Farm Report: Stoned Bluegrass, Gangsta Country

Glen Rock, PA ? Like you, I spent the 1970s competing in professional bong-offs and listening to music I didn't realize was mediocre. No one issues any new records in late December or early January, so it is time once again for us to explore the country roots of my insufferable generation in this "Farm Report Classic Edition II." This year: headshop swing.

In your nearly infinite fatheadedness it may never have occurred to you that the Grateful Dead was a country band. But take another listen to, say, American Beauty (LP 1970: Warner Bros.; available on CD: WEA). Jerry Garcia plays pedal-steel guitar (later he took a shot at the banjo with Old and in the Way, a straight-up bluegrass group). The harmonies are basically white-gospel bluegrass. "Friend of the Devil," e.g., is country top to bottom, and the whole thing would be distinguished from the commercial country of its day by a gentle jam-band pace, surreal or actually nonsensical lyrics, and playing that is clearly by stoned San Franciscans rather than Nashville virtuosi.

The Dead certainly understood what they were doing. Later they covered the Merle Haggard song "Mama Tried," and it fit seamlessly into their repertoire. Now it might seem that Haggard and Garcia were at opposite poles of American culture and politics; Haggard, remember, had written the antihippie anthem par excellence, "Okie from Muskogee." Garcia was no doubt some kind of Bucky Fuller commie and Haggard a reactionary. But they both thought of themselves fundamentally as rebels, and there is a whole country tradition of substance abuse and rejection of authority that appealed to Bob Weir as much as to big old Bubbas from Louisiana: ponder Johnny Cash, say, or a song like the Osborne Brothers' "Rocky Top," which is about burying revenooers. By the time we got to Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road," the connection of marijuana to moonshine was a central theme of American culture.

And there was an element of agrarian romanticism that connected the 60s left to Loretta Lynn. The freaks were reading Walden or moving to rural communes like Tennessee's The Farm and eating organic granola. The explicit rejection of urban sophistication in country music thus lit up a few damaged neurons among the longhairs.

This connection was most explicit in bands such as the Dead spinoff New Riders of the Purple Sage. Their first album featured Garcia on pedal steel, but by the time they got to their masterpiece, The Adventures of Panama Red (LP 1973: Columbia; CD: Sony), they had replaced him with the killer Buddy Cage. This was straight-up country music for hippies, and most of it was about drugs. "I'm just a lonesome L.A. cowboy, hanging out, hanging on/To your window ledge, calling your name from midnight until dawn./I've been smoking dope, snorting coke, trying to write a song,/forgetting everything I know till the next line comes along."

NRPS were great live, and I tripped through several of their concerts, some with the Dead, some without. My brother Bob was mad for them, and the day after he got his license he totaled the family wagon at a free New Riders concert at American University. In short, sticking on Panama Red fills me with loathing and nostalgia. Substance abuse, sexual abuse, vehicular homicide: it all comes roaring in like the head rush off a can of Reddi Wip.

The best headshop swing band, though, was the astounding Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Fielding excellent musicians the whole way, they could play any kind of American music beautifully, and did. They had a freak hit with the rockabilly rave-up "Hot Rod Lincoln," but they were essentially a swing band, and no one will ever better their versions of standards like "San Antonio Rose." But they were freaks and they produced headshop anthems like "Down to Seeds and Stems Again," which I took as a synecdoche of my sad, twisted little life.

My favorite Cody album is Tales from the Ozone (LP 1975: Warner Bros.; not available on CD, but various CDs are available, including greatest-hits packages and live albums), which was produced by Hoyt Axton and featured the Tower of Power horns; it's one of the best pop albums of the 70s. The album has old-timey pop/swing like "Minnie the Moocher"; a couple of Cajun songs; country tearjerkers; and the amazing Andy Stein solo "Gypsy Fiddle." On the back cover, Lance-the-drummer is wearing an NRPS t-shirt. Everything the Airmen ever recorded is of extremely high quality.

Very much on the same wavelength and more or less as good was Asleep at the Wheel, which in various mutant forms is with us still. But I talked about them in the last classic ed. Get online and look it up (http:// nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=1339).

You got a different vibe off Seatrain, which featured its own fiddle virtuoso, Richard Greene, who has shown up in all kinds of groups ever since, as has guitarist Peter Rowan. Seatrain was an electric bluegrass band, among other things. Greene, along with Papa John Creech (who played with the Jefferson Starship) and Sugarcane Harris (who sat in with the Mothers of Invention), was busy inventing the electric violin as a rock instrument, and now this band sounds something like a rural Blood, Sweat & Tears. On Seatrain (LP 1970: EMI; reissued on CD along with their next album, Marblehead Messenger: BGO), produced by George Martin, they issued what I think is the first recorded version of Lowell George's smuggling tune "Willin'," as well as somewhat unfortunate mini-epics like "Song of Job." But the same album features lovely, simple Rowan songs like "Oh My Love" and Greene's vicious renditions of "Sally Goodin'" and "Orange Blossom Special."

Certainly the best songwriter and the most serious and perhaps enduring figure among headshop country artists was John Prine, who wrote classic country and folk songs and performed them with vast intensity and pathos. All of his first three albums are classics. Songs like "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore" were at once direct attacks on the likes of Merle Haggard and tributes to their legacy, while "Illegal Smile" kept him on during the bong-offs. I'll take Sweet Revenge (LP 1973: Atlantic; available on CD: WEA). Side one contains two of the most beautiful songs ever written: "Christmas in Prison" and "Blue Umbrella."

It seems like a jump, but it's not, really: Prine to David Allan Coe: prophet, murderer, rhinestone cowboy, American Weirdo. A quote from his website: "From the age of nine, Coe was in and out of reform schools, correction centers and prisons. According to his publicity handout, he spent time on Death Row after killing a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. When Rolling Stone magazine questioned this, Coe responded with a song, 'I'd Like to Kick The Shit Out of You.' Whatever the truth of the matter, Coe was paroled in 1967." Coe was an "outlaw" in the Willie/Waylon mode, but more extreme: an inyourface druggie and biker. By the time I saw Coe in Tuscaloosa in 1993, he had disintegrated into almost perfect incoherence, and various brawls broke out. More recently he's returned with albums of covers. But in the 70s he wrote some excellent and some hilarious songs. He is still revered in backwoods America as the most real thing our paltry nation ever produced.

Let us now praise The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy Rides Again (LP: Columbia 1977; unavailable on CD, though there are several greatest-hits packages). Side two is trackless, seamless Hank/Merle/ George country written perfectly and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created to be "laid back and wasted." And the album ends with the all-time anthem: "If That Ain't Country." Some highlights: "The neighbors said we lived like hicks,/but they brought their cars for Pa to fix, anyhow." "Tryin' like the devil to find the Lord,/working like a nigger for my room and board." "Mama sells eggs at the grocery store;/my older sister is a first-rate whore./Daddy says she can't come home anymore, and he means it." "People, you forgot about poor white trash./And if that ain't country, I'll kiss your ass."

Now perhaps in what might flippantly be termed your mind you're puzzling as to the whereabouts of the Birds, Buffalo Springfield, the Band, Crosby, Stills & Nash, etc. The answer is simple: not only are they still played incessantly after all this time, but after all this time they still suck. So go git some Coe and some chronic, bitch.