January 4 - 11, 1 9 9 6

Kindred spirits

Making realist rock for the post-Springsteen era

by Franklin Soults

You can lay the blame for today's fuzzy-headed music at the cold, sainted feet of Kurt Cobain. His unprecedented ability to articulate inarticulateness ushered in an aesthetic that has become so pervasive, even the supposedly earthy country-rock revival nowadays floats on a sea of abstraction and vague allusion. From Son Volt to Palace to the Jayhawks, most new country-rockers suggest far more with their songs than their words actually say, and what they say is framed by emotions, aphorisms, anything but linear narrative. As always, there are a few exceptions, like Wilco, who, thank the Lord, have "run out of metaphors," and, better still, the Bottle Rockets and the Waco Brothers, two outfits who never needed no steenking metaphors to begin with.

Perhaps that's simply because the members of these two bands are so much older and feistier than all the others. Bottle Rockets frontman Brian Henneman grew up as "the original slacker" in Festus, Missouri (no joke), and he relates much more directly to the mid-'70s high-school experience of Dazed and Confused than to any current musical or cultural trend. Lucky for him, he found three bandmates who share his outmoded outlook, two of whom -- guitarist Tom Parr and drummer Mark Ortmann -- just happen to be his old neighbors from Festus. The odd man out, bassist Tom Ray, also just happens to be a Waco Brother (or at least he was until the Bottle Rockets' ceaseless touring forced him to drop out). Formed as a side project by guitarists/vocalists Jon Langford of the Mekons and Dean Schlabowske of Wreck, the Waco Brothers also include once-and-future Mekon Steve Goulding on drums and fellow Brit Tracy Dear on mandolin and vocals. Together, these grizzled, Chicago-based cowpokes are just as unfashionable as their Missouri counterparts. Yet both bands are more connected to the world-at-large than the vast majority of today's younger contenders.

The Bottle Rockets achieve that connection on their second album, The Brooklyn Side (TAG), by writing about their townsfolk as much as themselves. Unlike so many of the working-class chroniclers who flourished in the '70s and '80s, they don't romanticize their subjects; neither do they fall prey to condescension. Their insightful, plainspoken, funny lyrics can nail the essential jerkiness of a local radar-toting cop, a Sunday sports junky, or a trendy alterna-girl, but when they sing about a rural welfare mom, they offer a far more compassionate defense than most Democratic office holders. And when they pledge themselves to the queens of their world, they gladly pin their hearts on their jeans jackets.

This simple but remarkably well-rounded world view is matched by simple but remarkably well-rounded music. Unlike the Aerosmith faithful in Dazed and Confused, the Bottle Rockets absorbed both hard rock and hard country in their high-school days (a major achievement, if you think about it). To this double combo, they also add some leftover scraps of their Bicentennial Heritage -- mostly Chuck Berry and Hank Williams; then they puree everything until it's well blended but not smooth. The concoction is so broad and generous, when they covered the Kinks and Foreigner last November at the Middle East, it came off without a trace of irony.

As befits a Jon Langford side project, the Waco Brothers are more obtuse on their debut, To the Last Cowboy (Bloodshot). Their tales of "sex and death and drinking" are often like mixed-up, morning-after memories, but even if you don't know what happened, you can still feel the gritty aftermath of the night before. That's largely due to their wonderfully vivid music. Rooted somewhere between honky-tonk and rockabilly, it slams with a spare, catchy intensity worthy of a crack punk band, which is essentially what these lusty poseurs really are. To the Last Cowboy kicks and yowls and whistles a happy, hopeless tune, as if it were The Mekons' Honky Tonkin' finally done right.

What sets the album apart from most underground hoedowns, however, is that no matter how drunken, beaten and broken they get, the Waco Brothers always return to connect their misery to a larger, national context -- a nicey-nice way of saying they get political. For that, you have to thank Langford's stubborn anarcho-syndicalism. His radicalism has survived intact through years of playing footsie with major labels, struggling with Thatcher-Reaganism, and even making a transatlantic move from Leeds to the geographic heart of "Amerikay." If the closing "$ Bill the Cowboy" is conceptual overkill, the opening union anthem is a rousing hoot, and the ode to the '96 election, "Bad Times (Are Comin' Round Again)," is the album's secret centerpiece. Much like the Bottle Rockets, the Waco Brothers look a hard truth square in the eye and then spit in it. Come to think of it, Saint Cobain wouldn't have done it any other way.