country” has some excellent songs by some pretty impressive names, from Johnny Cash to the Meat Puppets. The two-CD set has 24 tracks, about 90 minutes of music that ranges from bluegrass to cowpunk to Beatlesque pop.
This kind of collection is always difficult to evaluate, because of that very diversity. It’s simultaneously the strength and the weakness of the “various artist” compilation. Add to that the question of what “alt-country” really is, and things could get pretty squishy. As Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden (editors of the alternative country periodical No Depression) point out in the liner notes, the label started out as a joke. That was what they called music that was “too country” to get played on mainstream country stations.
As with most such “various artists” CDs, there’s good and bad in Exposed Roots. On the positive side, there’s really not a clunker here. Whoever chose the artists for this compilation did a pretty good job. I suspect that the end result is often a combination of talent and luck — who knows how many names they had in the hat originally, and how many either declined to participate, or backed out at the last minute, or didn’t even respond?
But the artists represented here include some excellent choices: Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Whiskeytown, Golden Smog, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, BR5-49, Cheri Knight, the Jayhawks, Steve Earle, Southern Culture on the Skids, Vic Chesnutt, Alejandro Escovedo, Kelly Willis, the Handsome Family, Freakwater, Lambchop. If not a virtual who’s-who of alt-country and country-rock over the past couple of decades, it’s at least a good couple of chapters from the book. These are all good musicians, and generally good song selections. The Gourds’ “I like Drinking” is a fine homage to inebriation, part of a long tradition in both country and rock. Blue Mountain, based in Oxford, Miss., has impeccable credentials, and their “Blue Canoe” fits in the set.
K-Tel is based in Minneapolis, and so it shouldn’t be any surprise that Minneapolis is a little more heavily represented here than some other regions. Three of more borderline contributions are from Twin Cities artists: Tangletown (fronted by one Seth Zimmerman, a nephew of Bob Dylan), the Honeydogs, and Marlee MacLeod. All three are from the most “pop” outposts of what could conceivably fit under the alt-country banner.
The Deep South and Texas are heavily represented here as well, and even New England has its say with Cheri Knight’s hard-hitting “Black Eyed Susie.”
But my first complaint is the lack of regional diversity. With the space available on two compact discs, K-Tel could have added some artists from the West, particularly the Pacific Northwest, which has a very lively alt-country scene.
I understand the impulse to include songs by Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons here. Cash has always ridden the line between country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll rebellion; and Parsons is an icon, the legendary godfather of country-rock whose untimely death left the genre in the hands of the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. But their presence here jars the ears. Sandwiching Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” between Southern Culture on the Skids and the Handsome Family is questionable, both aurally and artistically. Rather like putting cuts from Robert Johnson and Robert Cray back-to-back on a blues collection — sure, they’re both blues, but that’s about all they have in common. Both suffer from the juxtaposition.
And Gram Parsons suffers much the same fate here. He was ahead of his time, and he was the inspiration for much of this scene, but 1973’s “In My Hour of Darkness” still sounds somehow out-of-place and dated.
Just as conspicuous by its absence is anything from Uncle Tupelo, the group that started the current alt-country revival in the early years of this decade, and its two offshoots, Son Volt and Wilco. And I could quickly name another half-dozen acts more worthy than the three Minneapolis pop bands of inclusion in this set.
All that said, this is still a highly enjoyable collection of songs, including a couple of rare gems. Vic Chesnutt’s early albums are hard to come by, and it’s a treat to hear his original version of the title song from the 1996 Sweet Relief tribute, “The Gravity of the Situation.” The song “Dallas” by Jimmie Dale Gilmore and his 1970s group The Flatlanders, even though it’s a year older than Parson’s “Darkness,” has aged much better.
If nothing else, Exposed Roots exposes the astonishing variety of music being lumped under the catch-all of alt-country, from the ultra-traditional Kelly Willis and swing-revival of BR5-49, to the acid-tinged weirdness of the Meat Puppets’ and the post-ironic cool of Lambchop. If you don’t like what currently passes for country music on American radio, but want a good dose of American Music in all its diversity and sometimes perversity, this isn’t a bad place to start.
(K-Tel International, 1999)
