Hard Nose the Highway

Since I've been a cosmic cowboy since way back, Heartworn Highways (1975) was a natural for me. But it turns out that Ms. Spenser (usually more of a metalhead) got into outlaw country driving around with her cycling buddies. So she was pretty excited when Netflix finally made this available. 

It's a documentary about the first generation of outlaw country, and done just right. There aren't any interviews or talking heads - it's all music or the outlaws bullshitting. It starts in a recording studio, with a guy named Larry Jon Wilson recording a little number called "Ohoopee River Bottomland." It shows him working out the parts with the band, teaching them the changes using the Nashville Number system - the 1, the 4, the 5, back to the 1, etc. It's funny because he is also assigning choruses to the musicians, "You're on the 1 and 3, he's on 4 and 4", and talking about shifting through the gears, like "We start out in first, and the drums come in, shifting to third", etc. You see this kind of thing in a doc and expect they'll cut away - but nope, they do the whole song, showing all the musicians and the engineer, etc. And it's a great song, from a singer I've never heard of.

But some of the others we hear are Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Alan Coe, Rodney Crowell and a very young Steve Earle, looking more like 16 than 20. They sing a lot of old favorites, like "Old Time Feeling" and "LA Freeway", which I thought of as a Jerry Jeff Walker song. There's a few I'd never heard of, like a band called Barefoot Jerry who do a pedal steel breakdown called "Two Mile Pike", shot in the recording studio again.

We see some old timers, including a couple of guys from Uncle Dave Macon's band singing a very dirty tune, "Doctor's Blues", and a Peggy Brookes, a honky tonk gal, doing "Let's Go All the Way" (a song about marriage).

We see Coe driving his tour bus and chatting on the CB. He's on his way to a show in prison - there are a couple of prison shows, and a couple of these guys have spent time in them. Outlaw means outlaw. There's an old black farrier, who talks about Jesus and whiskey. We meet van Zandt, his girlfriend and his dog, goofing around in his yard. 

But mostly it's just some great music, some homebrew. some smooth. There's even some Charlie Daniels from before he became an asshole (?). It meanders a bit, but it gives most songs their due, and it's the music that counts. Also, seeing these guys, now old bastards or dead, as kids.