Various - Truckers, Kickers, Cowboy Angels Vol.02, The Blissed-Out Birth Of Country Rock 1969 (1-CD)

1-CD Digipak (6-plated) with 56-page booklet, 24 tracks. Total playing time approx. 72:24minutes. Country Rock


TRUCKERS, KICKERS, COWBOY ANGELS
The Blissed-Out Birth of Country Rock 1969; Volume 2

"It was something in the air, almost like the earth was passing through a cloud. I think this music was the direct result of psychedelia, the chaotic noisiness of it. People wanted to return to the simplicity that country music represented. Three-chord songs, melodies, and stories." (Roger McGuinn, the Byrds)

This is the second volume of Bear Family's Country Rock chronicle. Sprinkle some patchouli oil, light up an exotic cigarette - only in jurisdictions where it's legal to do so, of course, and situate yourself in one of Los Angeles' vertiginous canyons. It's 1969. Nixon, Manson, Woodstock … Flying Burrito Brothers.

Sixties Country Rock was like its Fifties forebear, Rockabilly. Neither was successful until someone found a way to channel the precepts into slick, commercial formulae. Elvis did that for rockabilly; the Eagles did it for country rock. Both rockabilly and country rock were underground movements, hugely more influential than their sales would suggest. Just a handful of these songs were hits.

Country Rock wasn't trying to supplant or reinvent Nashville. These were times as bitterly polarized as our own. Country music as it was made and played in Nashville was grounded in contempt for the counter-culture. Gram Parsons' dream that country radio would sandwich his singles between George Jones and Loretta Lynn was no more than a dream. Country Rock was tailored to the newly minted underground FM rock format, not AM country.

The first volume in this series was sequenced in rough chronology by recording date to show how and where country rock originated and developed. This volume comprises records released in 1969, sequenced for listening. If a couple of your favorite tracks aren't here, there are several reasons: perhaps we didn't know about them; perhaps we didn't like them; or perhaps, and this is far more likely, the originating label wouldn't license to us.

Colin Escott